New all-in-one Ink tank printer

About 3 three years ago I got fed up feeding my ink jet printer and decided to get a simple black and white printer that uses a toner cartridge. I decided on a Brother HL-L2340D that prints single sided and duplex and that's about it - no fax, no copying. I print about a hundred pages a month and have had to replace the toner cartridge only twice after the original starter cartridge that came with the printer. It takes about a minute to replace the toner and about the same to add paper. In the time I've had the printer I've had absolutely zero problems with it. I'm like the former poster that mentioned getting photos printed at Walgreen's. We have a Walgreen's about a mile away and when we need the rare picture printed we go there. If memory serves, the prints cost about 20 cents each. Again if memory serves, three years ago I purchased the printer from Amazon for about $99. Can't go wrong.

Phil

Rather than start a new one, I decided to resurrect this 5 year old thread on printers.

Like @plunder above, I got tired of fooling around with, and paying for, those expensive ink cartridges. I looked at the ink tank printers, but I rarely print in color. Instead, I bought a Brother HL-L2465DW laser printer/scanner/copier. I got it on sale at Walmart for $149, which I thought was a good price for a combo laser model.

I soon found out why it was so cheap. It requires a $9.95/mo subscription to use?? No mention of this was made in the ads. When I followed the provided link to install the software, I was redirected to a 3rd party website that had a paywall to access the printer drivers!! To make it worse, the included toner cartridge has a chip that locks it until the drivers are installed!

I was going to return the printer, but decided to try AI for help first. It turns out, the drivers & software are available on the Brother website if you know where to look. I downloaded them and found a hack on Reddit to get around the locked toner cartridge. After investing 4 hours or so, I finally got it working. It will only work for a month though, before it locks up again. I ordered a toner cartridge on Amazon that does not have this chip lock and will swap it when that happens.

I'm told HP and maybe a few others are also using this subscription plan. Wow! Shopping for a printer isn't as easy as it once was!

Mister Gillette didn’t make his money selling razors; he made his money by selling blades!

I have the ET-3750 in my home office, and the ink lasts a long time.

Thanks for the resurrection of this thread. Three and a half years ago, I bought a Canon G6020 which is a tank printer with scanner and with the duplex printing option. I see that my black ink tank is 75% full now from the original black bottle that came with the printer. Just a few months ago, I topped off the three color tanks as the original bottles supplied with the printer were at around 25% full. The cost savings on ink these past three years is amazing.

My printheads have never clogged and that may be due to regular use. Inkjet printers should be regularly used. At least once a week, I run a Nozzle Check, as this is a quick 1-page print job that prints in all colors and keeps printheads in good shape without running a cleaning or deep cleaning which uses a lot of ink.

One more tip on buying a megatank printer: Be sure to buy a printer that has replaceable waste ink containers. My G-6020 does not have this feature and at some point, my printer may say its waste ink collector is full and no more printing can be done. If and when the time comes that this happens to me, I'd buy a Canon G3290, which is an all-in-one megatank, duplex-capable printer that has cheap replaceable Maintenance cartridges to contain waste ink. Replacement ink for the G3290 is cheap, even using name brand Canon ink, and as alandb mentions, I expect the black ink that comes with the printer purchase will outlive me.

This is an excellent tip Craig, thanks!

I've been using a cleaning cycle on my inkjet every time the print became erratic. I use the printer less than once a week and it seems I've been using more ink by cleaning than printing.

99.9% of the printing my wife and I do is monochrome, so for us, a laser printer seemed the best approach. I'll save the old Epson inkjet for those few times we do need color.

I’m a tech for an organization called Repair Cafe and a very common printer we see for clogged nozzle related repairs is the Epson printers with multiple tanks. In addition they aren’t easy to repair.

By the way those that are “tinkerers” should look up Repair Cafe and see if you have one in your area where you might be able to assist. It is very rewarding! We have four ladies that perform clothing repairs, one jeweler, four or five mech/elect people, two guys that do bicycle tuneups, one individual that sharpens knives, scissors, etc. , a cabinetmaker, and several computer techs. Our particular group meets every two months. The only charge for repairs is the cost of parts (like a switch for a lamp for instance) but donations are accepted. Repair Cafe is an international organization with about 1400 individual “cafes”. Further details at https://www.repaircafe.org/en/

Thanks for the tip about the G3290.

