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What Do You Do When Printers Cost Less Than Ink?
An anonymous reader writes "A family member recently asked me to pick up more ink for her Epson Photo RX 595. Unfortunately, replacing the black and color ink cartridges costs $81.92 + tax at the local store! That's so bad that I got a replacement printer that's just as good, and spare ink, for less. But now I have a useless piece of e-waste that I can't even give away. What can you do with a printer like that? I hate to just throw it away."
/thread
Find a sucker on feeBay!
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
You could take it to the firing range.
I don't believe in karma, I just call it like I see it.
Make sure the new printer comes with FULL carts, not the half-or-less carts they often box with the printer.
All you need is a bat
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
The best course of action for this sort of thing is prevention. Keep consumables prices in mind when buying hardware in the first place, get a decent laser printer if you can, and give 3rd party consumables a try.
If you do end up stuck with a printer, or printers, you might want to see if you are, or if you know, any electronics/robotics hobbyists. Even cheap and ghastly printers contain a reasonable supply of motors(some conventional DC, some steppers) and gears and optointerrupters and other fun little gizmos. The larger and more sophisticated printers can contain pretty impressive quantities of such.
Failing that, you probably just want to find a recycler.
and cut the intenstines out of the CEOs of Hewlett Packard, Epson, Canon, and all the others that have gone the way of the razors/razor blade approach to printers.
If you have something useful that you don't want anymore, donate it. Most organizations that take donations (Salvation Army, for example) not only spend money to help others, they also employ people that might not otherwise get employment.
It's the whole win-win thing.
The new printer you bought came with "demo" ink cartridges that are nearly empty, compared with full ones. You didn't get a bargain.
Personally, while I understand the business doctrine of "whatever the market will bear," I think it's time that Congress look into market collusion and racketeering. There's no way that a pigment can cost thousands of dollars per liter.
[
and if you bought a different brand, attach a congratulation for a lost customer
The printer that you buy with ink comes with cartridges that are, at most, half full. Usually it's considerably less than half. It might feel cheaper, but in dollars-per-print it's not, and that's the only metric that really measures the value you're getting.
Next time, don't fall for it.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
Well, you could use it for some DIY project. Printers have nice stepper motors and the guiding rod is pretty straight too.
But it doesn't have to be like that. You could just go buy an ink refill kit and refill existing cartridges
Did you know that "FTW" ("for the win") is a direct translation of "Sieg Heil"?
I hate to just throw it away.
I learned this lesson awhile ago with inkjet printers - throw it away, get over it. Inkjets are disposable.
I've been using cartridge stores like Cartridge World. Overall, the ink there is much cheaper. However, the best thing you can do is call up your local recycling center and see if they take e-waste. More so, a simple Google reveals that many manufacturers will take back their own product for recycling. Even if they're not listed, it wouldn't hurt to contact the manufacturer to see what programs they have in place.
Inkjets have ridiculous per-page ink costs.
Get a laser printer instead. Even color lasers are very affordable. Per-page toner costs with a small b&w are less than 5 cents per page (with a great laser you can bring that down to 1 cent).
Take it to a local field with a buddy
Set up a camera
Film yourself bashing it to bits
Upload to internet
Profit
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Terrible business model. Blame your con-consumers.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
Just put the old printer in the new printer's box, tape it up, and return it. Now that's what I call recycling your e-waste! ;)
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
Box it up and send it to the manufacturer. It's their business practices that cause this waste. Make them deal with it.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Hate to say this..... but we've been doing this for quite some time now at the MoJ. HP has been doing this for years.
We just toss them out. Don't need to replace them cartridges no more; just hook up a new printer. And you're done...
If you're too cheap to pay the recycling fee, just put it in the garage and wait until someone is doing a free recycling drive. I personally think that recycling fees are bogus. In California they already tack on a waste fee when you buy electronic goods. It's ridiculous that recyclers charge to recycle at the end other end of the waste stream as well.
We all have a drawer of old components that might some day be useful. SCSI cables, Ancient AC Adapters with weird voltage ratings, etc... A perfectly good printer sounds like a prime candidate for collecting dust. Who knows, maybe someday people will realize they're being ripped off and ink prices will drop to reasonable levels making it useful again?
