Disposable Culture

[bcholmes]

The toner on my printer has run out.

I have an old IBM 4019 printer that I bought around-about 1991. It was the smallest laser printer on the market back then, and it has this really cool solid toner cartridge that lasts a long time. How long? Well, it's just run out now. Eleven years. Not bad, I say.

Thing is, replacing the toner cartridge is probably gonna be more expensive than just getting a whole new printer. And the printer doesn't have that much memory and I'd rather have something that had more than 300 DPI resolution.

So I'm thinking of getting a new printer.

But the idea of throwing away a printer because the toner cartridge ran out is really squicking me. Hmmm....

Comments

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

We ran into the same issue with an old inkjet that we gave my sister. The ink we'd given her had dried out over the years. It turned out that it was actually cheaper for her to buy a new inkjet with ink bundled than to just buy ink. In fact, even for many brand-new ones we looked at, it turned out that their ink refills cost more than the printer itself (which comes with ink).

The first few google hits for toner for that printer seem to imply something like $70 USD as a going price.