Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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
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.'"
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.
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.
Find environmentally and socially responsible products on http://buy-right.net
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.
Find environmentally and socially responsible products on http://buy-right.net