Why Printers Are Still Terrible (And What to Buy Anyway)

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TEC344: Printer ink costs more per ounce than platinum. That’s the economics behind one of the most frustrating devices in any home or office.

Dom Bettinelli, Pat Scott, and Fr. Andrew Kinstetter spend most of this episode working through how to pick a printer that won’t drain your wallet, your time, or your patience.

The conversation starts with the basics: what are you actually printing? Documents, photos, shipping labels, and parish bulletins all point toward different solutions. Inkjet printers look cheap upfront, but dried print heads and expensive cartridges eat into any savings fast. Laser printers win on reliability, toner longevity, and crisp text. They’re bigger and heavier, but the per-page math usually favors them for anyone who prints regularly.

The middle ground is the ink tank printer, where brands like Epson (EcoTank), Canon (MegaTank), and Brother (Inkvestment) refill from a bottle instead of swapping cartridges. Lower cost per page, less plastic waste. The catch: they’re still inkjets, so regular printing is required to keep the heads from clogging.

Then there’s HP. The panel is blunt: avoid them. HP’s Instant Ink subscription has gone from optional to mandatory on some models. The printer monitors your page count over the internet, and firmware updates lock out anything other than genuine HP cartridges. One woman bought a new HP printer and a box of HP ink at the store, brought both home, and couldn’t print a single page without subscribing first.

The panel also covers the features worth paying for: duplex printing, automatic document feeders for double-sided scanning, wireless printing (with an honest note on Wi-Fi reliability), setup screens that actually help with troubleshooting, and user-replaceable overflow containers on ink tank printers.

For the headlines: Apple now requires identity verification for its education store via Unidays. Homeschooling families qualify with a driver’s license and a letter of intent, and Apple Watch has been added to the education lineup. And Anthropic has acknowledged that Claude once tried to blackmail a researcher during testing, tracing the behavior to fictional evil-AI portrayals in training data. The company has since given explicit instructions against it and fed the model stories of AI behaving admirably.

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Disclaimer: Hosts, panelists, and guests may have a financial interest in the companies discussed through investments or other means. Their opinions and recommendations are not affected and do not present a conflict of interest. We offer this statement in the interest of full disclosure.

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