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A Buyer's Guide to Inkjet Printers
An anonymous reader writes "CoolTechZone.com has posted a good writeup on how to select an inkjet printer without falling prey to many of the common marketing gimmicks."
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Inkjet printers are a scam, played on a public that doesn't know any better.
They're doing it with laser printers, too. $25 for a USB cable and $65 for toner.
The people responsible for this greed will pay one day.
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For me, a major inkjet selection criterion is a printer's ability to be adapted to use continuous inking (without major hacking/drilling/etc.). Screw the printer manufacturers and their stupid ink-based business model.
- ink-system-review.html
Linky linky:
http://www.nomorecarts.com/
http://www.brandonstaggs.com/epson-r200-continous
http://www.atlascopy.com/cfs/
We have more to fear from the bungling of the incompetent than from the machinations of the wicked.
- IJPs is an anagram for "jips"!
- If you're like me and only want to print out "The Onion", in color, once a week: by the time the next week rolls around, the inkjet heads have clogged. You waste a sheet or two of expensive paper in finding this out again for the galumpty-umph time.
- If you use the "control panel" to clean the heads you have to put up with 5 minutes of Grandpa-getting-out-of-a-Miata-type groaning coming from the printer. And it wastes a whole boatload of ink in the process.
- If you instead take the printhead to the sink and give it a Sitz bath, you get your fingertips all colored in the process, as you forgot how indelible the ink is.
- Some of the HP IJPs require a 59MB download to install one 37k driver. And 39MB of slow, clunky, and unreliable "Print management" admin software doodads. Which do not want to uninstall themselves.
- The HP installer hasnt heard of virtual LPT ports-- it bombs out if you don't have a real, live, 378h hardware LPT port, even if you wanted to use a USB virtual port.
- Don't buy even slightly past their expiration data ink cartridges-- I thought I was a real winner buying a bunch of HP ones for $1 each cause they were a bit expired. The red ink had magically turned into dark brown, like overnight. Not good if you're printing skin, er, I mean job-related bar-graphs.
- Don't buy one of those refilling kits, just don't.
Instead scarf up some lightly used color laser printer at some local auction. You won't regret it. Oh wait, you will if it needs a new photoconductor belt, $350.Do Not ask me how I learned these things.
If it isn't rated for industrial use, don't buy it.
.jpg files and display them on the TV. Even if the person hasn't got a DVD player, you should be able to connect your DVD player to your VCR with a simple SCART to SCART cable. Just running out of screen space? Increase your number of virtual desktops.
If it's rated for industrial use, but it either doesn't have Linux drivers, or the Linux drivers aren't under an OSI-approved licence, don't buy it -- even if you don't want to use it with Linux today.
If the Linux drivers for your industrially-rated printer were written by a third party, it might be worth buying -- after all, it's a good sign that somebody actually thought it was worth bothering to support.
Bear in mind that you have already managed up to now without an inkjet printer. Investigate all alternatives fully before you buy one. Can you e-mail your files, or host them on some web space somewhere? If you want to show off some photos, try burning them onto a CD-R -- most DVD players will read CD-Rs of
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Don't buy Dell.
I don't. If it hasn't been pointed out a million times already, the majority of the consumers out there simply don't know any better. For example, I recently recommended to someone the $300 Dell Dimension 2400 only to find that the sales rep talked them into upgrading to a "better model" so that they could get a 19" LCD "bundled" (note that Dell won't offer things like a DVD-R or large LCD monitor with their low-end stuff - that's how they getcha).
I tried to explain that they could have just ordered the PC and monitor separately but this was obviously well over their head. They didn't care. In the end, they ended up paying over $1000 so they could do basic internet, email and photo printing.
Lovely.
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I've owned my little black and white Okidata 10ex LED printer (basically a LASER printer) for more than 5 years and I've replaced the tonor cartridge a couple of times. By now the cost of this printer is a fraction of the cost of buying and maintaining an inkjet printer.
With budget Laser printers on the market these days, even if you have to pay twice the cost of an inkjet printer, for 99% of your printing needs the Laser is the far far better deal. You can get the Samsung 1710ML, for example, at less than $100 on some sales.
I do sometimes need color, and a color laser would be nice, although the colors from such a printer are not good enough for some applications such as photo printing. Photo printing is the one last domain of the ink jet, and probably always will be. But I do that so rarely that taking my photos to walmart to print is the best deal for me.
There is no way to purchase a good inkjet. They are slow, unreliable, and the ink is more expensive than gold on a /weight basis. If you do any amount (change cartridges every two months)of printing, a color laserjet is cheaper to own. The exception to this is if you need a multifunction device (fax/copier/printer) in which case a brother ethernet enabled multifunction device is available for $200.
This is to say, if you replace your ink cartridges on 1x/month basis - an inkjet is more expensive than a laserjet. I have several clients who change both the black and color cartridges on a monthly, or bi-monthly basis: $25/chartidges (bulk) x 2 x 6x/yr = $300/year for cartridges. This is the cost of a color laserjet.
Based on the duty cycle of the $100 high capacity cartridges in my Konica Minolta 2430DL, an inkjet cartridge with a capacity of 300-800 pages will cost between $830 and $300. (If we assume that black is 800 pages, and colour 300 pages, you are paying between twice and three times as much for ink)
Further, you get to escape the duties of changing the cartridges and making a mess on a (bi)monthly basis.
If you need a color copier, and a fax - then a multifunction inkjet makes sense. Otherwise, anyone who prints often should get a laserjet.
OH, almost forgot: Yes, Epson inkjets are wonderful for printing photos. However, if you are really serious about printing pictures - a color correction system (~$200) is required and can match your screen to any printer. And some (my)laserjet printers do have pictbridge so you can print directly from the camera. (Without proofing, why?)
Actually, if you do a lot of printing, you can get a continuous flow system for some ink jet printers. I used one when I was doing alot of printing. Took price per page (11X17 page, not 8.5X11) from 30 cents per page to 1.9 cents per page, AND you can still print high quality photos as well http://www.inksupply.com/cobra.cfm
I am a professional photographer and I have been using the Epson 2200 and Espon 4000 for my work, and there is NO WAY a dye-sublimation printer could do the work these pigment-based inkjet printers do. I use a bulk-feed system for my 2200 with the Lyson Cavepaint pigment inks and I have compared my 13x19 prints with dye-sublimation. There is no comparison, the inkjet is far and away better in color gamut, subtle tones and in the huge variety of archival and canvas 'papers' that are available.
A most overlooked advantage to owning a computer is if they foul up there's no law against wacking them around a bit.