this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2024
115 points (96.0% liked)

Asklemmy

43941 readers
644 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy ๐Ÿ”

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Fuck HP

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] Carighan@lemmy.world 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

If you want to print in oversized, I can readily recommend the Epson ET 8550.

It's a 6 tank A3+ photo/poster printer for under โ‚ฌ800. If you got the use case for these (say as a photographer or an artist or you just want to print your own posters) then it's a really good model.
Unlike it's closest rival in the semi-professional market from Canon, the tanks make ink very cheap to operate, the vast vast vast majority of the printing cost is going to be the paper. It has a damn good printing quality even on mostly dark prints, it's quite fast for documents spitting them out in 3-5 seconds each so for personal use it's not meaningfully behind a laser. Quite variable, too, you can take the back off and feed whatever material you want in there with a huge clearance for thick plates to print on.

Sure, it's not something the average user ever needs but if you are looking for something like this, I can recommend it.

[โ€“] Lemmy_2019@lemmy.one 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Interesting. What's the total price per sheet on decent paper? I do a few hundred A3 prints a week.

[โ€“] Carighan@lemmy.world 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

It's difficult to say as a lot depends on your specific use case and what you print and on which paper.

For my main use case, I bought a 100-pack of relatively inexpensive satin a3+ poster paper (so only 280g, but eh, they get put on the wall with something like poster strips or tack, I hardly need them to be thicker) which comes down to ~78cents per sheet. Ink usage is difficult to measure because my prints differ wildly in how much color is on them but my average so far seems to be ~50 cents per max quality a3+ print. So ~โ‚ฌ1,30 per full size print if I want to be slightly pessimistic about it. But some of them were probably more like 85 cents total. ๐Ÿ˜…

The ink bottles really last a long time. Check your local prices but over here they cost โ‚ฌ22 a bottle to replace, the printer has two blacks (one is pigment based for documents and stationary and so on), CMY and a 60% Gray, they all cost the same here but might be different for you. And then of course depends on what you print.

What I sadly cannot say is what A3 would cost, but scaling down you should be looking at roughly 20% less ink costs per print for full-size graphics prints, and then of course the paper you're printing on. But that's just mathing it down from my A3+ prints.

[โ€“] Lemmy_2019@lemmy.one 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Thanks for doing the math. I have a deal with a commercial printer for slightly less, so it appears I won't be changing. Rather not have the hassle either, in fairness.

[โ€“] Carighan@lemmy.world 1 points 10 months ago

Oh that's quite fair, plus at that volume it helps to not have the risk of the printing process on yourself on top of everything else. ๐Ÿ˜