Throwing it away is the only way to break this bad pricing model. The printer company will lose the potential revenue stream from ink on that specific printer and might eventually come to its senses and have a good pricing model. In fact doing this a lot of times will help. I must say that I've been tempted when I found a sale in which printer + ink was cheaper then ink alone.
Believe it or not, some waste is just waste, with no real use, just throw it away. Keeping giant metal paperweights around just because you feel bad throwing away something potentially useful but that you'll never use just doesn't make sense.
You can donate at Goodwill or Salvation army and claim a tax deduction.
Recycle it. Donate it to a worthy group. The Lupus Foundation (and others, I'm sure) will even come and pick it up (though, it's a bit of a white elehpant for them since the toner is so expensive).
Take it apart and make a sculpture from the parts. Take it apart and see if it will blend. Take the blended parts and stuff them into small balls of ground raw meat to feed to the neighbors dog that won't stay off your property.
Put it on freecycle.org.
I have a collection of 5-6 working printers in my garage. Someday I'm going to build a sculpture from them, if my wife doesn't make me give them away so we can store some useless junk instead (tongue fully in cheek).
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
You should be aware that new printers ship with less than full ink cartridges!
I got an HP printer an found that the full replacement cartridge had more than twice the ink of the cartridge that it was shipped with it.
You can get a refill kit. Those are rather messy and kind of a pain. I would suggest taking the carts down to walgreens and have them refill them.
Doctors do Massage in Longview WA now, who knew?
The cartridges which are shipped with the printer usually aren't completely full. They are just the demo, basically.
Goodwill or an educational institution.
I refill my 4-color printer with Blood, Sweat and Tears (4th bodily fluid "redacted" as this is a family site).
Set your phasers on "funky"!
You can get a set of continuous ink tanks off ebay for about $50 that will give you enough ink capacity to print until the second coming.
If I ran my country (and I really think I should) it would be illegal to sell a device at a loss in order to gouge on the consumables. In addition, they would be required to accept the return of any hardware they sell for environmentally acceptable disposal, meaning it would need to built into the price. I think some countries may already do this on some products.
When you don't use them.
But now I have a useless piece of e-waste that I can't even give away. What can you do with a printer like that?
Don't get one....craigslist a cheap laser printer instead.
...throw it away in someone else's yard, where you won't have to look at it.
I have one of their photo printers and it is just as nasty about the ink. Worse the carts use some damn chip which prevents refilling. My advice is to just keep trying to get rid of it on craigslist. Eventually some clueless person will buy it and then it is their problem.
Turtle Wings is your best choice for recycling.
If you find yourself buying a whole new printer _with_ink_ for less than the cost of replacement ink, there's probably a reason for it.
The ink cartridges loaded in new printers are often a little bit less than full. Don't be surprised if they turn out to have less than half the ink of the full-priced replacements. There's a weasel term for this, something like "Value Express Promotional Economy Monkey-Spanking Sized Ink Cartridges", but the point is that you're often being sold a nearly empty printer at a cut price just to get you to buy more ink later.
The best course of action for this sort of thing is prevention. Keep consumables prices in mind when buying hardware in the first place, get a decent laser printer
Indeed. Laser might have higher upfront cost, but tend to cost a lot less per page.
And also, tend to be much more compatible : they simply accept good-old PostScript. (PostScript over Network is the must in terms of compatibility).
Thus you don't need to hunt for drivers every time Microsoft decide to change driver model or when attempting to switch to Linux.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Best Buy has recycling programs for E-waste. For most items Best Buy's service is free or minimal cost ($10) and you get a $10 Best Buy gift card. I would assume recycling the printer would be free.
It's interesting how many people here have succumbed to the tireless sales pitches of the electronic store salesman trying to get you to purchase more ink. The mythological "demo cartridge" or "starter cartridge" is pure sales pitch. IT DOES NOT EXIST. I worked at a certain Electronics chain with a large Yellow tag and we were told to tell our customers this in order to sell more ink.
Unless the cartridge is listed as a demo piece or the contents show less liquid oz/ml on the cartridge than a standard cartridge it is the same thing.