I own a G7020, which, despite my efforts to print a test page (with lots of use of all colors) every week is subject to periodic failure to deliver ink. I've found that often if I just repeat the deep clean as many as seven times I can avoid the dreaded move on to flush, which so far has always worked, but uses a lot of ink, and probably rapidly uses up the remaining capacity of my non-replaceable ink absorber pad.

I asked my favorite LLM sources, and got the answers that indeed the G7020 had the non-replaceable absorber, and the G3290 enjoys one that is replaceable. Happily, most newer models enjoy the user-replaceable absorbers, including PIXMA G-series, MAXIFY GX-series, and quite possibly future models, as this seems to have been a design policy change for Canon shortly after my model.

Grok mentioned that it found a support page for the actual maintenance part(s) which mentioned compatible models, but I failed to find it.

Quote: I'm told HP and maybe a few others are also using this subscription plan. Wow! Shopping for a printer isn't as easy as it once was!END QUOTE. HP does have a subscription service for their ink. Sign up based on number of copies. I signed up initially and then found their "you printed more than you said and you owe us money". I did manage to get extra cartridges from them BUT they are useless since I cancelled their ink contract. This made it a little harder shopping for ink because I have to be careful to be sure it doesn't have the chip in it.

After having a HP ink jet printer for the last 20 years, I am looking at the laser printers. As I do not print at home that often, I find that the inks dry out and always need to replace them. I have a color laser printer at work (with duplex function) and love it. The toner cartridges last forever (until you use them up). I would like to get a color laser printer for home. It would be a bonus if it also had copying, scanning and faxing capabilities with an automatic document feed. I have to start researching to see if my wish list is feasible.

It seems that currently Canon has maintenance parts with ID's from MC-G01 up through MC-G07. If you search for any of these parts on the Canon site, you currently are shown a support page for the part, which lists compatible printers.

For example:
https://www.usa.canon.com/content/canon/en/search.html?q=MC-...

shows that the MC-G03 supports MAXIFY GX3020 and GX4020 MegaTank printers.

I'll probably run my G7020 until it dies, then consider buying one of these. I'm not going back to tiny cartridges that cost $50 for a cartridge that will either run out of ink after not enough pages or clog after not enough months.

I have a decade old canon AIO laser color printer. It's not connected to any pc, but rather on the local network. It is however barred from any internet access. The printer still works well, including continuing to print (in b/w) when color toner is empty. I mostly print shipping labels and scan documents in these days.

Next printer will definitely be duplex capable, both for printing and scanning. Don't care much about fax as the voip server handles that. One thing for sure, it will not be an HP.

I've got an old HP 1100 BW printer that's close to 15 years old if its a day. The latest HP drivers do check for an HP car cartridge but doesn't stop me from using alternates.

Yeah, I thought about it, but I've always had problems with ink drying up due to lack of use. My solution was to buy a cannon laser printer for the low use printing I do. I'm sold, no more ink printers for me.

In case this helps someone, here's something I found that confused me for too long a time.

My Canon G6020 uses Wi-fi to receive print jobs from my PC. When "off," the printer is actually in a listening mode waiting for a Wi-fi wake-up. It is also set to Auto-power Off after 15 minutes of inactivity. I love this feature.

But at times it does not power off, requiring me to push the power button on the printer. Eventually, I found that each time the auto-power off doesn't work, it's because the printer has a firmware update. Go to the printer's firmware setting, check for updates, then apply the update. Auto-power off then returns.

This has happened several times, and I am happy that Canon continues to offer updates when needed.

That is what I plan to do. I am looking for a compact color laser printer. i have a great one at work but it is a litte big for home.

If you want to preserve your printer's longevity, block it from internet access.

Having just escaped cruelly high ink cartridge costs by going to a MegaTank model (by way of one of the first Kodaks, which had much lower priced ink, but failed utterly in their hope for permanent printheads) I was encouraged by references here to suitable color Laser AOI models. Sadly, I found that each replacement toner color refill in genuine Canon form cost enough to make me reluctant to consider that path.

With my canon, the sadder part is, I print 99.9% b/w, yet somehow that manages to consume color toner too. Annoying.

I don't know what I'll replace this printer with when it dies. It's from 2016, so a decade this year.

It's a printer. It does not need internet access. And unless you're having major issues printing, there should be no reason to update firmware.

Does your keyboard or mouse require internet access?

I have a 13 year old samdung lcd tv that still works great. It has never been connected to the internet. I'm thoroughly convinced if it did receive updates, it would have self bricked by now.