#yeah I'm looking at you HP Inkjet you're an archaic relic of a bygone age

[thicc-astronaut]

If I was in charge of designing printers I wouldn’t fool around with the ink cartridge thing. An opaque ink container so you can’t see how much ink is in there, and instead you create a system of computerized parts to let you know how much ink is in there? And they aren’t even reusable? That’s stupid and terrible.

What I would do is make the ink containers transparent glass jars on the side of the printer, so you can easily see how much ink is in there with the naked eye. These jars, when empty, could be unscrewed and refilled with the appropriate colored ink. No computers, no annoying pop-up windows that “you’re out of ink!”, no brand incompatibility. You could purchase ink in bulk if you wanted like how you can get those big bottles of Elmer’s Glue for refills

Only downsides I could see for this is places like offices (where the printer may be far away from the workstation, so someone may tell it to print without knowing the ink is out until they arrive at the printer) or maybe some people have unreliable eyesight and wouldn’t be able to see that the ink jar is empty. I guess for situations like that maybe you could put an electronic eye on the printer itself, looking through the glass jars, in order to tell you that one of the jars is low.

Other potential downside would be putting the wrong ink color into a jar but. That can be solved with labels.

Printers today are not at all user-friendly. I think with my ideas they would be much easier to use, as well as more environmentally friendly since they won’t use so much plastic.