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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?"
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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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.
Canon are great but if anyone can tell me how to re-seal a (official) cartridge properly i'd LOVE to know - i've tried blue-tack (as per ink mnfr recommendation), i've tried insulating tape, and it's still driving me potty. half the time it seems to seal and i come down in the morning and find all the ink from one or more colour dumped into the printer. it understandably has trouble coping with that much ink going into the pads. i have a Canon i850 btw. my next plan is maybe to try a hot glue gun to seal the hole if i can find one but i'm slightly worried about melting the cartridge. i should have drilled the holes neater in the first place i know :/
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The thing with Canon ink cartridges (I've got an i350) is that they're actually pretty reasonably priced - 5.99 in the UK, rather than 23.99 for the HP.
So I just don't bother going down the refill route.
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I also have the i850, and hot glue works perfectly.
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!
That is exactly the reason why. If you use it often, the nozzles will stay clean. The problem starts when you don't print often, like not every week, or sometimes months inbetween a printjob. Then you will need to clean the nozzles often (which costs a lot of ink) or you can simply throw the printer away, because a new nozzle is more expensive then a new printer.
So basically, if you print often, several times a week, an Epson printer is good for you. But if you don't print often, stay away from Epson as far as possible.
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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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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!
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.