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How Aftermarket Inkjet Ink Holds Up After a Year
An anonymous reader writes "About a year ago I found a link on here for a test of inkjet printer inks. The article compared original manufacturer inks against much cheaper third party stuff and the results were surprisingly in favour of third party products. They've now published the final part of this study, examining the prints produced a year ago. This time the printer manufacturers have come out far better, with some third party prints having disappeared completely! Cartridge World ink still seems worth a try though, if you don't want to pay manufacturers' inflated prices."
If you're in a business where you print documents for a meeting or which will be obsolete in a day or two, this may be of even more benefit than it remaining visible. Undocumented feature?
The prices may not be inflated if one of your goals is to read the paper after a year.
I have a Pixma IP4200 inkjet. Bought for about $150 (not on sale) and the individual carts are about 6$, for Canon ones, why bother with 3rd party? At this rate I can toss them out the window and still come out ahead.
This is why I love my Canon. HP could learn a thing or two about ink pricing from them...
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
The summary neglects to mention that the third party inks failed in sunlight, but were fine in indoor or controlled storage conditions. It's still something to consider, but nearly as bad as the summary makes it out to be. Tons of photo processes produce photos that'll fade in a year of sunlight, so it's reasonable you'd have to put in a little more expense there for pigments instead of dyes.
I always buy 3rd party inkjet supplies, mainly for the price, but also since what I do isn't in need of amazing quality so I may not notice any decrease in clarity/color. I've never had a problem with ink that is 10% of the price of what I would pay for epson ink. If I do really need something of high quality I use the laserjet at work.
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I don't think third party ink providers are going to be around much larger. That whole industry is run like the mob. I don't say that to troll either, i'm serious. They are very competitive and the major manufacturers do just about everything they can to stop third party providers.
Ink is one of the most over priced products on the market today. Only Monster has margins that can compete.
A few years ago my father figured out that he could buy a whole new printer with new ink cartridges for about 15$ more then just the ink cartridges ALONE. Of course they got wise to that and I am sure many people are familiar with new ink jets being sold with minimal ink installed.
Now the "final solution" is about to be unleashed, which is the encryption being applied to the ink cartridges themselves. That has been coming for awhile AFAIK, and it will be interesting to see how third party manufacturers react when they have to break these new "DRM" like methods of protecting business revenue.
I have always told my clients that ink jets are for "suckers". Suck it up and buy yourself a color laserjet and you will greatly reduce the cost per page to print a report. Of course, I know there are some people that really need a good ink jet printer for their specific tasks, but does that really represent the mass market? I don't think so.
How your eyes hold up after a year of reading 6pt fonts!
Really, who cares that much? If I want something to be UV-resistant to hang on the wall or something, I'll go get professional prints.
For the other 99.9% of the stuff I print, my cheap Chinese continuous inking system is the best 300 Yuan (~$43) I ever spent. The whole package, plus some extra ink, cost me less than a full change of manufacturer's ink for my Epson RX580.
On glossy photo paper, it looks just as good as the OEM stuff. Most of the time I'm just printing regular business graphics, though, and it does just as well there. I no longer hesitate at all to print lots of graphics-heavy stuff, and the kids get a lot of use out of it. My son got elected 6th grade class president thanks in part to a series of lolcats-themed campaign posters he printed. (lolcats... is there anything they can't do?)
I've been using it for several months now, and would normally have gone through a couple of cartridges. As it is, I can barely tell that the reservoir levels have changed.
Now if only some honest printer manufacturer would embrace this sort of thing - I'd gladly pay a lot more for a printer with easily replaceable heads and nice, big refillable ink reservoirs that the printer can't lie about and doesn't waste excessively. I don't expect to ever see that happen, though.
Or so it says here. This seems a bit odd to me.
I used to work at one of the worlds largest electronics retail store (that is not the surprising part). With my employee discount a $25 ink cartrege would cost me ~$5. Most of the ink cartrages are only partly filled as well. HP is really bad about saling a $19 cartrage and a $27 dollar one.... the difference? 2x times as much ink.
That's also true of the samples put behind glass and hung on an interior wall - there's very little difference now from the way they were a year ago. If you use your prints in either of these ways, the only thing you need be concerned by is the image quality of the prints themselves, as judged by our viewing panel a year ago.
Please don't buy the native ink, they are just scamming people with them.
