Used to have a HP printer. I got fed up with the expensive ink cartridges, so bought an Epson EcoTank printer. Ink refill comes in bottles, so no stupid vendor lockin or shit. And each refill last forever (several years with our usage). But the problem with inkjet printers is that they dry out unless you use them regularly, so when the Epson decided to die on me, I bought a reasonably priced colour laser printer. Made sure it was of a brand and model that does not require subscription shit or unecessary personal information, and can use 3rd party replacement toner. The quality is good enough for what we actually use printers for in this household. If I need photo quality, I can go to a photo printer kiosk or order them online.
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I should have mentioned in my post that I hate inkjet printers. All of my printers, with one exception, have been laser printers.
The exception is a Brother all-in-one that is an inkjet. This printer has one extremely infuriating “feature”: It won’t do anything if the ink cartridge is empty. This includes doing things that don’t involve printing, such as scanning documents and faxing documents.
Yeah, I have come to the same conclusion after having had two of them. And my workplace have decided to replace all the laser printers we used to have with enterprise style inkjets 
The only downside with our current laser printer is that it doesn’t have a scanner (there would not be room for an all-in-one laser printer where we keep it). Oh well. The scanner on the old Epson still works, so I can just pull it out from the cupboard if I need it.
I guess I’m giving up on ink jets too. I like my Brother printer / scanner, but we print infrequently enough here that the heads dry out and I have to run a head clean / test before printing.
My objection to laser printers in the past (some years back) was that they are relatively expensive, the replacement cartridges or drums or whatever were ridiculously expensive and the color saturation wasn’t great (but as you point out, probably good enough for home use).
On the other side of things they usually hold a lot more paper IIRC.
If anyone has a particular make/model that they like that answers at least the toner cost objections and has been a reliable workhorse, I’d love to know of it.
Yeah, but relatively cheap laser printers can be had if you look out for sales, and if you choose the “correct” make and model, you can find models that can use third party toner cartridges, which are a lot more economical than the printer brand ones. As far as colour is concerned, for me that is really only a concern for photos. So for home and home office use and relatively low printing volumes, I don’t need professional quality. My pragmatic choice is therefore a laser printer that I rate as “good enough”.
When I buy a printer the first thing I check (or calculate as they don’t typically tell you, and I wouldn’t believe their numbers if they did) is the cost per page (and ignore the price of the actual printer, that price really doesn’t contribute).
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Similar issue with the HP printer collecting dust here. At the risk of sounding Jurassic, I loved the old dot matrix printers. Sure, they were loud, created their own heat…but a little black stamp pad ink and they were back on the job…
Ha. And daisy wheel printers – what I resorted to when the first-generation Apple LaserJet 1 was out of reach for me and I needed high quality printouts. Proportional spacing was possible, and print drivers would prompt you to change the wheel when you wanted italics. And the noise? It made dot matrix printers seem whisper-quiet by comparison.
Sometimes I wonder how we got anything done on those old systems but at least from a distance and through the haze of memory it seems like more fun than a lot of modern computing has become.
The first printers I used were big printers that printed an entire line at a time on wide green bar fanfold paper. Those things were very loud.
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A band printer? I’ve seen one but never used one
The first printer I used was a dot matrix printer. But then, at a pre high school age, I and a couple of friends struck gold and obtained legitimate access to a whole bunch of networked mainframes and minicomputers. And as for printers, they had almost the whole range: dot matrix, daisy wheel, ball type, line printers, laser printers, and XY-plotters. At some time I tried handing in a multi-page school assignment I had prepared on some professional typesetting program on a minicomputer and printed semi-professionally on a high-end daisy wheel printer. The teacher wanted me to redo it in hand writing 
but I finally convinced her to accept it. After all, I had put a lot of work into making it look professional.
Yeah, I had a dot matrix (complete with parallel port as I recall, could’ve been serial) in the early eighties. I envied those who had printer-plotters 
. I later inherited an old HP LaserJet 4. I’ve had a couple of mammoth HP colour laser jets but got shot of them when it cost more to buy cartridges than it did to buy the damned printers (and clone ones were pretty shit).
These days I have 3 printers, an HP P1606DN Laser (which seems to have lasted forever), a Canon TS7400 inkjet and my cellar printer (secondhand/free from Freecycle) which is an Epson WF-7710 office inkjet.
UK Atheist