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InkJet Printers Lying, Or Just Wrong?
akkarin writes in about a study reported at Ars Technica on how accurate ink-jet printers are when they report that cartridges are empty. Not very, it turns out. Epson came out on top of the study (and Ars rightly questions how objective it was, given that Epson paid for it), but even they waste 20% of the ink if users take the printers' word for when to get a new cartridge. On average, the printers in the study wasted more than half the ink that users bought.
Get a laser printer already. Even the color models have dropped in price.
I don't own a printer at home, and don't want one. They're too expensive to operate and maintain. I find that I can do nearly everything I want to do electronically. When I do need to print something out, I'll go to a place like Kinko's and do it there. This has the added benefit of forcing me to really think about whether I truly need a paper copy, and most often I find I can do without. The overhead of having a non-shitty printer at home that I have to take care of just isn't worth it for me.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Inkjet ink works out to be more expensive, by volume, than the most expensive Bollinger champagne which is why the money-grabbing manufacturers can virtually give the printers away but rip you off for cartridges. In some cases, it is actually cheaper to throw the printer away and buy a new one than it is to buy replacement cartridges - how *GREAT* is that for our environment.
Grow up, people! Take your nicely-edited photos down to a printing booth or shop and get your photos printed in *MUCH BETTER QUALITY* and at a cheaper cost than what you can do on a home inkjet. Then invest in a cheap laser printer to just print letters and documents when you need to.
And the sooner VoIP phones and wireless access kicks out the price-fixing cellular phone providers, the better...
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
I used to work at a help desk at my college and one of the biggest annoyances was users telling us the one thing we already knew, the printer says low toner. That, we knew, was a lie a majority of the time. People could still print pages out that had no lack of toner. If it got light in some areas but was strong in others we would tilt the cartridge back and forth a couple of times and get a bunch more good prints out of it. All too often the HP laser jet that we had would report it was low on toner well before it was actually low on toner and out of toner.
2) It's pretty easy for Epson to have rigged the test so that multi-ink cartridges did particularly badly (although in my experience they really are that wasteful).
3) Assuming accurate wording of the message, I'd much prefer to get a warning when the ink is low but there's time to get a replacement than to get it only at the last possible moment -- I can figure out for myself when the ink is really gone. The article claims users rush to change cartridges as soon as a message pops up, but those workers are a lot more proactive than those in any office I've ever worked in.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Laser is significantly better at the moment. Cost per page is about 10% that of inkjet, and it's a lot faster. Photo's aren't so hot, but are about the same as an inkjet in photo draft mode - big reason is that the DPI is lower (1200 on my color laser) and it only has 4 colors instead of 6 or 8. This is why I use my little Kodak 4x6" photo printer for photos (which is thermal transfer) and an internet print shop for larger quantities / enlargements of photos.
I'll never ever buy an inkjet ever again. With my laser, I never have banding, never have "cleaning cycles," etc. It just works.
They grab that tube, start at one end of the brush, and just hammer that brush, covering it to the last bristle with toothpaste.
Is the cleanliness of the teeth proportional to the amount of paste used? No.
Are sales driven by encouraging people to use more product? Yes.
Why does the 'corporate we' seem so surprised when we occasionally wake up and realize that vendors are trying to cajole more sales?
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
That is why they are moving the monitoring from computer into the cartridge itself. Once the "intelligent" cartridge determines that it is time to make you pay another tribute/ransom to the mother ship, it will simply lock you out. No more tricks like using Ubuntu to evade what, the printer makers believe, is their rightful claim to your wallet.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
My car says my gas tank is empty when it has about 2 gallons left. I don't think this is that big of an issue, just buy a new cartridge and install it once YOU notice ink is running out.
So, when a car's gas gauge indicates empty, do most people replace the gas tank with a new full tank? No, they put gas into the existing tank.