* The software embedded in HP printer cardridges causes them to expire after a set of amount of time, forcing comsumers to purchase new ink, even if it's not run out yet. This prevents users from refilling their cardridges. (HP Ink costs more than human blood) by the way.
* They enforce "region coding" restrictions that prevent cardridges purchased in one region from operating with printers purchased in another. This "feature" is intended to support regional market segmentation and price discrimination.
* Laser toner is a cheap black powder. You can buy a refill for about $4.99. Opening the toner equipment for a refill can be tricky, in the case of Lexmark they made it impossible. A new toner costs ~$100. After third party toners that allowed refills showed up, lexmark added a layer of encryption and authentication to the modules. When SCC started selling reverse engineered refillable cardridges Lexmark sued them, they invoked the DMCA to ban them from selling the product. Litigation lasted 19 months and SCC products were off the market during that period.
* http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/peripherals/hp-ink-costs-more-than-human-blood-booze-212444.php
Nature journal lied in Britannica vs Wikipedia Ask to retrac
If only they could invent some sort of electronic device that acts like a hundred small scissors and cuts up your documents into little strips, making it really difficult to figure out the contents of the original document.... I'd call it The Scissorator.
Better yet, maybe, would be some sort of fantastical sci-fi method of applying an energy to the document in such a way that the very atoms of the paper disassociate from eachother, and combine with oxygen in the atmosphere to form carbon dioxide and liquid water. Of course, we'd probably need tiny nanomachines to do this atom-by-atom. It's still hundreds of years off, I'm sure...
Disappearing ink sounds to me like a feature, not a bug. That documentation expires when a new version comes out, so why not have it actually fade away and be unusable?
stuff |
Ink jet printers are stupid, especially for people who print occasionally and in black in white. A toner cartridge is more expensive, but is cheaper in the longer run producing far more copies and it never dries out.
If you need to print photos, a colour ink jet is a damned expensive way to do it... if do print photos occasionally, at least around where I live, photo printer kiosks abound.
It's cheap and black and white and even if it sits for weeks it fires up and prints perfectly. Much more than I can say for inkjets costing more.
Maybe some day they'll make a cheap color laser printer that's as reliable, and I'll buy it.
Blar.
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I had an epson photo printer for many years and always bought epson inks.
Then I found a link to third party inks at a great bargain. I bought 5 sets of color and black cartridges for about the price of one set of epson brand inks.
Within a relatively short period of time the print head got clogged up and the printer was useless. I tried everything I could to clean it, all the way to taking it completely apart. Nothing I did got the printer working again.
The printer was very old but never had any problems before. I think epson overcharges for ink but the third party ink cost me more. I wound up getting a color laser printer for normal printing and will be getting another epson photo printer at some point for photos. Though I mostly send out stuff to the lab since I prefer the tone and quality of lamda or fuji frontier prints over inkjet ones when I'm not printing them myself in my darkroom.
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Another issue that I didn't see after skimming this article, as well as part one of the series, is that many of the third party ink cartridges don't contain as much ink as the name brand. Consumer Reports tested a bunch of inks, and found that most of the cheapest inks were actually more expensive per page than the brandname ink. Which inks fared well varied from printer to printer.
Unfortunately, it looks like the full article is only available to subscribers, and there are just a few short blubs summarizing the results available to everyone.
Buy an $80 laser printer from home B&W printing, use company color laser for high quality color prints.
No more messy ink.
But after a quick search, color laser printers are well into the low $100's...
At this price point I would fathom to say that inkjets are on their way out. Good riddance.
I don't print things out from home too often now that I'm out of school, but when I do go to print things out, I expect a printer to WORK. After going through three inkjet printers in as many years, with ink cartridges that dry up, nozzles that CONSTANTLY get clogged and take several minutes to completely clean, blotches on my printouts, and so on, I came to the conclusion that inkjets are poor investments indeed, even with cheap third-party ink.
Three years ago I bought a laser printer. It cost around $200, quite a bit more than an inkjet, and doesn't print in color. But I am STILL using the original toner cartridge that came with the printer - I have yet to run out. Admitedly, I'll probably have to pay a good $75 for a new cartridge when the existing one runs out, but I'd say $75 for several YEARS worth of ink that won't dry up and/or clog is well worth it.
Prices have dropped a bit since then. You can buy a laser for around $100, around triple that if you insist on color. And it'll really LAST - every place I've ever worked has had laser printer that have been around forever.
