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Printers - Are In-Cartridge Printheads Better?
koelpien asks: "I am a tightwad geek who likes to print photos without spending lots of money on OEM ink cartridges. Both Epson and HP have let me down; HP doesn't have a lot of third party cartridges available, and refilling the OEM's is a pain, especially resetting the ink level counter. Epson is just as bad, with cheap low-cost cartridges available, yet using them will often clog the heads, needing multiple ink-depleting cleaning cycles to restore proper flow. I am on the market for a new printer, and want to know which technology most Slashdot users happy with, in relation to printer brand and the use of third-party or refillable inks. Is one technology superior to the others, or are printers mostly the same?"
I have never had a single issue with my Epson CX5200, never even had to clean the nozzels and it goes through at least one round of ink every month! I even printed off all of our wedding photos instead of paying for reprints, that was almost 400 5x7 prints! Are you buying the most inexpensive printers and running them hard? Do you have your printer sitting next to a window/TV/Monitor/computer vent where it and the paper will collect more dust then it should? Perhaps your fix will be as simple as just moving your printer to a cleaner/drier spot.
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It's cheaper to have your photos printed at the photo lab than to do it at home. The cost of a high quality photo printer more than offsets the gains per photo. Consider that you need to replace the printer after a year or so of heavy printing (these things don't last forever as we all know) and you will typically find yourself far behind what you would have saved if you had just had the photos printed by the lab.
Now, with digital you have the opportunity to select which photos you want to print, plus the ability to digitally enhance pictures before having them printed, so this saves money over film in the long run. However, printing those shots at home is just throwing money down the drain.
You can get a greyscale laser printer for around $100. My Samsung was around $179, and it rules. I got it about 2.5 years ago, I've put a ton of paper through it, and I'm still on the same toner.
Color laser printers can be had for $400 or less now.
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They are reasonably priced for the printer itself, about $100, it color separated (CMYK) with a cartridge for each color and they're only about $10 per cartridge.
You could just get a color laser. I like the Xerox Phaser 8400. Very cool.
I have gone through two Epson printers (Stylus Color 640 and Stylus Color 740) because ink dried in the print head. Both printers were not worth the price in money or effort to fix them (both reasonably old), so they were both trashed. They had both been hand-me-downs from others anyway.
:]
However, I suddenly found myself having to do alot of printing for classes so I went and specifically looked for a printer with the print head on the ink cartridge. I got an HP Photosmart 7260 because it was the cheapest one I could find in the crappy town, and I've been happy ever since. When I buy a new ink cartridge it's going to be a bit expensive, but it's better than having to toss the whole printer, IMO.
Your question is too vague. What are your requirements? Do you do high volume printing? Or just a few HQ prints every few weeks?
This really makes a difference. Back in the 80s, before inkjets were common, I used to operate an Iris inkjet 3072, it made 11x17 prints with a cost of paper and ink of about 20 cents, IIRC (we charged $75 per print). Quart bottles of ink cost less than modern inkjet carts, each CMYK color was fed from a bottle, I only changed bottles about once a week, and the printer ran full time about 16 hours a day. BUT the printer cost $80k and the annual service contract was something around $8k. And you had to buy the service contract because the print heads (nozzles actually) died often, they required continual cleaning and replacement, it was a very high maintenance beast.
The point of this anecdote is you can get really REALLY cheap-per-print consumables (ink) but it isn't practical unless you're doing incredibly high volume or you need extremely high quality prints. You've merely shifted the cost from consumables to hardware maintenance.
So get us some more data on your requirements, and we'll be better able to make a recommendation. You could buy an Iris, or a cheapo disposable Lexmark, it all depends on what kind of printing you do.
i own an epson 2200...
why would you (me) ever want to NOT use the epson ink (ultrachrome pigment)
why would you want to RISK putting in a lesser ink being into the holy shrine?
gawd... I mean, i can understand modding it out to be like the higher end vat-ink printers (with tubes)...
and besides... what 2nd rate ink jerk carries light magenta? or light black?
LIGHT BLACK
I used to own an Epson photo printer some time ago; now I have a Canon 560i.
:-D it has a seperate, replaceable printhead. This means you can change the printhead when it's no good anymore and you can change all ink colors seperatly. (Plus it doesn't use much ink - I've printed over a dozen letter-sized photos and still have more than 90% in the inktanks :-D )
The problem with my old Epson printer was, that the ink dried out inside the printhead, changing the device from printer to garbage.
Due to the fact, that it's not possible to change the printhead (yourself) for epson printers and they are driven by piezo-elements - this means that, if the ink dries in the printhead, the printer is wrecked. (note: I didn't use the printer often...)
