Don't Network You Home Printer

With more people at home due to the COVID-19 Coronavirus it is tempting to network your printer, so everyone can use it. I suggest considering not doing thing this. Installing a networked printer is fiddly, especially with an assortment of work, school, and personal computers in the home. There may also be security risks from this. In addition you could end up using more paper, and ink, when someone prints the wrong document from one end of the house and doesn't see what is coming out at the other.

Instead you could just connect the printer to the nearest computer, and print from that. Or if your printer is equipped with a USB socket for printing, use that. It will be less convenient to have to copy the document to a USB drive, and sneaker-net down the hall, but think of the paper savings.

Using Old Printers

Laser and ink-jet printers are now available for under $50. However the low cost laser printers typically come with less than full toner cartridges and new new high capacity cartridges cost around $100. A $100 color laser will cost you $400 for new cartridges.  The ink-jet printers have cartridges which cost $10 to $30 and can't be refilled. An alternative is an older printer with refillable and lost cost supplies, or better still a free one which is already full. Older printers are available second hand at places like  The Bower in Marrickville in Sydney and Tiny's Green Shed at Mitchell and Symonston in Canberra.
I picked up an ink-jet printer left near the bins at my apartment block. This had ink in it which worked for a few dozen pages. The cartridges are easily refilled with low cost bulk ink and do not have an anti-refill chip which prevents reuse.

In need of a printer in Sydney I found a discarded Brother MFC-7420 multi-function copier, fax, laser printer, on top of a recycling bin. There was a toner cartridge box next to the printer, indicating it may have a new cartridge in it (the cartridges are good for about 2,000 pages). These printers can have problems with paper jamming, but work well using the single sheet feed slot.  The simplest way to get it to work with Linux is to choose a compatible per-installed driver, such as for the Brother MFC- 9600 Foomatic/hl 1250. Assuming this printer has a full cartridge, printing a couple of pages a week, it would last about 20 years.

Perhaps there is scope for retrofitting older large capacity laser printers for a longer life. One way would be to modify the printer firmware, or the printer driver, so that only one sheet of paper is in the paper path at any time. Another way would be to slow down the printer, so paper travels through it more slowly. More radical engineering, perhaps by the "Maker" community, might see simpler mechanisms around commonly available laser printer mechanisms.

Low cost ink jet printer

After many years of refilling the cartridges, my Cannon i250 ink jet printer finally stopped working. I replaced this with a Epson Stylus TX100. This was the lowest cost printer I could find which had individual ink tanks for each colour. It is annoying when one colour runs out and you have to buy a new three colour cartridge (it is only slightly less annoying trying to refill a multi-colour cartridge).

The TX100 costs A$69 from the Australia Post shop, before a A$10 cash back offer from Epson, making it A$59. Big W have the TX200, with more features, for $10 more. The replacement low capacity Epson ink cartridges are about A$14 each and high capacity third party ones about A$10 each.

The printer is twice as big as the one it replaces, because it also includes an A4 flatbed scanner. I did not want a scanner, but couldn't find a low cost printer without one.

The TX100 hardware was easy to install, but I had some difficulties with the software. Like many modern printers, the TX100 insists on installing a whole lot of drivers which say resident, running even when you are not printing.

Print quality is very good. One aspect which surprised me is that the copy function on the unit does not require a computer. You can use the unit as a standalone photocopier: put an original on the scanner, press "copy" and an inkjet copy is make. The results are not as good as a laser copier and this is a very expensive way to make copies, but could be handy for occasional use.

The TX100 looks like it will work well for the one or two pages I print a week.