It’s 2026 and the HP OfficeJet 6950 I bought in 2018 and used with my Linux devices ever since has reached the end of its life. As I have used it only very little, the ink lines or print heads are so clogged that even a repeated 3-step cleaning process could not make it work again. Over the years, I have used the printer very little due to the high cost of the original replacement ink cartridges that would not last very long. Using cheaper 3rd party cartridges was a hit or miss over the years and hence not much of a fun experience.
So due to all of this, I preferred to use a black and white laser printer for the faster speed and lower cost per page for most of my printing needs. What I used quite frequently, however, was the scanner unit on top of the ink printer. As the printer was not of much use anymore, I was thus tempted to just buy a new scanner-only unit and only use my black and white laser printer going forward.
While researching scanner and printer prices and features, however, I noticed that Epson, HP and others are now offering a wide variety of color ink printers with large ink tanks and deliver ink for 6.000 color and 12.000 black and white pages as part of the original package. This significantly changes the equation for me, as printing with ink will thus become significantly cheaper and produce much less waste compared to my black and white laser printer.
Initial Cost
With this in mind, I changed my plans, and instead of just buying a scanner, I bought an HP Smart Tank 7307 color ink / scanner with an automatic document feeder combination for €289. For comparison: If I had bought a standard cartridge ink printer, I could have gotten the same setup for about €140. In other words, the tank + ink cost me around an extra €150 initially. Let’s compare: An original XL pack of black and color ink for my previous printer costs around €127 euros and would yield 825 pages according to a quick web search. So I will break even at 1.000 printed pages.
Cost per B/W page
As I print relatively little, I don’t expect to get 12.000 pages out of the black ink that was supplied with the 7307, as my printing to head cleaning ratio is likely to be quite unfavorable. But let’s say I would get 8.000 b/w pages out of it and that the black ink makes up about half of the 150 euro difference, with the other going to the color inks. So that would be €75 euros for 8.000 pages, which translates into 0.9 euro cents of black ink per page. Add to this 0.3 ct per paper page to a total page cost for black and white printing of 1.2 ct per b/w page, including the paper.
This of course does not include the €150 for the printer, but I won’t count that, as a separate scanner would have at least cost a similar amount.
Cost per Color Page
Printing a color page would cost about the same, so the reflex of thinking that printing in color is expenisve will hopefully fade away over time. Overall, I expect that replacing the thought “printing with ink, particularly in color, is expensive” with “printing with ink, even in color, costs next to nothing” will put the fun back into (color) printing.
Refill Cost
A b/w and color refill set costs around €26 from a third party, and should I ever require a refill pack, printing costs per page will reduce to almost nothing. Let’s say I would get 6.000 black pages out of a refill pack, and half of the price of the refill pack would be for the black ink, the ink cost per b/w page would be 0.2 ct. Add 0.3 for the paper and we are talking about a total printing cost of 0.5 euro ct per page, including the paper.
Summary
After using the printer and scanner for a bit, I can just repeat what I said above: Paying more up front and having a significantly reduced price per page over time really puts back the fun into ink printing in general and color printing in particular for me. For the first time in many years I feel like I bought a product without enshitification at work. Rather the opposite!
So much for today. In a follow up, I’ll have a closer look at how the printer integrates into my Linux environment.