After that I went through some reviews at 'Tom`s Hardware' and bought myself a Canon 560i.
For my surprise
What you want more ?
It has 8 cartridges... Red, Blue, Yellow, Cyan, Magenta, Matte Black, Gloss Black and a Gloss Coat.
Each cartridge is $12-$14. Depending on your printing needs you will run out of one or another color more frequently, but not all at once and not often. Quality is supreme. Hi-Res is 5760 x 1400 dpi and no bronzeing... great for giclee... super high qual prints. It has a setting for heavy weight papers... anyways... price it out and see if it is right for you... I love it.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
26 refills, $17. Color printing is a serious hassle. After having many problems, we spent a lot of time researching it. We bought a Canon S820 and a Canon S520, and we have had good luck refilling the cartridges using a kit from IMS, which we bought at a Costco store. The refill kit is NOT available on the Costco web site. Each kit allows something like 26 refills, and the kits cost $17 at the Costco store. The second time you do a refill, it is extremely easy. We inspected photos and font characters under a magnifying glass and were not able to see a difference between the hugely expensive Canon ink and the refill ink. There has been no difference in fading.
The S820 has six separate cartridges. It is very slow, but photos are much nicer. The S520 has 4 cartridges. It's faster, and good for printing labels, for example. We have had no problems with print heads, which are separate from the tanks. Both use the same refill kit, which comes with 6 ink colors.
Buy low. Then buy low again. Our experience is that it is far better to pay $50 for a printer, and replace it often with a new $50 printer, than to pay a lot and buy a "good one". The technology is changing so fast that the $50 printer of a few months from now will be better than the $400 printer sold now.
HP: Ugh. In the past we have bought several HP color printers, and been badly burned. HP is expensive, and we have encountered many quirks. (Since Carly Fiorino took over HP, we see a lot of HP printer software seriously failing, right out of the box. Can someone with little technical experience lead a technically oriented company? It's like a horse that can do math. It appears to be possible, until you realize that it is just a series of tricks.)
Canon: Canon is an extremely adversarial company, in our experience, but less adversarial than the other printer manufacturers, at present.
Canon does product churning, and apparently deliberate product confusion. Before, all the companies sold 6 tank printers as "photo printers". Now Canon is selling 4 or 5 tank printers as photo printers. The Canon USA web site has liberal use of web developer resume-building technologies like Flash and Javascript that tend to defeat use of Mozilla's tabs, and provide for menu choice surprises. There are extremely long URIs which are difficult to email.
The Canon i860 is not related to the S820. Note that the web page says, "... it provides true 4 color photo printing...". One day a few months ago, the InkJet printer companies switched from "true 6 color photo printing" to the present "true 4 color photo printing". I don't know their motivation, but the 6 color printers print MUCH nicer photos, in our experience, with much better shadow detail. Tech company marketing departments take extreme advantage of any ignorance they find in customers.
Testing in the store. At the time, Fry's was doing its insane prices thing with Canon printers. It was possible to buy "refurbished" Canon printers for $30 and $50, which is what ours cost. They weren't really refurbished, it seemed. We tested them in the store and found that 1/3 taken from sealed boxes did not work. The third time we tried opening boxes in the store and testing printers with a laptop, we were told not to do it. The only alternative was to take printers back to the office and find that some of them didn't work. I can understand Fry's position; I can understand mine, too. We bought all the printers that we opened that worked.
Rebates: Be really careful with Fry's rebates; often we have had experiences where they use some trick. We bought Netgear products from Fry's with rebates. All of the rebate receipts were v
Laser printer. On ebay you can get used laser printers that work just fine for quite a nice cost. And even thought you have to buy toner cartridges from the OEM they last for freakin' ever. In the long run the savings of a color laser printer far outweighs the initial cost.
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Go color laser. Pull out your calculator and do the page comparisons. Not only will you find out it's cheaper per sheet to run a color laser you will also find the quality and the fact that the ink wont run off the page when it's wet top selling features.
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the short answer is that what you want will depend on the volume of prints you plan to output.
s _r800_new.html is what i'm currently using. i'm not sure what's going on w/ their site, but it looks like they may be re-engineering the unit. anyway, for $400 bucks you get what would roughly be $800-$1000 worth of ink when purchased from epson and refills for this system are $200, resulting in a huge cost savings.
if you'll look around at most every digital photography review site, you'll find that pretty much everybody recommends and uses epson printers. i'm currently using the epson r800 and it's great for my technical docs and printing direct to cds, and my wife (who is a professional photographer) loves it for photos. epson is very particular about the inks they use, both in terms on longevity and in color gamut.
with any inkjet printer, you're going to get raped on ink from the manufacturer. if you're going to be printing with some serious volume, look into a continuous flow inking system. the system that (used to be) offered here: http://www.inksupply.com/index.cfm?source=html/cf
If you do a lot of printing, I would suggest a model without the print heads built in to the cartridge, I think Canon and Lexmark are like that. If you print a lot, I would suggest an HP. Maybe even a color laser, if you have the scratch.
