She didn't mention this, but laser printers are best for people who may not print all the time because the ink from an inkjet can dry and plug it up.

So basically, in the face of declining sales, printer manufacturers decided to stop ripping you off on consumables and allowed to pour the ink from a jug

I remember at a time it was cheaper to buy a whole new printer than to buy just an ink cartridge. No lie

It should be noted that Epson invented the ink tank concept and all the other brands were forced to come out with their version because they had no choice. I bought an Epson ecotank to support them for doing this.

Joanna does a good job with her reviews but she omitted an important difference between inkjet and laser printers. Laser printers do not get plugged ink heads so they are much better if the printer goes for long periods of inactivity.

I bought Canon laser printer 10 years ago when I went to college. It’s still working fine and I am still occasionally using it. The model was LBP-2900. If you need a printer just for the documents - laser is the choice!

Traded in my fancy ink jet for a monochrome laser printer and it's been way better for me. I can just ignore the thing for like 2 years then decide to print 1000 pages and it just works. Hooray for low maintenance!

Working at an office supply store I can confirm that ink tanks and laser printers are the way to go, but most people don’t want to spend the money

"You try to Control-P at my age!" 😂😂😂

I looked at the ink tank printer. First, it costs more to begin with. Now, I could do that if costs were better over time. But, as I looked into the problems these printers have over time. Users report the ink getting clogged, and the print head is non-replaceable, and they have a limited number of prints before needing expensive service. The Epson I looked at had an 18k page limit where a counter is set off stopping the printer in its tracks. A workaround of that is possible by removing a set of sponges that get ink soaked, cleaning them, and then replacing them, followed by a $10 app that resets the counter. Only some would be willing to do this messy job. I went with a traditional HP. IMO opinion, the ink tanks have some development left to be done. I knew it wasn't going to be as simple as manufacturers just cutting our costs for ink and robbing themselves of income.

Nice comparison review. After working for well over 2 decades in IT, I can agree with everything Joanna said. No printer is really 'great' or 'the best.' I'm always checking online where I can get the least expensive replacement ink carts. Right now, Staples is the place, but that could change in a heartbeat. For a long time, I was always a fan of Epson. One of their best selling points IMO was they always provided the straightest paper path to reduce jams. Sadly, that's no longer true. Still, even as I don't print a lot now that I'm retired, I'm quite satisfied with the print quality of my current Epson, and I have a bit more time to look for the least costly cartridges. Thanks for this info, Joanna.

I appreciate the self-aware "Tolerable Printer Award" as the highest standard a printer can reach for. xD

You have to also take into consideration maintenance cost of running an ink tank printer, the print head (it will fail by 2 to 3 years), ink absorbent pad replacement, chip counter resetting and cost of repair itself is almost the cost of buying a new printer. I would have to say getting monochrome laser printer is more worth it if you're only printing black and white.

I gave up purchasing printers years ago. Whenever I need to print something, I just head to my local library and pay cents for each copy. I only print pages sporadically though 🙄

The ink tank system appears to be much better than the cartridge system kzfaq.infoUgkxciSwynMJ7PnUvvx11rewiu-yFBkZTl53 and a lot cheaper to run. The machine was easy to set up. A small point but I thought they'd be a USB cable included to help with the set up but there was none. I've been using it now for a few weeks and it seems like a good product and superior to my previous printers which were all troublesome HP machines.

I've been servicing printers for over 30 years. I bought a Brother MFC-J5845DW for personal/home use last year. I absolutely love it. Great quality, duplexing, copying, faxing. Long-life tanks and the brother software is very very useful and easy. Highly recommend this unit.

I've been using the Epson ecotank for years, I was so fed up with other printers. It works great!

I gave up inkjet printers aprox 3 years ago, and bought a B&W laser printer costing only twice of the inkjet one (including a multi-sheet scanner feeder). That was a huge improvement. As I rarely used my Inkjet most of the inc was used for cleaning the heads, and because of the long usage interval the head was cloged and dry when I eventually needed to use it. I repeatedly had to use alcohol to dissolve the cloged heads, and repetedly had to clean the pad where it's disposing of 50% (in my case) of the ink it spilled from cleaning the heads before printing. ..... The laser printer doesn't have any of these problems ! ..... It can stand for 3 months, and it's still gonna work on the first atempt. ....... And the toner cartridge is lasting (in my case) for a couple of years, whereas the ink cartridges I had to replace several times per year. ...... When I need a color photo I just upload it to the web page of my local photoshop and then I pick it up there after a few days, on real photo paper. .... I will probably never ever have an inkjet printer again. And I did have at least 4 different ones over the years. .....

