While this is fascinating, I am sitting here wondering if anything has improved in the Inkjet printer world.
Does it still clog up? There are many be one or two more refillable ink printers but are they good? Has printing quality improved?
Or are they still a bag of hurt we should all just hope for better and cheaper colour laser / LED printer.
> Does it still clog up?
Yes, even very high end printers like an Epson p5370 - https://luminous-landscape.com/the-epson-sc-p5370-printer/ "The printhead is the same relatively maintenance-light device that P900 owners (and predecessor P3880/3800 owners) really appreciate. These heads don’t clog much unless you leave the printer idle over long intervals and/or sit the printer in a very dry environment."
> Has printing quality improved?
Depends on the printer? A professional inkjet is extremely high quality these days.
>Or are they still a bag of hurt we should all just hope for better and cheaper colour laser / LED printer.
In a distant past I was tech support help desk person, which included poking the many color laser printers we had. They also actually broke all the time :(
I have the Epson EcoTank Photo ET-8550 printer and have found it to be excellent for printing photos. It prints up to A3+ size (13" x 19") and ink costs are low since it uses tanks, which can be refilled using ink bottles, vs cartridges. The main caveat is that it uses dye inks which theoretically don't have the longevity of pigment inks, but for my purposes (family photos and photo club competitions) it doesn't matter.
Keith Cooper on YouTube has lots of informative videos about the ET-8550: https://www.youtube.com/@KeithCooper/search?query=8550
The key is using it, but…not too much…. I bought a inkjet printer and run maybe 10k pages through it, after i let it sit for 3 weeks it was basically unusable: clogged nozzles, misalignment. After working with riso printers for 10 years, I didnt feel the urge to fix it or have it repaired.
I've long had an idea that I should get my home automation to just print _something_ every couple of weeks to stop it clogging up.
It was recently fully clogged (Epson EcoTank) and I managed to get it back to fully printing after about 10 rounds of head cleaning, so it's not a huge deal, but how many home printers are really printing regularly these days.
Ours gets used maybe once per quarter, and I actively encourage the kids to just photocopy, in colour, random stuff whenever they want to be sure it doesn't just clog up.
Sounds like someone needs to make an app that just prints out a calendar page or newspaper front page every morning to keep things flowing...