this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2025
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Buy an Epson EcoTank printer. My family owns three. You pay more for the printer but just dump in bottles of ink when they need refilling.
Just make sure you schedule a test print every couple off weeks to prevent clogs, is a little wasteful but if you get aftermarket ink it's cheap enough that is worth it, otherwise a new head will run you down around 50 bucks.
TIL EDIT: you can get continuous tank mods for most printers on AliExpress! I might give it a try with mine!
They do require maintenance to keep them running smoothly. I'm fairly mechanically and technically capable so I can disconnect the head and run DA-2A through the mechanism to clean it out.
DA-2A works to a point, but if you let the printer sit for a year it might not unfortunately. Like I said print heads aren't crazy expensive, but still kind of sucks. But hey inkjets still do have their place sometimes.
I have a 210 L drum of the stuff.
We do a fair amount of printing and run the print head cleaning routine on our printer every few weeks to keep it happy. We've had the ET-4550 for over 8 years and it's still chugging along. If it ever needs a replacement print head it will not owe me a damned thing.
That's great but it doesn't sound like this is relevant for home gamers ;)
I just bought a printer. Everything I saw said that if you print infrequently then you don't want an inkjet. They're very prone to clogging if left alone for a while. Went with a laser printer instead.
I just got an old HP inkjet that doesn't care about reported ink levels and cheap ink bottles from AliExpress.
I print white on black because I have so much damn ink and nobody expects dark mode documents. Kinda funny when I take out a sheet of paper and have to dry it out. 120g/m² is absolutely the minimum when doing such crap though. Regular 80g/m² just wrinkles up and leaks through, although that's also a property of dye ink vs pigment ink.
But I also lucked out on sales combined with coupons
Currently it's €18.50, though for 0.5L (~1 pint) that's still cheap. Honestly I am surprised I actually received that.
Nice. We had one printer or another that required expensive ink cartridges before we got the Epson. I used to refill some cartridges but it was a pain. Now I just open a set of bottles and top up the tanks whenever it's thirsty.