Just connected my HP Laser to my PC today - was sitting unused for 2 years with toner cartridge in it . Prints perfect.

Probably the most entertaining and well produced printer review video I've seen. Nice job! Thanks for the info!

I'm just happy that every printer is now a network printer, and I don't have to install malware to run the thing. Printers used to be so much worse.

I had an Epson ink tank but unless you print literally every single day, you will have a terrible experience with it since my ink tank print head always jams if I want to print, and I have to run a print head cleaning every single time I want to print (uses a lot of ink), which is only once every month or often longer. I changed to a cheapo wireless 3 in 1 HP cartridge ink jet and I would recommend it for anyone who barely ever prints. I haven't used it in a year and the moment I turn it on, it prints good as new again.

The Epson EcoTank is nice. As others have mentioned, you need to use it regularly so that the jets don't jam. If they do, you have to run a cleaning cycle which uses a good amount of ink. AND the excess ink used during the cleaning cycle gets stored in a separate tank that, when filled, needs to be serviced ($$$). FEAR NOT! You can do this yourself. There's a number of tutorials on KZfaq.

Bought a brother printer 15yrs ago for $50, bought cartridge refills from eBay for cheap. The whole thing lasted 15yrs. Pretty happy with the time it lasted.

I didn’t think a video on printers could be make me laugh at 7am. Great video WSJ!

I got an epson eco tank when they first came out. I absolutely love it. Saved so much money on ink. We used to go through 3-5 cartridges a month. So spending $500 on an eco tank was well worth it

After years of experience, my opinions are slightly different. The Inkjet printers with the ink reservoir are reminiscent of old inkjet plotters, which also had a reservoir, and I used them extensively. First thing first, the ink going into the reservoir has a very different formulation compared to the ink used to refill inkjet cartridges. They are incompatible, and the "compatible" reservoir type inks are difficult to come by. Not a big problem though, as the "original" reservoir inks are cheap to buy. The real life problem, that you haven't mentioned, is that if you leave the reservoir inkjet printer not used for a month or so, the printer's plumbing gets clogged. The solution is to replace the head-plumbing combo - - - It is expensive! Same as for the non-HP inkjet printers which, left unused for long, requires new printing heads. With the HPs, the heads are included in the ink cartridges, so they are replaced every time. But the cartridges are more expensive as consequence. In the end, a four - toners colour LaserJet printer is the ideal solution, as you can leave it idling for months without problems. You can print in B/W and replace only the black cartridge if you want, and you get 5,000 pages for $70. The initial outlay of money is slightly higher, but that is compensated from the fact that the LaserJet is more robust and lasts 5+ years. Just make sure the printer has a physical Ethernet port, not just the WiFi.

Another negative of some inkjet printers is that some will lock up if the B&W or color cartridge goes dry, so you can end up buying new pair of cartridges and throwing away a perfectly good cartridge. I finally replaced my ink jet with a laser, I'll never go back to ink jet.

I’m so happy with my Epson Ecotank printer. I had to run a deep cleanse once because I rarely use it and the text looked like a hologram. But I’ve had it a year and still on the same ink. Oh, and it came with an extra set of ink!

Advantage of the ink printers with tanks is that those have no way of telling if you used genuine ink and can buy cheapest one you will find in the world. Also cartridge systems should be made illegal to manufacture, completely unnecessary pollution, also a lot of entire printers went into landfill either because the owners realised it's a scam and or the only working cartridges were no longer sold.

There is a problem with these ink tank printers that hasnt been brought up here. There is a sponge in the bottom of these printers that receives all the ink purged at head and nozzle cleaning. Once this gets full the printer is basically bricked because it has a sensor that cannot be reset, and keeps throwing up an error. I use a B+W laser printer for regular text documents, and an epson artisan photo printer for colour; usually photo printing. Not much printing these days but its not breaking the bank, and they are both super reliable.

I bought a black-toner Brother laser printer in 1999 - it is still going strong after 3 toner cartridges (3rd just a few weeks ago because the 2nd had gotten too old and had moisture problems) and a replaced photo-sensitive drum about half way along. Never have I ever wished I could print in color at home; it's cheap to do the few I have needed at the local copy shop (probably better quality there too).