Well the only useful experience I have with this is with a Kodak G610 printer dock. Which is a film type printer. And the thing I learned almost immediately was ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS use Kodak paper. Nothing else yields a useful result at all. So I have to think that Kodak has engineered their printer and paper chemistry to go hand in hand.
I have just realized that my fantastical idea would be less fantastical if the by-products were carbon dioxide and water vapor, not liquid water.
How the hell are you going to even find the paper after a year? Much easier to do a find or (s)locate or use beagle to find the pdf or tiff and print it out again.
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No offense, but trying to tell other people what their goals are, or should be, is arrogant.
You don't like the primary vendor inks. I don't like them either. I think they're too expensive. In fact, I dislike the ink problem so much, that I've replaced all my printers with laser printers. But I'm not going to sit down and tell someone that it's wrong that they buy inkjets or vendor inks. I'll let them know that there are cheaper alternatives, if they want to know. But ultimately, it's entirely up to them how they respond to this.
Live your own life. Stop trying to tell someone else how to live theirs.
$.02.
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i just refilled my samsung ml1710 toner cartridge with a toner refill kit and i have to say i'm impressed. nearly 1/8th the cost of a full replacement cartridge, i can't see the difference. and replacing the toner was simple. it amazes me that more people don't go this route.
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This matches the finding that consumer reports had last year. The CR article went into operational issues with third party ink, and found similar results. That being said, I'd like to see how color laser printers do in these kinds of tests.
Oh for the days of the old Xerox 4020, which used food coloring for it's ink. (Yes, the material data sheet said their ink was nontoxic.) Surprisingly an equal mix of red and blue was the best substitute for black.
Did it fade in sunlight? I'm sure, as did any printers' output we left in the display windows of the store back then--sunlight is vicious!
I just finally ran out of ink in my Canon Pixma MP780 and am looking at buying replacement ink cartridges. I know that a lot of the printers, mine included I'm pretty sure, have counters in the carts to keep you from refilling them. You can (usually) disable the counters through some undocumented voodoo, but then it doesn't watch out for you running out of ink and you can burn up the expensive print head.
So I'm going to skip the refill. But I'm looking at buying the non-name brand ink carts. Does anyone know if this avoids the counter problem? Do these "compatible" ink carts also have the counter chip so it can avoid silently running out of ink?
I need replacements of all the carts - BCI-3eBk, BCI-6C, BCI-6Y, BCI-6M, BCI-6Bk. From Canon, this costs around $40-50 for all 5. I found one compatible one that is $14.51 and actually contains about twice as many carts: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000C159LW
Couple of other questions: if I got the above package, would I still need a BCI-6Bk, or could it use the BCI-3eBk for all the black needs? Does anyone have a link to a page the explains the difference between BCI-3, BCI-3e, BCI-6, etc.?
Note: I sometimes print photos, but it's not really for archival purposes. If I want a quality long term photo, I send it to Walgreens. Most of my printing is fairly disposable - a map to some place, a story to read later, etc.
At this point, I doubt I'll ever buy another photo printer. For routine, share-then-throw-away stuff, I have a color laser that is far cheaper than any of the inkjets I've ever seen. For pictures I want to frame and keep, I can upload the images to Wal-Mart's website and pick them up at the store an hour later. Advantages:
I don't want to sound like a Wal-Mart shill. There are lots of online options to pick from, and that's just the one that happens to be most convenient for me. Now, I can understand why people wouldn't want to have certain photos developed, particularly those of a particularly personal nature, but I'd much rather farm my printing out than mess with it myself anymore.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I have an Epson RX700. Very good specs, uses 6 cartridges. Cost GBP 200
Epson cartridges cost around GBP 15. That's about half the new cost of a printer for a refill. So I don't do that.
Third Party cartridges cost around GBP 5 for a refill. That's about 1/7 the cost of the printer. I did that for a while.
Skyhorse are a chinese company that manufacture cartridges which are easy to refill (http://www.tianma.net.cn/en_skyhorse/). I have some of these, and they're good. With bought-in ink, they were the equivalent of GBP 1.50p per cartridge. But Epson started up a legal case and scared them away from the UK.
Then I got a CIS. At the same time I found Promax, who import OCP ink into the UK, and sell it really cheaply (http://www.promaximaging.com/OCP_Ink/ocp_ink.html). This brought my costs down to the equivalent of GBP 0.17p per cartridge. That's amazing - ink is now a non-issue for me!