...because from what I have seen they are garbage. YMMV, but the one I got was extremely loud and jammed (as in an entire sheet of paper bunched up behind the printhead jammed) literally every other time I tried to actually print with it. The ink may be cheap but the hardware is garbage. Got a Canon as a bonus on a Newegg purchase and haven't looked back.
I got called a /.tard for saying that individuals didn't need printers yesterday. That i would rather have a cheap chromeOS powered device with no local storage and use that when i needed to move documents around my home. That smart phones just don't cut.
Of course now I will get called an idiot for just such things.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Look on-line 6 cartridges for your printer (black, yellow, cyan, magenta, light cyan, light magenta) would have cost you $30.
They would have also held twice as much as the "starter cartridges" in your printer.
Find a group that will recycle the printer for you.
Where I live there is a group called http://www.freegeek.org/ that will take the printer off your hands, break it down, recycle it and fund the groups activities with the money made from recycling.
Either a paper cutter(replace ink with knife), a plotter(ink with pencil), or just steal the motor/belt system as one half/third of a homemade CNC.
Paper and Ink have been HP's bread and butter for a long time. They sell the printer at a loss, but keep the price of ink and paper high. Sadly because they give away the printers, the printer companies have also stopped investing in quality printer designs, drivers, software support, etc, and you can more or less kiss the printer goodbye once it starts to behave badly. Most printer related jobs have now been succesfully outsourced to Asia. Ten years ago when HP had its first lay offs, they didn't touch the printer divisions. Now they can't seem to cut employees fast enough. Printers have become a commodity in which innovation and quality are really no longer important.
http://www.beanleafpress.com
Just throw it away. Recycling in it's current form is a crock anyway.
Your local waste management company is well equiped to deal with bits of plastic and metal.
Platform advocacy is like choosing a favorite severely developmentally disabled child.
Put it back in the box and return it, of course! No, I'm not trolling; I'm advocating consumer protest.
You still print stuff? Like, on paper?
Luddite.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Evelyn Beatrice Hall, re Voltaire
Sure, the new printer has less ink than a new cartrage. BUT, I can get a new printer and a new cartrage for around $100 from best buy (cheaper if you go online). The replacement ink for that printer is only $13. So while this new printer has less initial ink, he will still come out ahead if he bought the printer with low ink replacement costs.
Printer: $79.99
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/HP+-+Deskjet+Multifunction+Printer/+Copier/+Scanner/9317429.p?id=1218084031435&skuId=9317429
Ink: $13
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/HP+-+60+Ink+Cartridge+-+Black/8761912.p?skuId=8761912&id=1202650704918
And, as always, read the Amazon reviews before you buy.
he also got spare ink in the deal? He's not asking for purchasing advice, he's asking what to do with an old printer that still works.
That said, I don't know.
New printers these days come with partial ink cartridges. Budget laser printers for example usually come with a cartridges that is only 1/3 the amount of ink as you get in a refill.
As such, if you keep buying replacement printers than you're going to be doing that VERY often. Instead, buy a decent printer - regardless of cost, and then when the trial period ink gets used up buy some more so you start working on the real life-cycle of the printer.
Or to put it pretty simply: a $75 toner cartridge for my printer that lasts me for 4500 more pages is a lot better than buying another printer for $50 and getting 1000 pages out of it.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Keep in mind that toner/ink cartridges in new printers aren't always "full" cartridges and hence won't necessarily last as long or do as many pages as a new cartridge. For example last week I I bought a new toner cartridge for my printer (Samsung ML-1640). For $10 less I could have just got a new printer with toner cartridge, *but* the toner cartridge contained therein is a 750 page one, whereas the new cartridge is 1500 pages, so on a $/pages ratio the replacement cartridge is still cheaper.
I bought an HP CP1215 on sale for around $100 a year ago.
Came with 'introductory' toner cartidges.
Price of the black refill: $109
Fortunately, I can refill them.
I bought a toner refill kit, and the first thing it said is to set the printer driver 'override' in the HP toolbox, and just keep on printing.
So far, I am 250 pages past the 'out of toner' that the popup keeps warning me about, and no signs of fading.
