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."

Comments

Gimmicks?

[Nuclear Elephant]

how to select an inkjet printer without falling prey to many of the common marketing gimmick

The first of which is that you should buy an inkjet printer in the first place.

Re:Gimmicks?

[ryanov]

What are you going to buy for a color printer if not an inkjet? I can't afford to blow that much on a color laser.

Re:Gimmicks?

[Nuclear Elephant]

Sorry, that wasn't meant as a troll. But it is beyond me why we're still using technology that's just a slight spin on the old dot matrix printers. Especially in light of newer and still somewhat inexpensive technologies such as color laser ($400) and Dye Sublimation ($250). Especially considering most people use a color inkjet for photos, which Dye Sub is far superior to. It clicks in my head at least that the only reason anyone's using inkjet today is because of the propaganda from manufacturers who make more money on the ink than the printer.

Re:Gimmicks?

[poot_rootbeer]

I can't afford to blow that much on a color laser.

Color lasers can now be had for under $300. That's the cost of a decent color inkjet plus two or three sets of ink refills. Are you sure you can't afford that?

Re:Gimmicks?

[nelsonal]

I agree, but don't think it is worth trying to compete with professional equipment down at the photo lab. If it cost $0.15 or more per print at home and $0.11 at Costco, I'll keep my black laser printer and let someone else own the good hardware. Personally, if I wanted nice color, I'd get one of those wax based plotters.

And the point of the article ...

[jeremymiles]

The final word, from TFA: "Once you gone through the list of this buying guide, make sure you do general research by reading individual reviews and evaluations before making the final choice."

And so the point of actually reading this guide was ... ?

This is an easy one...

[grasshoppa]

You shouldn't. Not unless you want to print your photos out, but even then it's probably cheaper to sign up with some place online.

Inkjet printers are a scam, played on a public that doesn't know any better.

Re:This is an easy one...

[dsginter]

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.

Re:This is an easy one...

[dsginter]

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.

CoolTechZone

[Matthew Weigel]

This is the site that last week, had an op-ed up arguing that "loving" Microsoft is OK, and Linux is just the product of some nefarious cabal of hypesters and PR men. Yeah, uh, I don't see me caring about this review of inkjet printers either. One of the things that matters to me is whether I can print to it in Linux, which I kind of doubt they'll be able to handle.

Troll?

[TheRaven64]

I don't know what the moderator who marked this as a troll was thinking. Inkjets are a marketing gimmick (even if they weren't always). They have a significantly higher TCO than an equivalent laser printer, offset by the fact that they have a much lower capital investment cost.

People are conned into thinking that they are cheap because the initial outlay is low, and then they realise later that they will keep paying for it. Maybe for very low volume printing they are good (except that if you use them infrequently the ink in the heads dries up and you have to replace both the print-head and the ink), but for everything else they are a very expensive way of transferring data to paper.

Re:Troll?

[FreeBSDbigot]

I agree except for one application -- have you ever tried printing photos on an affordable laser printer? It's not pretty. Yes, inkjet consumables are expensive compared to laser printers, but laser printers just don't produce decent photographs.

Re:Troll?

[bowlingfreak]

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

slashdotted

[dtfinch]

Somehow, cooltechzone managed to stay up throughout the "Is it wrong to love Microsoft?" article, but they can't handle the traffic generated by their inkjet printer buyer's guide. Maybe people are RTFA this time.

Here is the easy answer

[El Cubano]

how to select an inkjet printer without falling prey to many of the common marketing gimmicks.

Buy a color laser printer. Here is why:

Many prints for low cost (mine was ~US$400 and has 7k page black toner and 5k page color toner for each of C, Y, and M).