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If photo printing is your main use, you should consider just having a printing service do it. Walgreens, Walmart, and several online photo printing services will give you higher quality, longer lasting prints. When you factor in the cost of the ink, printheads, photo paper, the occasional inevitable screwup, and the cost of the printer itself, it is usually less expensive also.
I expect this will change in the near future. Probably when photo laser printers become affordable.
Right now printer makers all seem to be gearing their business models on making their profit on the ink and printheads. They practically give away their printers. I have actually bought new printers because it was less expensive than buying a new printhead for my old printers. I threw away 3 perfectly good printers (a HP and 2 Canons) when I moved 6 months ago because it was too expensive to buy printheads.
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I had an early HP ink jet, and it was fantastic. How early, well it used a tractor feed so it had to have the kind of paper where you tore off the sides and was connected to Victor (XT class machine). That thing was fantastic, lasted more than a decade, the print head was NEVER changed. I would just squirt more (inexpensive) ink into the reservoir. Many years later I bought an early color bubble jet from Canon, to get color and experienced ALL of the hassles that people now know are common with ink type printers. It was so wasteful and expensive to run that for charts I used my trusty old imagewriter with a color ribbon until last year.
What changed about a year ago? The price of both new and used color laser printers fell into range. I believe that you can get a new duplex capable color laser printer from Xerox for $400 at todays prices. (That is if my memory serves, possibly there was a mail in rebate involved.) Our laserprinter is used for almost everything and it natively supports PS and has an RJ-45 and print server built-in, it is an HP something or other.
That printer is used for almost everything my wife and I print. For photos we have a small dye-sub printer. Sony something or other. We just have it hooked-up to the TV, not even to a computer and we only use it rarely because it is cheaper to just go to pretty-much any photo place. It is nice though for when you care about the color to be exactly predictable. (Each photo place seems to get the colors a bit different in my experience.) And I have had some problems with photo places having bad card readers which will sometimes be unable to read a few of the pictures out of the multitude on the card. So for situations like that or when you want the pictures now (trust me when you have kids and your relatives or friends come over that happens) the dye-sub printer is used.
So that is my attitude. Do not fool around with ink anymore. It was SUCH a hassle for me that it was just not worth it in terms of time and ink lost. It all just led to aggravation. I cannot even name the printers that I use now, and I like it this way, because everything just works. The printer I hated, oh I REMEMBER that one alright, a BJC-70. I remember that from all the times I was on the net searching for help and because of hassle it was!
getting a printer that uses chip-less cartridges.
I believe that Canon printers are good in that respect.
I was printing B&W text on my HP deskjet when the output started getting really crummy. I knew both my black and CMY tanks weere running low, but I wasn't printing color at the moment and I like to hold off on cartridge replacement until absolutely necessary. So, I replaced only the black. The output still looked awful. After going a few rounds with HP customer support, I finally found out the answer: Even when you're just printing pure black, the printer spits out a coat of cyan as a primer under the black text!!! So, unless all your graphics/photo output is heavy on the magenta and yellow, your color cartridges are nuked prematurely by pure black text output. This revelation bothers me immensely, though I'm sure HP is quite pleased about it.
While I still have a 4-year-old HP inkjet as my home printer, I plan to replace it with a laser. While I originally bought this printer to print photos, nowadays I get photos printed at Walgreens down the street. (1-hour service, "light-jet" style process) Someday I'll do a "digital picture frame" like another poster suggests.
These can be expensive and are prone to air ingestion (when you run your cartridge dry) or even when simply replacing the ink cartridges; this pretty much makes them useless and in need of replacement.
We have one of the cheapie HP colour lasers. While the thing does wonders for brochures, etc... and prints better on plain paper than my HP PhotoInkjet, the quality of the inkjet for photographic images seems quite a lot better than the laser.
I'm not sure that colour lasers are so much intended for picture printing as they are for letterheads with coloured logos, etc?
This is one of my peeves about HP. While they're no ignorent enough so as to "prevent" printing on refilled cartridges, they do not register them as full when the cartridge has been removed+filled+replaced
However, they do still print, the software-timed status meter just stays low and you get warnings every now and again. There is a trick with covering various contacts on the cartridge that will trick it into resetting counters though - but while it worked on one cartridge the other didn't seem to fall for it.