Promax pointed out that CISs should not use silicone tubing, which leaks oils and coagulates some inks. They suggest surgical quality TYGON, but I have not found a cheap source for this yet. So I just clean when I need to - the ink costs are negligible.
I have recently hit the dreaded 'waste pad counter' error. This is a counter Epson put in their printers to note how often you clean the printer and deposit waste ink to the internal pad. When Epson decide your printer pad should be full, the printer locks and will not print any more. The rumour on the blogs is that if you use non-epson ink this counter goes about 20 times faster! Luckily there is a russian hack (http://www.ssclg.com/epsone.shtml) that lets you reset the counter.
Some time ago I tried asking Epson how to reset my printer - their response was to offer me a new printer for GBP30. They would rather pay off people who ask sensitive questions than stop stiffing their customers. Figures....
Hope this gets modded informative - it's the only way to fight the pigopolists....
I keep meaning to pick up a color ink jet for the house... I don't print a lot of color, but sometimes it would be helpful for diagrams and things. Photos, that's crazy, CVS has a decent printer and charges like 30 cent a print. If we want a picture in a frame, why would I get a photo-quality printer when CVS will let me use theirs for next to nothing. A color laser would be cheaper if I printed a lot, but I don't, we're talking diagrams and graphs.
If I have something that needs to look good, I can upload it to Kinkos and pick it up... I can even pick it up bound. If I did that more than twice/year, I'd start to think about convenience.
I agree. Laserjet's have really come down in price too. I've gone through so many inkjets, I finally sucked it up and bought a laserjet. And guess what? no more replacing the ink cartridges every few months. I bought a small $100 laserjet 2 years ago and I haven't even replaced the toner cartridge yet! Good riddance!
As a student I do a lot of printing, but I don't have enough money to warrant buying a laser printer, because I get ink jet cartridges for $6 instead of $40. I haven't had any issues, and have saved a lot of money. Also, I bought an expired color cartridge (like over $40) for $1 at a garage sale, it was unused, and it's been in my printer for 3 months and still prints fine. Maybe it's just because I'm so damned cheap, but I do not think that I would ever buy an OEM cartridge....but I'm also too lazy to refill it myself. Also, i have noticed that refill places only do it a max of 3 times, and they wouldn't refill my color cartridges for some reason.
Orbis terrarum est non altus satis
Encrypt the ink!
I got extremely sick of dealing with inkjet cartridges and filling them. I also hated the idea of being made a fool by the very obvious scam being engaged in by printer manufacturers.
So I bought a laser printer. I got an HP of all things on sale for $89 with a full toner that prints 1200 sheets with the printer.
The toner cartridges are a tad more expensive ($100). The nice part is at the rate that I print stuff I wont need to replace it for 2 years.
I say the hell with inkjet printers.
I personally can't afford a colour laser printer. I just had to get a new printer because of my forced vista upgrade and my old HP is not supported. I got a cannon all in one (as cheap as printer-only on sale) and the ink is $6-10 per cartridge. I and most people might agree, don't have the $1500 for a colour laser printer, no do I have $150 for refills.
The reason people have ink jet printers is pure economics. So get off your high-horse and quit lecturing people about how stupid they are for buying an ink jet printer, and save me the linux/windows crap, when I can play all mainstream games on linux then I will switch, and not before.
I'm seriously considering taking home one of those black ink dot-matrix printers sitting in storage at work, which I could have for free. They're industrial printers that last, and for just black and white printing that will eventually get trashed, it would be cheaper than my HP inkjet, which is the only printer on my small LAN at home. My wife and kids are killing me on inkjet ink. I know I'll need to attach a print server to network it, but it still may prove to be useful.
Stop trying to tell someone else how to live theirs.
LOL, you don't a lot of consulting, do you? Clients are children, they often have to be led everywhere by the hand.
I mean, you can try and be nice and diplomatic and waste oodles of time, but by the 5th time you've heard some asshat complain about the price of laserjets after you've just explained everything to him, you learn to save some time and just cut them off at the pass.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
I bought an Epson Stylus Photo RX700. Great specs. Cost GBP 200. Uses 6 cartridges.
Epson cartridges cost about GBP 15.0p. A new set is half the cost of the printer. I didn't want to do that!
Third Party cartridges cost about GBP 5.0p. A set of these is about 1/7 the cost of the printer. I tried this for a while.