If all you want is a printer (i.e., not multi-function do everything device). Laser is the best way to go. I bought my Samsung CLP-550N from NewEgg (I am not affiliated with either Samsung or NewEgg) and have been exceptionally happy. There were cheaper versions, but here is why I got the one I did:

• Samsung has a real Linux installer and Linux support for pretty much all of their printers (though, in my case I did not use it, see below).
• The 550N came with a built in ethernet card
• It speaks PS level 3 (this is why I did not need their installer, as it speeks native PS).
• It has a builtin duplexer
• the CPU is 266 MHz and it has 128 MB of RAM
• It is exceptionally quiet
• Setting it up with CUPS took about 15 seconds. Much easier that when my father visited and needed to print something from Windows (Windows wanted the install CD for drivers, which he had not brought with him, so we had to hunt down drivers on the net).

Seriously, just the built in duplexer and laser alone would be a deal at US$400. The builtin ethernet and extra CPU and RAM were basically a bonus. Not only that, but the quality is better than that of other inkjets I have seen.

THe only down side: you need to purchase special laser quality photopaper. Inkjet photo paper can melt when it hits the the 180 degrees C drum (or so I am told).

Re:Here is the easy answer

[OreoCookie]

* Samsung has a real Linux installer and Linux support for pretty much all of their printers (though, in my case I did not use it, see below).
Most people don't use Linux and don't care.

* The 550N came with a built in ethernet card
Most people use USB and don't care.

* It speaks PS level 3 (this is why I did not need their installer, as it speeks native PS).
Most people don't know what that is and don't care. They just click print and don't care how it gets from the screen to the paper. That's how it should be.

* It has a builtin duplexer
Most people don't care.

* the CPU is 266 MHz and it has 128 MB of RAM
Again. Who cares as long as it prints I don't care if it's driven by Chipmunks.

* It is exceptionally quiet
Good point. So is my Canon inkjet.

* Setting it up with CUPS took about 15 seconds. Much easier that when my father visited and needed to print something from Windows (Windows wanted the install CD for drivers, which he had not brought with him, so we had to hunt down drivers on the net).
You have to install the Windows drivers to use it from Windows? Well that sucks.

I'm glad you're happy with your printer. Nothing you listed makes it better than an inkjet for the vast majority of people, and it's much more expensive for the low volume printing that most people do.

Re:Here is the easy answer

[discontinuity]

Buy a color laser printer.

But this isn't ideal for everyone (although I grant you it's probably an adequate solution for many people). My GF is a graphics designer who specializes in print media. We compared many printers about a year or so ago and the inkjets blew away color lasers w.r.t. color accuracy. My mother won't notice if the laser printer makes the sky in her picture a few Pantone shades off from ideal, but stuff like that does matter to someone proofing a brochure before sending it off to the print shop.

Basically, I find anyone who is serious about their color tends to prefer inkjets despite the obvious fact that they have turned into a marketing scam.

Just buy new printers

[Cutie Pi]

There are now many ink jet printers on the market that cost $49, which is cheaper than the ink replacement cost.

One way to stick it the manufacturers would be to throw away the printer after it runs out of ink, and buy a new one. This would wreck their business model, since they typically sell the printers at a loss.

I bet if enough people started doing this, the manufacturers would relent on ink cartridge prices.

Re:Just buy new printers

[intermediate_represe]

I bet if enough people started doing this, the manufacturers would relent on ink cartridge prices.

They already know about this. The printers available these days have very little ink in them. It's called a demo ink cartridge.

Continuous inking ability

[Kevin DeGraaf]

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.

Linky linky:

http://www.nomorecarts.com/
http://www.brandonstaggs.com/epson-r200-continous- ink-system-review.html
http://www.atlascopy.com/cfs/

What I've learned about IJP's

[Ancient_Hacker]

• 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.

Re:What I've learned about IJP's

[GweeDo]

How did you you learn these things?

Re:ink...

[SimilarityEngine]

Tell me about it. I work for a printer manufacturing company, and we make virtually nothing on the printers themselves. There is an enormous profit margin on the ink, on the other hand - without it we'd be nowhere. Hence, my company goes to a fair amount of trouble to make sure that third-party stuff won't work properly with our printers (i.e if it works at all you get faded colours).

Choosing an inkjet printer

[ajs318]

If it isn't rated for industrial use, don't buy it.

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 .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.

Re:Do you need an inkjet or laser

[swv3752]

At only 50 pages, you are almost better to just print at Kinkos.