With a laser printer you should take in account the price of the drum, but it's by far the better option to print high quality text documents. A black and white laser printer does the job for 90% daily tasks. Ecotank can be cheaper than laser but I prefer laser because : no clogged heads, no wet ink, better speed, auto duplex and crisp printed documents.

Sadly, that brother printer more personality and sass than me LOL

Excellent research and awesome presentation of good info in such a short time 👏. Wonderful effort. Congratulations and thanks 🙏, this is helpful

We've had our colour laser printer (OKi C3200n) since 2004 and it still works well. The key was to get one with separate toner and drum units. Cost $400 which was expensive but saved tons over the long haul compared to ink jets.

Wasn’t in the market for a printer before watching this video, now I am. Laser printer, here I come so you can gather dust in my home.

I found out about the Epson while watching some live TV one night. Shaq was their spokesman and I was intrigued about why Shaq would be hawking a printer. Then I looked into it and was more intrigued by the printer itself. Flash forward to the start of the pandemic and the wife working from home and needing to print stuff. The HP printer I had of course, was out of Ink because it always was. Knowing she was going to be printing a lot, it became the time to pull the trigger on a new printer. I got the Epson ET 3760 with the auto feed scanner. If I ever see Shaq at some sort of fan event with signing, I am taking my printer for him to sign. Screw a basketball, he is signing my printer. Best printer I have ever had. Most tolerable!!!

Great video, to the point, informative and entertaining. Perfect. I had just ordered a regular HP Inkjet and was able to cancel it and order up a tank version...New technologies are constantly coming out and it's hard to stay up to date these days. First I had ever heard but it's about time that the computer industry heard our cries and adjusted. More will follow I'm sure. Again, thanks. I'll have to check out your other videos.

This was very useful, thanks! I'd heard of inktanks but didn't really know what they were. I'll definitely be buying one of these because I like to own my printer and ink and not have to pay a monthly subscription and be limited to how many pages you can print as you are with many printers now.

this is a Honest Review ans expresses how i feel about printers after my VERY FIRST PURCHASE. However it fails to mention, the Epson and Canon Ink Tank has a self destruct system built in. its called an INk Pad, a non replacaeble component that literally soaks up all the ink you wasted trying to get the settings right or from not printing every day. IN SHORT if you are using this for casual everyday use DO NOT get an Ink Tank and especially not an Epson or Canon due to the afermentions Self Destruct system. It is not eco freindly becasue the Company will tell you to toss the Printer rather then find you a replacement.

This was a god send....thank you so much. Also nice editing, didnt think I would enjoy a printer video but I definetly did

One time business used to print their own stuff, now they expect you to print it for them, they even save on the postage, and you get all the cost. One of the worlds best cons. Cheers

You just broke it down for me in a mathematical logical manner, precisely the video I've been looking for!!

I've found that the most tolerable solution is to simply not print anything at all.

When I bought my ink tank printer no one told me to use it everyday so the ink rollers do not dry out. Calling support everyday had me do steps that took up so much time and did not work. Best buy and Epson was no help so it is sitting in the toss out pile. Wasted 300.00.

Half way through this video and I love this woman! I’ve laughed and giggled all the whole time. Thanks for the video!

Thank you for your video. I watched a few others but yours influenced me to chose an Epson EcoTank instead of a HP inkjet which has been my choice for many years. The goofy talking printer was not my thing but your info was fantastic. Thanks again.

I have tried to crunch these numbers myself and ended up with such a headache, I just bought whatever was on sale at the time and resolved to "figuring it out later". Thank you sooooooooo much for a simple, realistic, USER friendly breakdown.

Good insight. There are some cheaper Ink Tank printers as well. I have a cannon that works amazingly. The best way to compare price is the cost per page vs ink refill. You'll see how to get more for your money. Its better to spend more on a printer that has a smaller cost per page when printing.

Just found you - you were really easy to listen to - to the point and just a little good humor sprinkled in to make it a little fun - thanks for what you do !!

1:17 - I was pointing at the screen when this came on. My teacher literally put this on his mandatory class supplies list and I got it fearing it was just some other useless piece of junk. Wow, surprisingly good taste Professor.

I watched the whole video but I haven't printed anything in years.

Note that the Epson refillable versions AFIK do have another wearable component, their so call “Ink Maintenance Box” at 10-20 dollars, still far cheaper the some single cartridges ...