Then I got some cartridges from Skyhorse, a Chinese company that do easily-refillable cartridges (http://www.tianma.net.cn/en_skyhorse/product_detail_list.asp?id=422). These, with some bought-in ink, cost about GBP 1.50p per cartridge. I was happy with this, though Epson have since scared them out of the UK with legal threats.
Then I got a CIS off ebay. At the same time I found ProMax, who import OCP, the top-quality German inks, very cheaply (http://www.promaximaging.com/OCP_Ink/ocp_ink.html). This brought costs down to GBP 0.17p per cartridge. At this price the ink is virtually free, so I no longer worry about price.
Promax pointed out that the silicone tubing which comes with CISs can leak oils and react with pigment inks, causing blockages. They suggest using medical grade TYGON. I haven't bothered, and just clean every so often.
Then I hit the dreaded 'waste pad full' error. Epson count the number of cleans you do, and lock your printer after a set number because they reckon the internal waste pad will be full. If you are using non-epson cartridges, the rumour is that Epson count up much faster!
Luckily there is a Russian site which provides a reset program - http://www.ssclg.com/epsone.shtml. So now I reckon I have the best of both worlds - a good printer and really cheap ink.
I hope this gets modded up as informative - spreading information on how to avoid paying through the nose for inks is our only weapon against the pigopolists....
I would presume that as a consultant, you're getting paid to tell someone else what to do. But the person to whom I was responding was belittling some guy because he suggested that some people might actually benefit from buying HP, epson, lexmark ink.
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
Most everyone knows by now that inkjet printers are not the way to go on a price/performance standpoint. I've seen many people in this thread talking up moving to a laser printer, despite the higher initial costs.
Multifunction inkjets came out on the consumer market quite some time ago and are pretty inexpensive today (for the machine) yet have all the issues with inkjets. Multifunction laser printers are relatively new on the market and I don't have any experience with them. My injket printer died recently and I was wondering if anyone has recommendations for a home multifunction b&w (or colour) laser printer they've used. I'd like to get off the cart wagon as well...
I'd really love a pen containing ink that either degraded to invisibility or sublimated. It would be useful for signing things that need temporary authorisations - where you don't necessarily want your mark to be retained forever. Or where you want people to reauthorise something after a period of time. Maybe have it available in "1 day" "week" "month" and "year" varieties for different contract lengths.
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1) There are different printer technologies than dye that last much longer. I have an Epson 2200 pigment based ink printer and have printed many images on canvas. These have been hanging on my wall for years, plural, with absolutely no fade. Yeah, you pay more for pigment, but if you want long lasting prints, you'll pay more. Newer pigment printers print glossy as well.
2) Epson (Claria) and HP (Vivera) inks are supposed to be longer lasting, but are insanely expensive. I have the R260 and the results are fantastic. Don't print much this way due to the insane expense (just for proofing or hanging on office wall).
3) I don't see what all the fuss is about. If I want a long lasting print, I simply send my image to print on this. Same photo technology as old photo technology mentioned in the article. Looks great on my wall! Costco, et. al. also has similar photo printing.
I generally don't print much on inkjet anymore, since the inks are so outrageously expensive. Photo print shops, such as Costco, have much longer lasting results cheaper than inkjet. I just print on my local inkjets either for (a) color proofing or (b) use fancy materials such as canvas.
Except there are HP Laserjets that sell for less than the toner cartridges that go into them (I've seen hp laserjets for like 250-300 dollars with cartridges that cost 150 a piece - and you need 4 of them). And a lot of these printers will only let you use the oem cartridges.
This whole ink mess isn't just about inkjets - it applies to laser printers too.
Inkjets are a mug's game.
I love my color laser. I can just switch on, print, switch off. On normal photocopier paper.
It always took me about 20 minutes to coax the first decent page out of my inkjet - at tremendous cost and waste of ink and fancy paper.
I had one memorable session where a head needed cleaning and the black was low. By the time the head was cleaned, the black needed changing, and this needed another round of head cleaning. By the time the black was good the cyan was low, so I changed it, and you guessed it, had to clean again. By this time the Magenta was out, so off we go again.
By the time all six colors were good my brand new black cartridge was 1/4 empty.
I figure that particular page cost me about $25 to print.
Do I really need to be throwing away all my black ink when it's the cyan head which is clogged? Epson certainly thinks so - but they would, wouldn't they?
a great 31 PPM HP 4700 that has been a champ (and cost 2k new)
and an epson 1800...
why? lasers don't do full bleed,
and tabloid/oversize color lasers make my wallet bleed.