You don't lose anything by refilling the fuel tank before it's empty, and in fact you do lose something by running a car out of gas - you overheat the fuel pump. Running a fuel-injected car with an in-tank pump (pretty much any gas powered car built since 1987, and many modern diesels too) out of gas even once will damage the pump, making total failure of the pump much more likely. Fuel pump failure is not fun because it usually happens without warning while you're driving.
Back in 2002 I got a Lexmark laser printer in a going out of business sale. Since I got it, it had the low ink warning flashing. Only about 2 months ago did the actual ink start to fade, which prompted me to take out the drum, shake it, and everything was normal again.
When I was in college I was a computer lab assistant, which pretty much meant that I'm the go between for students and the printers. There were times that my supervisors were replacing the ink weekly when it wasn't necessary to do so. After a little research I found that there were page counters in the ink drums that triggered the low ink warnings, that typically triggered at 5000 pages. This might be accurate if you were printing 5000 pages of solid black ink, but when you are printing text documents you use much less ink. So just for fun I replaced a toner cartridge and ran 5000 blank pages through the printer, and sure enough the low ink warning came on.
Granted both cases are for 10 year old printers, now the newer ones have the digital display showing how full the ink is, and some even have the "window" to see if there is any color left. Back when I still used an ink jet I remember saving cartridges that only had one color that ran out and swap it when I was printing images that didn't use much of the missing color, just so I could use it up.
The rule of thumb should always be keep using the same ink until it actually runs out, or if it is a laser printer ignore the "life cycle" warning until it actually stops. I've been doing it this way for nearly 10 years and haven't had any problems.
And over five years you will MAKE a lot of ink refills on an inkjet. If you print a lot you will use the carts up (or as much of them as they allow you to use up, anyway.) If you don't print a lot, then you either blow out your ink cleaning the heads, or your heads crust up and you have to replace the print head, which may be integrated into the cartridge, or which may only come with ink carts (true or at least formerly true of some HP inkjets.)
IMO it just doesn't make sense to do inkjet prints in any situation. If you're not doing enough to justify buying a color laser, send them out for printing. If you have broadband you can upload them to a website, make a CC payment, and they will mail you prints. If you don't, you can take them to a multitude of places including Kmart, Walmart, Kinkos, etc. (as you say) and not have to worry about maintaining a printer.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
That is a LOT of ink refills on an inkjet.
It's not unusual for an OEM set of ink carts to cost $100, that only get you about 200 pages (if you are lucky.) Payback on the laser is under 1K pages. Yes, for some printers you can get refills that can drop that cost to 20%. That is still under 5K pages - the norm for starter toners.
Refills (if you can get them) can also be messy. Print quality problems (clogged heads), speed, shit print drivers (winprinters), and special paper requirements are also huge issues.
I can EASILY print over 5k pages on an inkjet with separated and refillable cartridges, WAY more than that actually.
Well, that's great. I haven't gotten an inkjet to last that long. Epsons for example have a non-removable print head. You can't clean it without completely disassembling the printer. Rather than go through that hassle, I just toss it in the garbage. I can also easily print 100K on my laser before I have to buy a $200 maint kit. My high-yield toners, which cost $450 for a full color set can print 17K pages. Black toner is even cheaper (which is most of my printing) and those refills are only $80 for 17K pages. Good luck getting inkjet refills that cheap. OEM inkjet carts? Well, you may need a second mortgage.
It's not like I've never used inkjets. I started with an HP Thinkjet back in '84, and have probably used every brand out there over the years. At some point you decide that the hassles of inkjets just aren't worth it. I have better things to do than sit there and go through 15 cleaning cycles trying to get rid of banding, or refilling my carts every 200 pages or so. If you time has zero value, and/or you print less than 200 pages over a year, go for the inkjet (although infrequent printing with an inkjet is also a problem.) Skip that, go with a cheap laser if you don't print often. You can get an OK color unit for $300.
Recently, Epson lost a lawsuit because their inkjets were causing users to waist an extreme amount of ink. If you own an Epson printer, you may be eligible to receive $50 in free ink -- more information at http://epsonsettlement.com/
Dell/Lexmark sells a network (and USB and parallel), duplexing, 1200 DPI, 20+ PPM, greyscale laser with a flat media path (at least for manual feed) and a think-media fixing mode for $239. It's even got a separate imaging drum so you can use cheap, refurb toner cartridges.