Still, I'm in love with HP's quality, and from one set of cartridges I got over an album of 4x5"-6x9" prints (and some bigger ones), plus a few other printjobs.
Also, the in-cartridge printheads mean that while the cartridges cost more (to but new ones, not fill), I don't have to pay for a whole new printer as you often have to do if the in-printer ones get too plugged up.
I've got an HP cp1700 - $500 uberInkjet printer (although they go on ebay for $200) - pure CMYK system with easily replacable individual cartridges and printheads - so when I'm printing tons and tons of B&W photos... I just replace the black cart. Beware, it does eat nearly a meter of desk space... it's huge.
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The really depends on how much you use it. I've had both and with my printing needs the In-cartridge was better. The reason being is that we don't print on a regular basis.
The cartridge with only the ink replacement dried up during the month that we didn't print the ink dried. Now when we tried printing again and when we decided to fork over $30(CDN) for more ink, the printer still wouldn't print. It turned out that the print head ink dried in the print head. Asking repair shops and doing some googling the solution that we found was to soak the print head in water for 24-48 hours and to clean the head with rubbing alcohol. Still didn't work. We then asked the cost to replace the print head on the model... it turned out it would be cheaper to buy a new printer.
We now own a printer that replaces the print head with the ink. The cost is a little more expensive to replace the cartridge but at least we're keeping another additional rpinter out of our landfills.
What you have to keep in mind is that the ink will run out eventually and when doing so you have to keep in mind if you'll be replacing the ink right away or will it be a few days before you do.
I had to seriously rethink my need for color. I don't print family photos, and I can get better results from the printer at the drug store kiosk. I wanted something that would not gum up if I also went long periods without printing. I eventually ditched my inkjet for a cheap laser. I picked up the cheapest Brother laser known to work with Linux/CUPS and haven't looked back.
Eeeewwwooo, hard copy!
LCD is the new paper.
The above is not worth reading.
I've found that for my printing needs, usually black and white text with tables, that Kinko's works just fine. My Cannon S110 costs about 12 cents per page and runs out of ink after 100 sheets. Kinko's charges about 9 cents per sheet or so depending on the volume. (More is cheaper still.)
Just upload your files to their online form and pick a store. It'll usually be done in a few hours. You can go pick it up, or even ship it.
Marv.
Trusting software vendors is no smarter than trus
I have an s600, Quality is OK, not super, The ink for it is very cheap, and is changed 1 color at a time. Knockoff inks available for it are sub dirt-cheap. I've used it a LOT and it's still hapilly chugging along.
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
Computers and computer technology give us the ability to get away completely from paper, yet there are still tons of people who cling to it. Yes, there are certain facets of life which need paper still - books, for example, still aren't fun to read on computer systems (but we are rapidly moving to e-ink and similar systems). But digital photography is an area that can be completely paperless - case in point: I have some very old images on my PC now that I digitized on my old Color Computer using a DS-9 (I think that is right) digitizer cartridge and a video camera - they are over 15 years old, but I can still view them no problem - this is the power of digital technology. I expect to be able to see all of my current digital pictures on my future machines as well (and, I will *still* be able to view my old CoCo digitized images).
As far as printers are concerned - my wife and I owned an Epson Color Sylus 700 or some POS like that. It was always blowing through ink and we replaced cartridges nearly every month. I got fed up, went down to a local surplus computer junk dealer, picked up a used HP LaserJet 6P and a refilled toner cartrige for $100.00, and never looked back. Excellent print quality (though B&W only - but we found we hardly used the color anyhow), always ready when we need it, no print head cleaning, can run just about any kind of paper through it (whereas the Epson I had to use 24lb paper to get a crisp image - cheaper 20lb would bleed and look blurry) - I simply love it.
I will never go back to using an inkjet (ok, I take that back - if I can ever get my Radio Shack CGP-220 running with my CoCo again, I might use that)...
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I recommend Canon mainly because they have not pissed me off either on the product side or the buisness practices side. MY old Canon BJC printer lasted a long time and was good with ink (replaced the ink $7-$15 ink tanks about twice a year, maybe three times) OTOH when the Canon did eventually die I got an epson (had an old dot matrix epson which was a good printer for several years before getting the Canon) but the newer Epson printers suck ink down fast and the ink costs about twice as much as Canon ink. Lexmark is quite simply not an option, their actions have shown them to be evil, as well as overpricing their ink even worse than other companies.
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