Lasers are the way to go except for photo printing

[caseih]

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.

Not always true, depends on useage pattern.

[brunes69]

The question is, are you someone who prints off a page from Google Maps once/twice a month, and an occasional photo, or are you someone who prints off huge online novels to read later?

Sure, cost-per-page is much lower for a laser - *over the long haul*. Personally, I print less than 100 pages per year. I am lucky if I even go through one color ink cartridge before the ink inside just dries out from non-use.

I don't print enough that I would *ever* be able to recover the much higher initial investment of a laser printer. By the time my cost per page savings would recover the $350 more it would cost me (in say, 10 years), the printer would liekly not even work with the computer anymore.

My all-in-one HP inkjet / scanner / copiter cost only $69 CDN, and has HP supported Linux drivers. I have been using it now for 8 months, and the cartridges are both still 75% full. I am extremely satisfied with my purchase and doubt I would have had any better luck with another printer (although I wish I had splurged and gotten the one with the built in memory card reader, that would be handy).

Re:Next article....

[cazbar]

Buy an expensive printer...

Say no to inkjets except for multifunction devices

[amcdiarmid]

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?)

Don't knock inkjet.

[antifood]

I am seeing alot of comments on how inkjet printers "suck", and that laser is the way to go. Well I am sorry, this is not always the case. Sometimes people need quality, and by quality I mean something a laser printer are incapable of providing. I have yet to see a laser printer that can provide the quality of say... even an Epson stylus 2200. I mean sure, if all you're doing is printing 72 dpi webpages, by all means get a cheap laser printer. But don't snuff off inkjet because you're not taking advantage of it's true worth: print quality. Now as far as inkjet printers go, I am a huge fan of the 4000 7600 9600 stylus lines (they have recently upgraded these using another tone of gray, but I haven't used them yet). Throw in a good RIP, like Colorbyte's Imageprint and you have some absolutely stunning prints. Now of course these printers are... considerably more expensive than what most folks are willing to spend on a printer, but they are out there and they print beautifully. So ya, high end? Epson definitely.

Next article by cooltechzone

[NotAHappyCoder]

They should also write an article titled 'How to select a GOOD webserver'. It seems they could use one...

Laser doesn't do it for some tasks

[arexu]

For all you slashbots who think the only use for color is photos, you need to stop and ponder the possibility of other uses for printed material before you crap all over my inkjet printer. YOU might not use an inkjet for anything beyond that, but there are plenty of us who do. If you do paper (cardstock) modeling the inkjet is far superior, because that expensive laser toner CRACKS and flakes off if you score or bend it too much (two things you tend to do when modeling anything more than a flat panel). Inkjet printers can even print on plastic card and other structural materials (not to be considered with the heated drum of the laser...) I only wish I could get a good continuous ink system for my HP 842C printer.

Re:Even for photos, inkjets suck.

[bananahead]

You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about, and your advise is worthless.

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.

Re:Do you need an inkjet or laser

[karnal]

Kinko's: "Sir, could you at least put on a bathrobe when we come over to print out your photo...."
I8TheWorm: "Why?"

Could An Article Be Less Informative?

[fmaxwell]

Sorry, but this article wasn't "News for Nerds." It was fluff for technophobes.

Touting Pictbridge, card readers, and little tiny color screens, because "you need not bother booting up your PC every time you want to take a print out"?! That's great for granny who feels threatened by her PC, but for us "nerds", the thought of printing a picture without any processing (denoising, unsharp masking, exposure correction, etc.) is pretty heinous. Besides, most of us have our PCs on all of the time anyway.

The rest of the article was just as intellectually hollow:

Ink cost is a concern. No kidding?

Longer warranties are better than shorter ones and on-site service is better than having to ship the printer out for service. That's news.

Bigger input and output trays are more convenient. More insight from the tech wizards at CoolTechZone...

"Duplex printing enables you to print on both sides of a page." You don't say?

I sure am glad that I have that kind of insightful commentary to guide me -- should I ever want to buy a slow printer that costs more per page than my laser printer and can't do photo-quality printing of color images.