HP OfficeJet J4580

Inkjet printers often have rather good specifications for the price.   If you want photographs then you probably need an injet printer and it's special paper

We are always intrigued by running-cost claims that say Print high-quality colour documents for up to 15% less cpp than lasers as is the case with HP's brochure for this. In the small print underneath it says Compared with lasers under $750; … Officejet cost per page based on HP 901XL Black Officejet Ink Cartridge (not included, purchase separately) and HP 901 Tri-colour Ink Cartridge

Printer brands such as HP like inkjets because it is a technology they have largely developed in-house. They have some patents that remain in force and have some proprietary, secret, factory processes for printhead and ink manufacture. The inkjet printer itself is little more than a set of plastic mouldings that can be subcontracted.

Laser printer technology or "electrophotography"" as it is more broadly known is older, more established and has fewer opportunities for meaningful patents. It is also quite expensive to develop laser-printer engines so manufacturers tend to share - but that has the potential to "compromise the brand" because people will tend to spring to the conclusion that if two printers share an engine they are the "same thing" - which is only partly true.

As it happens ink can be cheaper than toner - but toner can also be cheaper than ink. The price of either is largely arbitrary and made up by the print brand to suit the marketing proposition for the machine. Cheap laser printers have expensive cartridges (because that is how they recoup the development cost for the engine).   But then - cheap inkjets have expensive cartridges for precisely the same reason.

The true cost of ink is a colourant and a vector like distilled water, ethanol and biocide additives. Toner sounds more complicated styrene-acrylate or polyester with wax and electroscopic modifiers.

Inks are probably cheaper to make in small quantity, hence the number of so-called "compatibles". The problem with compatible ink is that it is far more prone to streaks and failures than original HP material. Compatible makers can read the patents but they don't know all those proprietary tricks.

A bit of Web research suggests that a lot of people are looking for the "drivers" for these printers.

Don't download drivers from anywhere but HP or Microsoft. Apart from the Linux community nobody else writes drivers and there is no mileage in giving them away. Anyone offering drivers is therefore likely to be offering malware.

To give an example on of the sort of site offering this sort of thing this is the text on one The download drivers for hp officejet j4580 review is sources where names must be centers, global as having a knowing preview or costing a MEID PC page. … etc etc. This looks like its "information" to a search engine. The page then rapidly forwarded to a couple of others that attempted to start the download automatically (but we use Linux so it failed).

HP are very unlikely to provide new drivers for this printer as it dates from 2008-10 so by the standards of these things it is obsolete - sorry that's just the way it is with inkjets.

If you have upgaded to Windows 10 then last I saw was that the J4580 is still supported.

The print language used is PCL 3 GUI - which is nothing much to do with PCL but a raster or bitmap transfer language. The page is formatted in the computer then transfered to the printer.