I occasionally need edge to edge, and occasionally need a 11X14 or 13X19 print
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
My first job was working for an electronics retailer. We were encouraged to sell 3rd party ink because it was cheaper but had a higher profit margin. My next job was working for a small IT company that repaired canon printers. After working there for a while I could tell if a printer had been using refill inks by the look of the ink, the print quality, the condition of the print head but most of all the condition of the purge unit. The purge unit in printers that had been using refills were always clogged with sediment and had to be replaced. After seeing the results of what happened to printers that had been refilled I will never touch refill inks again.
I agree, inkjets are rubbish. I own a Canon IP4300 and have to get a bank loan every time I need cartridges. A full set here in Ecuador is $145, $20 more than the printer cost. The cartridges last about 150 pages and absolutely saturate my paper. I tried different software to control it with but to no avail. As I mostly print code out I now print on an Epson LX300 24pin dot matrix. It cost me $30 from a dodgy repair shop down the road. The ribbons cost me $2.00 and print about 1100 sheets without fading.
"The cartridges last about 150 pages and absolutely saturate my paper. I tried different software to control it with but to no avail. As I mostly print code out I now print on an Epson LX300 24pin dot matrix. It cost me $30 from a dodgy repair shop down the road. The ribbons cost me $2.00 and print about 1100 sheets without fading."
That sounds very odd... not that I don't believe you... the Canons are rather high volume per yield printers. As in 25ml per 500pages @ 5% yield. That's in par with HP 10 years ago. While that is a fact.. I can't say I've noticed truly saturated paper just printing text. I would guess you are using some type of onion skin paper, like old school dot matrix, not your average 20lb paper.
I'd like to say with bulk ink the price is on par with ribbons. The price you seem to be paying is slightly less if one were to buy 4oz of bulk ink for $10.00.
I got into a 24 pin when the feature set was decent. I think it was a panasonic 2124 IIRC. It had a color ribbon, dual feeds, and plain or tractor feed. But the contrast was never on par with inkjet or laser... but running black ribbons it was pretty cheap to operate... but once you factored in the cost of a laser's replacement parts, I have to admit the dot matrix was indeed cheaper.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
The problem is, is where I am living. The refilled carts here are only for epson c42/62 and canon s200. I think there is something wrong with this ip4300. I bought my Canon printer from the largest computer chain in Ecuador and Canon still won't honor my warranty. On top of that, the first black cartridge I tried to use I had to change straight away because the printer kept reporting an unofficial cart installed. Canon wouldn't change this either. If they expect me to be paying though the nose for carts, they could at least make sure my Canon products work first. I will never buy anything Canon again, which is a shame, because the store I owned in England sold over $180,000 of Canon goods in one year and I don't want to put more money in their pockets now.. As for the paper, it's Xerox high white for inkjets; its the cheapest we can buy here. I appreciate the problem with contrast though, terrible for professional docs but for code it's a blessing, takes the strain off the eyes.
Sorry to hear about your Canon ip4300... in the states Canon has a VERY liberal warranty policy. They ship out replacement heads even after the warranty is expired. They accept warranty returns based on phone interviews.
While ml per yield is high, dollars to output is pretty reasonable for black. Not as reasonable as the ip4000 series (bci-3eBK). Kodak offers an inkjet which has an average cost per black @ 2.5c/page @ 5% yield. However, I highly doubt that would beat your dot matrix.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
I wish Canon would have the same policies here. Seven emails, three phone calls and a letter. Maybe their Latin American branch aren't that bothered. I've had the same problem with LG who ship a lot of goods down here. They seem to think a warranty in South America means that it'll work in the first five minutes of opening the box, then you're on your own. Panasonic are excellent down here but the printers are damned expensive. Seems like toners are cheap to refill as a good compensation. Just out of interest, which kodak model is it? They sell kodak near here but I never saw them in the UK.
"They sell kodak near here but I never saw them in the UK."
http://printers.kodak.com/
It's part of their EZ share line. The black is $10 with 400p @ 5% yield at least in the states. I'm not truly excited about the cost per page, but it is reasonable. The printer uses a technique similar to canon, detachable thermal head. It offers a multi color tank, as I recall three primaries and a clear, perhaps an additional black. Color and black are pigment. It's no Epson, but the price is a fair bit more reasonable even in contrast to their dye models.
Oh, near as I'm aware they only offer all in ones.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.