Pkchukiss - Reality Wine

One of my friends asked me about laser printers some time back: I think it was around the August period where he just realised that he had way too much notes to print, and too little trees to kill.

Not that the rest of the world cares, but since he approached me regarding this technical problem, I was obliged to give him a blow-by-blow account on the differences between the two.

Laser:

Laser printers, other than sounding chic, are just printing implements that suck up more expensive powder ink, and iron same said ink on the page with heat. If you print any significant number of pages, you would realise that the printer tends to get hotter.

And a dire warning in case you get any funny ideas about dismantling the heating element while the printer is working: your print job may be screwed up, just like it did when I opened the printer top cover back when I was during a rush job for an audit back in January. Thank goodness it was my own print job, and not someone else’s, or I would get something more than just another piece of paper in the shredder. Oh, and by the way, your hands may be burnt by the heating element, but that is a secondary consideration to your job. You can have your hands, but they are nothing without a job, right?

Do note that if you get addicted to the smell of freshly printed paper, like the ones that come out from my office’s network printer, your printing hobby can get pretty expensive. Since the smell fades away after a while, you are stuck trying to satisfy your addiction, eventually racking an enormous replacement cartridge bill. You would be better off eating some real food that has the same smell.

On top of that, printing in colour may be a justifiable cost if your printing practice is moderate. However, bear in mind that there are third-party refills for ink-jets that make them a better choice for colour printing.

Ink-jets

Coming on the heels of the razor-blade sales model (in case you don’t know, this means to sell the initial package at a bargain basement price, and to murder your customer’s wallets with exhorbitant after-sales support and replacement cartridges), you usually are better off buying a new ink-jet after finishing the inks, rather than replace the ink cartridges.

I suspect that the only thought that prevents our landfills from being choked by cartridgeless new ink-jet printers is the hassle of disconnecting the old one, and connecting a new one in its place.

I guess the slightly above replacement price for the cartridges help too.

Irregardless, third-party ink refills hope to lick the problem: with extremely cheap packages that boost 3 to 5 times the number of printable pages for the same amount of money, you stand to reap a lot of savings from dumping money to voracious manufacturers: that is, if you know how to manage the refilling process.

The Conclusion

Personally, I prefer laser printers. They print fast, have the addictive smell, and produce crisp lines that ink-jets sometime struggle with. However, the cost of replacement cartridges can put off wide-spread implementation, though if you are a heavy user, replacement cartridges are the way to go.

Ink-jets can be extremely cheap, if you know how to get the refill into the cartridge.

However, for the rest of us, there is always the office

Filed under: General