Magical Ink. I has it.

I’m starting to think that the toner cartridges in my HP OfficeJet 5610v are all sorts of magical or something.

As a general rule, I don’t like inkjets — I got tired of replacing ink cartridges in my first printer pretty quickly in college, and I had nothing but bad experiences with inkjets in the places I worked as well.

So, I plunked down the $400 to get a laser printer (this was circa 1995 or 1996) and that bad boy — and the original toner cartridge! — hung in for about five years, four moves, and zillions of pages of college reports. When it died, I bought a networked laser printer (a Brother 1270N) in 2000 that I still have, and I’m only on the second cartridge.

But, I needed a printer at my home office while I was waiting for my stuff to arrive from Denver, so I grabbed the OfficeJet for about $100 and figured it’d be good for about 50 pages (if I was lucky) before the greedy little thing would be begging for more ink. (Like I said, I don’t like inkjets.)

I’ve been using this one for a few months now, and it’s still going strong on the original cartridges — and I’m using it while proofing the print version of Linux Magazine and you know that’s sucking up a lot of ink. I’m not sure how many pages I’ve printed so far, but I’m sure it’s in the hundreds.

It gave me an error about low ink in the black cartridge a few weeks ago, but I popped the black cartridge out and slapped it back in, and it’s been printing like a champ on the same cartridge ever since. So, yeah, I’m starting to wonder if I got the ink cartridges with an extra dose of magical ink or something.

It also works well with Linux — I plugged it into an Ubuntu Gutsy box and before I knew it, a little dialog popped up to tell me that Ubuntu had configured my new device, thankyouverymuch, and it was good to go. Nifty. This model also has a scanner and fax, and it’s a nice set it and forget it fax — you just plop down the pages, press a few buttons, and it will scan or fax them without any manual intervention.

So… that’s the long way ’round saying that, if you need a printer and don’t want to spend the extra dosh on a laser (still my first preference), you might look into one of HP’s OfficeJets.