How many people spend $239 on printing over 5 years? At $40/6 months (whether you use it or not, that $50 printer will tell you that you need more ink in 6 months) the ink alone is $400. You might be able to beat that with refills, but only on some printers, and many people lack the knowledge to do so on any printer. And how many of those people would be glad to have (whether they know it or not) a printer that works with any PCL/PS driver and doesn't require any particular hardware interface or operating system?
There are reasons to buy an inkjet. Printing on things that aren't shaped like paper, for example. A need for color (particularly photo-like blended colors) on a regular basis is another. But price, either per-page or overall is not terribly compelling, even for light users.
Black and White original HP Deskjet 500... About 500€ and the cartridges were about 10€ (I remember vaguely) and lasted forever. Not only that: the printer was in use for over 5 years. Try doing that with the crap they sell today! My HP Deskjet 320C (A colour portable printer I bought when I was student... ~350€) is still functional, but I've converted to Laser quite a while ago. The Deskjet 500 (which was my dads printer) was also replaced by B&W laser.
In an ideal world, ink cartridges would not be disposable; the manufacturer would have to take them back for refilling or disposal. Same with the printer itself. If that were the case, the quality of everything would go way up because the manufacturers would have an incentive to make them easily refurbishable. Instead, printers end up in landfills a year or less after people buy them because it's just as cheap to buy a new printer as to replace the cartridges.
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Why don't we get the cars for free and get charged $500 per gallon of gas, that'll teach those people who like to drive. Before you know it we'll all be driving brand new cars and just replacing them when the tank runs out because they each come with a free tank of gas... better yet why not have it read "E" when we're really down to half a tank.
Collector's Edition
I can see where your analogy is going, and kudos for the obligatory automotive reference, but the comparison is flawed (not that they aren't all flawed in some way, but particularly here).
When you buy a car, you can fill it up with gas pretty-much anywhere. The profits on the sale of the gas DON'T go to the vehicle manufacturers.
With printers, particularly inkjets, the inflated cost of the cartridges is used as an income stream, and part of the justification (if you can call it that) for the inflation of the prices is that it is used to recoup the "losses" made on the capital costs of the printer in the first place.
Additionally, you're not tied into a small subset of available providers in the automotive fuel market. A pump nozzle at an Esso filling station will fit in the same vehicles as one from BP, Texaco, etc. The lock-in effect just isn't there.
Or are you suggesting that the gas-tank be a user-replaceable sealed unit that is not trivial to re-fill? In light of the hazards associated with gasoline (or LPG for those of you with vehicles that use it) relative to the hazards of... erm... ink(?!?) I really don't think that idea will fly.
Now... were you to modify the analogy to refer to a car battery (adding the requirement for the purposes of the analogy that the batteries be non-rechargeable and/or the alternators be removed) then the analogy falls slightly closer in line with the situation under discussion, but is still not a perfect analogy as there remain numerous suppliers of batteries on the market (at least, that's the case here in the UK).
Just my $0.03 (At current exchange rates, my £0.02 is worth more than your $0.02)
All this talk about loss leaders makes me wonder how much an ink-jet printer really costs to build. It's really just a couple of stepping motors, a simple controller and a little bit of memory. Maybe I'm a crazy old geek but those components are just bigger, slower and cheaper versions of the parts that go into a hard drive (minus the platters). If I can buy an 80gb hard drive for ~$30, with its tight tolerances and fast transfer rate, then why should I be paying three times more for a big hunk of plastic that moves a little box of ink back and forth ? I could probably build one around a microcontroller and some SRAM, so what's with the ridiculous price tag ?
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Save the trees by getting all of our fiber needs from hemp. No, not the kind you can smoke; the kind that grows like a weed (haha) on even the most marginal farmland, and provides not only high-quality fiber, but oil that can be used as biofuel.
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