If you don't mind B&W, I would go for one of the many cheap monochrome laserjets. They are a lot cheaper and you will only have one toner to change out. The manuals are something I really miss, but the expense of printing them out would be too much I fear even with laserjet. I could probably get away with printing them out at work, but would just feel too guilty. I already get away with a lot of stuff at work that most jobs I wouldn't (surfing the internet all day, taking an extra hour for lunch, showing up a half hour late).
I've resorted to using an ereader when I want a manual (pdfs suck on a ereader), and printing out just a page or two I need. Why can't developers use epub, pictures can still be inserted for charts.

I kinda bought it, but in the back of my mind I was thinking...a gamer with a girlfriend and another girl wanting a piece of him, very unlikely.

Would be nice if the white-on-black manuals came with a text-only black-on-white version. Printing out just a single reference page from one of those will use up quite a bit of ink.

I had a look at a few mono lasers but mainly Brother and Samsung models. The more I read about Brother, however, the more suspicious I became of their stuff, though their printers generally get good reviews. If user reviews on Amazon are to be believed (a big IF in some cases I know) a number of Brother models are chipped so that they will only accept Brother toner cartridges, which are predictably more expensive than compatibles. Their printers are also often prone to reporting toner levels as being low when they are not low and will not allow you to print until you put a new cartridge in. Moreover, when one of the colour cartridges is empty you cannot print at all until you replace it - even if you only want to print in black. These things have made me suspicious of Brother, despite the company's generally good reputation.

It sounds like printing off manuals might be an expensive idea so maybe I'll have to rethink. I really miss the good old paper manual ; it's definitely one of the crappy things about games these days that you have to go to so much trouble to read up on how to play games, especially the more complex ones. I would never have worked out how to play Civ 4 without the paper manual and the Civilopedia.

That is the exact manual I had in mind when I read your post. Thankfully, I purchased it back when they were still including the manual.
According to an HP add I saw, $.16USD/page for their monolaser.

Can't you reverse the colors when printing? I thought I saw that option in one of my printers (print all text in black or something)

Me too. And the Civilopedia is also an immensely helpful in-game "manual". Perhaps in-game manuals are the future if half the idea behind scrapping paper manuals is too save paper / trees (which I'm certainly not against) ? Someone will have to come up with a decent idea at some point because some games NEED a manual and sitting in front of my computer for hours reading an Adobe Acrobat document is not my idea of relaxation...

It wouldn't be a problem if they used epub. Ereader's are a lot easier to use like that, than a tablet. But pdfs are horrible and they are hard to convert.

I don't know anything about epub but it sounds good. I'm surprised and disappointed that the games industry has not addressed this issue yet. There must surely be plenty of people who give up on a game simply because there is no longer an easy/convenient way to learn how to play it. It used to be simple when games came with a comprehensive manual.

Just think of epub as a file format like a word .doc. It's an open format with no licenses needed. It is the format most companies (not Amazon kindle) are using for their ebooks. It can be locked by DRM, or open to changes.

I actually use a kindle, and rip the DRM off my books and convert them to epub and mobi (basically kindle's format). It's pretty easy to rip the DRM and convert, but hard now a days to find the software to remove the DRM. But pdf's are almost impossible, because they are just a bunch of pictures of text. There is software to conver pdfs, but it is not always perfect.

You missed the part about it being easier to gripe than it is to do something about it. ; )

But yeah. I was thinking that the PDF viewer of choice might be able to invert the colors, but hadn't considered doing it on the printer side. Lemme see if I have the option on mine...

Bleh - I don't see it on mine, and I don't see where Foxit does it, either. The 'print all text in black' thing I think simply takes any gray-scale or color text and makes it full black. Can't try it now since I'm traveling this week...

Indeed. I know a few of the games have reference pages that GOG staff did, but I think overall this is really more of a forum user project.

Yeah, I don't remember ever trying it, but thought that would do it.
It's a relatively cheap device, $70USD, but I read quite a bit.

As a result of your thoughts I've just come across a .pdf reader app for the iPad called GoodReader for iPad. It looks promising. I've no idea how to send files from my laptop to my iPad because I'm not very tech savvy, but I imagine it must be possible ? I'm also not sure how it deals with images as opposed to text. Anyway, looks promising. It shouldn't be necessary to invest in an iPad to read a PC game manual though. Anyway, you may have nudged me in the right direction so thank you. I still miss the good old paper manual though, being a nostalgic old git :)

I don't own an ipad, so I don't know if you have to transfer through itunes or it's drag and drop like my android tablet. I do know it's possible, just like you have a kindle and Barnes&nobles app. If it's a pdf reader you don't have to worry about how a pdf reads on a tablet. ereaders just are terrible with pdfs, but tablets have very minor problems with them. PDFs still work on my kindle, but they can be a little hard to read if they are not formatted for the smaller screen.

This sounds like a potentially excellent solution, especially since I was very luckily gifted an iPad by my sister, who basically wanted me to have one so that I could communicate with her more easily. I'm glad I started this thread now, + 1 for you :) My sister and her partner, who owns a Mac, will probably know how to transfer files from laptop to iPad. I was reading the .pdf manual for X-Com Apocalypse on the iPad last night and although I had to zoom in a bit it to read the text it was a relatively comfortable experience. The industry needs collectively to come up with a more universal solution though, I'm sure you'll agree.