Here’s a conundrum. I can buy a new printer from the likes of Brother for around $99. The official Brother drum for this printer costs $150. Maybe instead of buying that new drum I should just throw the printer away each time the drum wears out. The same goes for projectors which now typically have a very long bulb life up to 5000 hours. The issue there isn’t the cost of a new bulb, but rather the fact that after 5000 hours of use the projector could be considered worn out, or near to it, or uneconomic to justify the expense of the bulb.
When we get into more expensive printers, the cost of consumables is less proportionate to the cost of the printer, so it is more worthwhile to replace the items like a drum with new ones. Especially where you can buy third party consumables for a printer, as you can for most Brothers, since they are one of the few printer manufacturers who have not chipped and patented their consumables. This is all driven by cutthroat competition between printer manufacturers, to the extent that new printer prices are so low the manufacturers are selling at a loss. But we are the losers because we go out and buy a whole new printer instead of a new consumable and therefore are throwing away a large bulky printer which is bad for the environment.
At our school we buy Brother and the important reason for that is that their consumables are much cheaper. So are the printers. That is provided you can get a good performance from them. Lately I’ve had a lot of trouble with Brother’s drivers. I solved that by using HP drivers with the PCL5 compatibility. This works only as long as PCL5 adequately reflects all the printer’s features. And the printer is misidentified as to its capabilities. So it is a bit of a mixed bag all round.
