So, the best printer I’ve ever owned in my life was a Canon Pixma iP5000. And yes, it was an inkjet. It had it all for the time: It made excellent photo prints, did double sided printing, could do borderless even on a full 8.5x11 sheet of paper, and its ink cartridges were literally just boxes full of ink. It had a separate print head below the tanks which was removable for cleaning (!) with no tools (!!) and the ink cartridges did not have any DRM chips or other bullshit in them. I refilled the original in cartridges it came with for years before I finally just wore the durn thing out, and I could not find the parts I needed to fix it.

Then began my odyssey of trying to find something to replace it. No one made a comparable inkjet printer by then. Anything you get nowadays is either missing duplex functionality, borderless, or both, and/or has head-on-cartridge printing, and they all have DRM chips built into the cartridges to prevent you from refilling. I thought the Epson Ecotank line was the answer, but it turns out those are all have trash build quality and while the no-cartridges idea is sound in theory, the way they’re designed means that the things inevitably cack themselves in short order and they’re basically impossible for a consumer to take apart to clean or service. The Ecotank takes the idea of commercial printers with external remote ink reservoirs, but messes it up by building the reservoirs into the printer body in a “consumer friendly” way that leaves the reservoirs not sealed (so the solvent can evaporate out of the ink, and dust can get in) and not removable (so they can’t be cleaned), nor can the print head be accessed in the event that it needs to be unclogged.

I went through three of them under warranty and once my warranty was expired that was it. I had to throw the damn thing away, and then I just bought my current color laser printer. The hell with it.