Thank you, Joanna, for taking the time to do this comparison. Much, much appreciated!!! ❤

This video saved me from purchasing a mistake! Had an inkjet ready for pick up at the local store. Wow, Thanks a ton for sharing! I am tossed between the 2 suggested ... will brainstorm about them and make a decision shortly.

I’m planning to buy soon, glad the algorithms brought me here.thanks for this review

"Tolerable Printer Award" 😂😂

I just bought the Canon G3202 ink tank printer. Got it to work with great effort. Easy to set up but no help in how to use it. Wish I had seen this video sooner. But it works and makes a sharp print. Oh Brother.

Thanks to Joanna's excellent advice, we bought the Brother printer she recommended and we are very pleased with it.

YAAS! I'm all for this! awesome editing too!

I just got an all in one HP laser printer from Costco for $400. Absolutely love it. Great quality and speed. The toner colors are individual like the ink tank printers, although they do run $60-$70 each. But it is going to take me a long time to have to replace considering that, according to a printable report, I am still at 100% for all colors after printing 62 color pages plus 20 black and white. This includes a few full coverage photo prints. I believe HP is a superior brand to Epson in reliability and build quality. I still have a working HP inkjet that I bought in 2006.

I have been using the Epson ecotank printer for a long time and I have been extremely satisfied with it. I was frustrated with other printers before using this one, but it has been a great experience. It functions very well."

Enjoyed the video. The comments gave me a lot of important user experience and inside information that I needed as I am looking at different printers and inks. Really helpful.

She didn't mention this in the video. But off brand ink ( or toner ) is usually the exact same quality you'd get from the original manufacturer and it's sometimes 70-90% cheaper.

In Thailand they sell printers that use cartridges all printers have fairly large ink reservoirs that are connected to the print head with capillary tubes. You buy pints of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black…and fill the reservoirs yourself

Thank you. As a law student, this is really helpful. I bought an Epson inkjet and it was so expensive for my first year

I use an old monochrome laser printer that was manufactured in 2008. The toner has only went out once and when I replaced it with the TN360 it costed me $20. I bought that back in 2013. It’s 2023 already but the toner and printer are still going strong. No problems whatsoever. 😊 Note: it’s “monochrome” Not Black & White.

The video was good, but it really depends on what you need. This are probably the printers for a regular household that only prints A4 pages and no special need for quality. If you are doing anything photo related consider buying a printer that uses pigment ink instead of dye ink. Also consider buying a printer that can print A3, it might can come in handy. My favorite Ecotank printer with 'normal' dye inks is the ET-7750. If you want pigment ink (prints last longer without fading) the ET-16650 is a decent choice. My favorite is the big format printer SC-T3100X (The X is important) which also has pigment ink in bottles. I had to install additional icc color profiles to get good looking photos and art prints (I do not use Epson paper, so maybe you don't need this if you print on their paper). I do recommend printing from a program that supports the use of colorspaces like Photoshop, Lightroom, Epson Print Layout (my favourite). You maybe also want to look into printers with more colors, but that is a topic for another day :) Edit: I think the SC-T3100X also has dye inks (but they are water resistant). The printer can not print borderless, but is perfect for posters and CAD blueprints. For nice pigment prints you need at least 10 different pigment colors and the ET-16650 only has 4 different colors, so I'm not sure how good the photos get. (I learned that recently, sorry that I did not know better when first posting this) The ET-7750 (ET-8550 is the new model) is still my favorite printer and it produces really nice looking dye prints.

Props to the WSJ content team for making me truly enjoy a video about the economics of printers

Great review! All the information I needed. Epsom Ink tank is my choice only because I just seen off a Brother all in one inkjet printer and I’m delighted it’s gone. Nothing but headaches from day one and oh so expensive to feed. The ink cartridges are poison ☠️ to buy. I don’t need exceptional photo colour printing, I need fast reliable mostly black and white document printing and scanning!

Really good points and good research. Thank You for sharing this with us. It Helps

Switched from an inkjet to a laser printer. Had to give up the ability to print in color(but really, if you think about it, you don’t have to print in color often), but never been happier. I’m laser only from now on!

Can't really go wrong with a brother laser printer. I picked up a HL 2270 DW back in 2013 for I think 200 bucks and I have yet to have to replace the toner cartridge and didn't even come with a high yield cartridge. Just the regular toner

I found this to be one of the most informative and entertaining videos on You Tube. I especially liked your thumps up "Tolerable Printer Award." Hilarious!!!

