Comic Strips

Yes. But I use a cheap Brother laser printer.

If you need an ink jet, I can also recommend the Epson L3260 ink tank. You pay a bit more for the printer but the ink is fairly reasonable.

This is true, and yet somehow when I buy the "XL" sized cartridges they don't feel like they lasted much longer than the "S" size that came with it.

it is if you only print rarely

Ohh God ... That's a very, very tall order.

You wouldn't think that it's that complicated. I worked in a print-on-demand house for about 5 years, The amount of black magic fuckery that goes on between streaming data into that driver and getting stuff on the page is absolutely insane.

You're standing on the backs of like 40 years of trade secrets and poorly implemented protocols at half-assed feature sets.

And then the worst part is, HP is spent the last 20 years making the printer cheaper. Most of the inkjets don't even have steppers anymore, just DC motors and a resistive feedback ribbon.

Developing a multi-platform certified signed driver would be a pretty decent hurdle as well.

Can't we just stop printing? Change things over to black and white thermal when we really need something that's pretty easy to do.

I would love to make a living lobotomizing smart devices.

The Linux version of a printer is just buy a brother color laser (or non color). I bought one for 85 bucks like 15 years ago and it still chugging along

Someone could probably do this. But it would just be a fun project, not replicable.

You'd need to write your own printer driver. There are probably some open source libraries out there to do most of the heavy lifting, but it's still a project.

The big issue is going to be the interface between the pi and the printer's "motors and wiring". Doable, but too finicky to publish a "kit" or something for someone else to replicate. It could be worth the work if it would help other people, but I don't think that's on the table.

Honestly, I think anyone with the ability to do that would probably find it easier to just build their own printer.

It is important to point out that it isn't the brand that makes it good, it is the fact that it is laser.

I used to have a Brother "multi function center" printer/scanner/photocopier/fax that used inkjet and it was pure asshole design. Wasting expensive ink just by remaining plugged in and refusing to do anything if one cartridge was low on ink (but was actually still half full)

But if I had to single out a brand that should absolutely be avoided for printers it is HP. They do asshole DRM to a whole new level. They bricked a brand new ink cartridge because I didn't put it in properly at first.

Now I have a laser printer and the nightmare is finally over.

Mate, they sold you a printer that prints white?

I’m convinced this is the only good printer in existence. They are an absolute workhorse.

Yup

I think the most under appreciated aspect is that ink can dry out just from sitting around. A lot of the time and “empty” ink cartridge just evaporated off its solvents

Toner lasts forever. Perfect for occasional use

Yeah I've been using an HP laser for a decade, get knockoff ink from some random website that probably steals my info, but whatever, who isn't stealing my info these days, it's got almost zero value at this point. Only issues are when it's just needs to be restarted to work sometimes and I have to walk down to the basement to do it. Need to put it on a smart plug so I can just do it from my phone. Then I need a trained monkey to bring me my prints.

Brother used to be the go-to but there was a post a week or so ago showing how they are starting to hold laser toner hostage.

I replaced my HP inkjet with a Brother laser a little over a year ago and seems to be going okay. Though I'm hesitant to let it update firmware.