OT: suggest a printer

Atrocities · #1 March 2nd, 2005, 10:30 PM

Quote:

NullAshton said:
I say get an ink printer, that way you can refill it.

Screw it, just buy an old IBM Electric Typewriter and be done with this computer nonsense!

Thermodyne · #2 March 2nd, 2005, 10:43 PM

There is no easy solution. Inkjets use ink and ink cartridges cost too much. My solution is two printers. Keep the inkjet and buy a Laser printer. Use the laser for everything that does not have to be in color, save the ink for stuff that must be in color. Most things don�t need to be in color, and even photos can be proofed in grey scale. You can pick a personal laser printer up cheap these days, Dell almost gives them away. If you have a home network, spring for a network interface, then mount the printer on the network. That way everyone has use of it without worrying about shares and print hosts being left running.

Instar · #3 March 2nd, 2005, 10:47 PM

HP 5550. It is a cheap USB inkjet that is very fast. It doesn't seem to use that much ink, just use the options to reduce ink usage.
I like it a lot. Hopefully it is still on the market.

http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en...897-74615.html
$100 for a printer is pretty cheap. The review I read of it in PC Mag was very favorable too...

Mindi · #4 March 2nd, 2005, 11:57 PM

Quote:

Thermodyne said:
There is no easy solution. Inkjets use ink and ink cartridges cost too much. My solution is two printers. Keep the inkjet and buy a Laser printer. Use the laser for everything that does not have to be in color, save the ink for stuff that must be in color. Most things don�t need to be in color, and even photos can be proofed in grey scale. You can pick a personal laser printer up cheap these days, Dell almost gives them away. If you have a home network, spring for a network interface, then mount the printer on the network. That way everyone has use of it without worrying about shares and print hosts being left running.

This is exactly what Richard and I do. We have two hp printers, one is a color inkjet and the other is a b&w laserjet. I try to use the inkjet basically for printing color things, mostly birthday cards, christmas cards, photos, professional paperwork with color logos, etc. We use the b&w for everything else.

The inkjet is an ink hog of course and I normally have to put in two combo packs of ink (combo pack has one black cartridge and one color cartridge) in a year. Each pack cost $35 at officemax, so that's $70 a year on ink for that printer. However the printer cost us less than 40 bucks as we got in on sale during the holidays a couple of years ago (day after Thanksgiving sale). For that price I get somewhere between 500-1000 copies depending on the amount of color the copies have. I think it's definitely worth having around for that price as the price I would pay for cards, professional reprinting of pictures and business paperwork would definitely be more than $70 a year. For a while we didn't even stick with one inkjet for color, we got what we called 'disposable printers'. There were so many sales on cheap inkjets around here that when we needed a new one we just put the old one in a garage sale or something and bought new because ink cartridges were more expensive than buying another color inkjet. But I have really liked this little hp, so I have kept it for a while now.

The laserjet prints thousands and thousands of copies and I only have to replace the cartridge about once every 12-18 months. I can buy refurbished cartridges now at officemax for about $55. We paid $200 for this printer at CompUSA right after the new low priced lasers came out a few years ago and we've had no problem with it in all that time. It's definitely been the best printer investment we have ever made.

Kamog · #5 March 3rd, 2005, 02:21 AM

I recently purchased a Brother printer / scanner / fax multi-function unit. The black ink cartridges are $32 each and it's supposed to last for 400 or 500 pages. So far I have printed about 50 pages and it's already more than half empty! What do they mean when they say 500 pages, they must mean a mostly blank page with a couple of lines of text in tiny font at the top.

I looked into refilling the cartridges, and that costs about $20. That saves some money, though it's still expensive. Even though the printer manufacterer recommends not refilling them, of course they would say that to force you to keep buying their expensive cartridges.

Atrocities · #6 March 3rd, 2005, 03:51 AM

They mean 500 test pages. You know the ones with virtually nothing on them. I am serious. The funny thing is, the ink cartrages cost next to nothing to make. They are a cash cow for the printer industry.

Anyone who can make cheap printer cartrages, generic, can make a killing in the industry.

David E. Gervais · #7 March 3rd, 2005, 08:37 AM

I approach buying a printer fram the opposite direction.. I look to see what printer has the less expensive ink cartridges and then check out the printers they fit. I personally have an Epson Stylus 670 and my ink costs $7cdn/Black and $12cdn/Color (Note I buy Print-Rite compatible ink, not original Epson they cost about double.) I get about 500 pages of B&W and about 35 Full color photo quality (8.5" x 11") prints from the color.

My next printer will be a Canon, any one that has the separate color ink cartridges. (I'm leaning towards the Canon PIXMA iP4000, the ink sells for $8cdn each color and $12cdn for a double capacity Black. Oh, and it's quiet & fast.)

nuf said, Cheers!

Mindi · #8 March 3rd, 2005, 11:03 AM

Well this could be true or it could be like my inkjet. I put in cartridges in my inkjet and inevitably it will say I go through ink like crazy! I mean I print 50-100 pages and it's down to less than a quarter of a cartridge for both cartridges on my printer status window. However, in my case, it lies. I can get down to less than a quarter and print 3-5 times the amount I printed in the first 3/4 of the cartridges. Frankly I don't think the software accurately measures the amount of ink in the cartridges. This COULD be your case as well. If not you may want to look into refilled cartridges online. I used to get a lot of mine that way to save money and a lot of them have a good variety of epson, brother, lexmark, etc printer cartridges to chose from. Unfortunately for me, I haven't really found a good place for my hp cartridges that really gives me much of a discount.

Kamog · #9 March 3rd, 2005, 11:50 AM

Thanks. Well, I hope that's the case with my printer; I guess I'll know when I print more pages. I don't think I'm going to remove the cartridge to see how full it is because the printer user manual said it's not a good idea to remove and re-insert the cartridge. Hopefully, this printer doesn't rely on the software to know when the ink is empty.

Another way to refill the cartridge is to buy a do-it-yourself refill kit that comes with bottles of ink, a syringe and a drill. You're supposed to make a hole in the used cartridge and fill it up with new ink using the syringe. This is really inexpensive, but I'm not sure about doing this because I don't know if the ink that comes in the kit is compatible with the printer.

Mindi · #10 March 3rd, 2005, 12:51 PM

I've had good and bad results with refill kits. I used to do this with my epson printer and it worked okay. It was a little bit of a pain to get it to work at first correctly(had to clean the printheads a million times, had to do a bunch of test prints), but this did work. When I tried it with a different printer (might have been a lexmark), it didn't work as well and I could never get it to print right-always had streaks, some colors wouldn't print correctly, etc. So finally I ended up giving up on the refilling idea. Some cartridges seem to take well to it, others don't.