What a fantastic video, thank you so much. Would it be the same process to create something similar to a soft cover moleskine?

I had an old Canon all-in-one that was extremely reliable, never clogged and the ink price was reasonable. The only reason I got rid of it was it didn't support Windows 10.

Printer purchase should solely depend on one question, "How much are you going to print?"

Honestly this video is really well made and so important.

This video is way better than it needed to be and i appreciate you so much for it

I had a Canon Pixma MG6120 for 10 years now, and it finally died claiming the "ink absorber full". I loved my printer and am super annoyed that I can't even use the scanner with this error message. It's so daunting to find a new one!! Great info about the ink tanks, too. I'm so used to using cartridges that I'll have to look into that more. =)

I just loved the Printer animation 🤩👍

You are amazing! So fun to watch and great information. You are such a joy to watch! Great video and I will be subscribing. Thank you for doing such a great breakdown. Huge fan! Wishing you all the best.

Very good vid .. needed this education. Buying bulk ink now. Well edited, great style useful. Thanks.

Exactly my point. And when not printing at least once a week, the cartridges dries out and to solve that, you have to clean the print heads and that costs a lost of ink. Now when you want to print high quality photographs, you have no choice but choosing an inkjet printer. There is only one brand that sell inktank all-in-one printers printing high quality photographs : Epson. An example Epson ET-8850 is an A3+ All-In-One that can copy and scan up to A3 and print A3+ up to 2 meter long pictures in high quality. I gladly switched my Canon for that.

👍Great vid. I need to print about once a week to keep my ink jet printer from dry clog. Will go to laser or led printer in my next life.

Well done. I have had an Epson Tank printer for several years. My only problem is that I don't use it enough and after a year the nozzles clog up, but in fairness that happened with my cartridge ink printers too. They do have several levels of cleaning that seem to work but I don't understand the wait of 12 hours before good quality after the deep cleaning. If that doesn't fix it there are several KZfaq videos out there that explain how run a solution through the offending head. I have not had to do that yet but the printer seems well made on the inside and unlike anything from HP it is designed to be easily disassembled (only 1 screw) for further cleaning.

I gave up on ink printers (I was a loyal HP user) and bought a Xerox color printer. Using the Xerox WorkCenter 6515. I purchased it about a year ago for just over $300.00, on sale at Amazon. Still using the toner cartridges that came with the printer but there are generic version of this toner for a third the cost of the Xerox brand. My main gripe with ink is that it was always dry when I needed to print something. I print infrequently but that is not a problem with the toner and it does a beautiful job printing to boot.

My Epson ET-3750 first set of ink bottles lasted over 2 years. I'm on the second set of ink bottles now. That's from the end of March 2018 to April 2021 without buying ink. Previously, I would have been replacing ink at least every three months

The issue with ink tanks at least for someone that prints a lot like me is that it breaks down real fast.

Nice.I had the HP 2700e with the instant ink plan. Received an offer for a free HP office jet Pro 9010e for upgrading my instant ink plan to platinum. Ordered it today. Lots of manuals for my electronic gadgets I would like to print out without worrying about the cost of ink cartridges.

Thank you for your time and effort this is exactly what I needed.

Teachers would love to see this vid. Great work!

This video is just perfect, super informative and also hilarious! Bravo!

No, my ancient B&W HP laserjet 4L is still chugging on, almost 30 years after I bought it. THAT is a great printer.

I have the hp laser one. It’s pretty unique. The refill for is only costs $30 and you don’t need to replace the whole cartridge.. it costed me around $400. And I’ve had it for a while now over 4000 pages. And I only need one reload kit. If they had a colour version I would buy it in an instant.

Printers have been ruining our lives as an understatement

I switched to Brother Laser decades ago because they did not force you to replace the drum (built in) with the toner. About 3 Hi-yield toners to a drum unit. Their Color Laser works well as long as you do not want Photo quality. A bundle (4 colors) of toner tends to be the best buy, but at some point you probably will just buy a specific color as they never get used up evenly (Another drawback of those triple color Ink cartridges)

One of the best video's I have ever viewed, thank you so much for the laughs..

Thank you for the video. It was helpful. My wife's business and my business go through a lot of printers. How about scanning docs? Any favorites?