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?"

Comments

Printer Model?

[Hardwyred]

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.

Tightwads ought to know

[Dancin_Santa]

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.

Canon

[gizmo_mathboy]

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.

Re:Canon

[Anonymous Coward]

The Phaser 8400 is a very nice printer, but in general color lasers produce pretty ugly output. They're also expensive to use and maintain: color toner, belts, fusers, fuser oil, transfer assemblies, rollers, imaging drums, whitchawhatzits every way you look. They're also extremely mechanically complex, which affects general reliability. On the low end you probably won't have so much maintenance, but the output will be crummy and slow. Color lasers, as I see them, are really niche printers: they're perfect for business offices that can afford to maintain them and that need high speed copies of business-style color documents rather than photos. In the home they're for people who need printouts that don't bleed when wet, and people who need to print colored graphics, charts, and text (again, not photos).

If you're looking for a color laser for home use, consider a solid inkjet instead. They don't have the mechanical complexity of lasers, their output quality is on par with most lasers, and their printouts won't run when the paper gets damp. The ink, however, can be about as expensive.

If you only need black text and grayscale graphics, get a good solid laser printer; the toner cartridges in most laser printers last for years. I know people who have never replaced their toner cartridges since buying their laser printers in the late-90s (although eventually the imaging drum dies even if there's still toner left). Cartridges may run more than $100, but will usually last for thousands of pages. Remanufactured cartridges are usually much less expensive, are readily available, are about as good as brand new carts. If you get a black-only laser printer, consider whether the imaging drum is integrated with the cartridge. If it's not, find out how much it costs to replace and compare the costs and capacities of cartridges with printers that do use an imaging drum integrated with the cartridge. The advantage of an integrated drum is that you'll replace it every time you replace the cartridge, so it'll always be fresh, but you may pay slightly more for the catridges. On the other hand, some low end printers may use expensive cartridges without an integrated drum so you may end up spending more per page to keep them fed. Separate imaging drums can be expensive and have a finite life. You're probably better off to get a printer with a higher up front cost and lower maintenance needs than a printer with lots of silly expensive pieces to replace.

The Canon inkjet printers seem like alright devices, but I've not used them extensively. They may, however, suffer the same issues as the person posting the original question wished to avoid. BTW, the Canons typically use an ink tank separate from the print head.

My solution is to buy $40 to $60 Epsons, which come with two brand new cartridges (each of which would alone cost $25), then buy the cheapest off-brand ink I can find (usually $4 to $7 per cartridge), and throw the printer out as soon as it has any hint of trouble. This is a whole lot cheaper than any other strategy I've come up with, and the Epsons produce excellent quality color printouts when printing on good paper. Even with the cheap ink I haven't had very serious clogging problems, and even if I do have to sometimes run three cleaning cycles after the printer has been sitting for a couple weeks, that's still only a few cents worth of ink. Finally, I haven't had to replace my $60 Epson yet...

You mileage may vary.

Oh, BTW, I use Dealink.com to locate dirt cheap ink. NOTE: I'm not affiliated with dealink.com in any way, and if anyone would care to post a better resource for locating dirt cheap ink, I'd probably use it too. :-)

It depends.

[sakusha]

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.

Re:In-cartridge print heads for me

[Twylite]

Similar experience here. The head "burned out" in my Canon BJC printer. Cost of replacement R600 (~ $92); cost of newer, better printer R450 (~ $70).

If you can remove the print head from the printer you can often recover it by soaking in warm water (just the end bit, really) and then allow it to dry thoroughly. Doesn't work with burned out heads unfortunately.

In my experience, cartridges without a head are cheaper, but your printer will not last as long. Personal opinion, if you don't need color, get a laser.

Color printing is a serious hassle...

[Futurepower(R)]

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