As many others have pointed out, the new printer comes with "starter cartridges" which contain less ink; in the case of a donated Dell inkjet I recently reluctantly accepted for the school where I work part time, the starter cartridge contains 5ml, instead of 25ml of ink. So for your $81 you would have bought possibly five times as many pages as you bought with your new printer.
That said: you are, in fact, causing significant grief to the companies making these printers by discarding rather than reloading. The company has adopted the Gillette marketing model: give away the razor, overprice the blades. It is almost certain that the printer costs more than $50 to make, so if you toss the printer you are hitting them in the bottom line.
On the gripping hand, the ecological costs of discarding the printer and buying new are significant. How much petroleum did it take to make the plastic that you would be dumping in the landfill, and transporting it to you?
The only truly sound way to approach this, once you have one of these printers on your desk, is to buy a single round of replacement cartridges and a refill kit. (The starter cartridges may have something in them that prevents them from being filled above the starter levels. To get full life out of a refilled cartridge you may have to start with a proper cartridge.) This not only prevents the printer hitting the landfill, but removes you as a source of ink-cartridge revenue from the printer manufacturer.
My wife codes for a printer company who shall remain nameless. It's well known they make more off the ink cartridges than the printers. Thing is it's not a renewable resource, you'd think they would figure out how make that work.
"Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy - Benjamin Franklin"
Monochrome Laser Printer.
Seriously, unless you're a professional photographer there's no earthly way it makes any sense to print your own photos. More or less anywhere will print them for you at practically the same cost per print, with the added bonus that you don't have the expenditure of buying the printer itself. Then you just have to live with only being able to print in black & white.
I intentionally do not mention colour laser printers because the cheap ones are heading in the same direction as inkjets - the initial cartridges are half-full, a full complement of all consumables costs about double what the machine itself costs.
I got tired of having to buy a new color laser printer every time the cartridges ran out, so I just buy toner refill kits now. The average drum can last 3-6 refills and the company provided replacement chips to fool the printer into thinking it was a new cartridge.
Inkjet refills are also fairly easy, or you can buy cheap replacements online. Just be wary of the vacuum-sealed carts (I think Epson liked to use those) that cause major issues if you try to refill them.
That's also why I generally preferred Canon printers back when I owned Inkjets: Their inks were in individual tanks so you could replace just the colors that needed it. The heads were also a separate assembly, so the tank only held ink. Official replacement tanks were about 10 bucks each, which is not bad when you compare it to HP's outrageous prices.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
Kodak has had their printer line on the market for over a year now, they place the print head on the printer itself and forgo all the smart chip garbage causes some rather anti-consumer issues on other brands of printers. Their cartridges are really cheap compared to others, under $25 for a full set of color and black ink. The print quality is great, and the prices while not as cheap as the lower end HP's and Epson's are reasonable, I paid $120 for my all in one last year and have changed cartridges once and it hasn't skipped a beat.
Tell you're friend they're a sucker, and tell them to buy a real printer.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
It was a great idea back in the 90's and we've almost changed enough to pull it off!
I know even at the retail places you can get cartridges for certain no-longer-manufactured printers for ridiculously low prices. Anyone know what printer made today has the lowest cost for replacement ink?
Why not use a syringe to re-fill the old cartridges? U can bulk buy the ink but I think there's an upper limit on the number of times u can refill these cartridges. See it pays to have lived in a poor country!
seriously, most of the crap i used to print works just fine digitally.
The camera in my cellphone comes in handy for just about any kind
of digital reproduction I need. Shift away from the I-need-to-print
this-just-so-i-can-take-it-with-me to taking a pic of it, or emailing
it.
The only thing I use my printer for now is printing out coloring
book pages for the kid.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
Buy cheap ink cartridges from China. I've been using them for years for all kinds of purposes -- everything from disposable map directions on cheap paper to portfolio pieces on very expensive paper, printed by ridiculously expensive printers. I've used them on multiple models of three different major brands over the years and haven't had any more trouble with them than my friends have with brand name cartridges bought from the printer manufacturer.
Don't be dumb! Looks like you can get a pair of complete refill sets for $33 to me...
quite a cottage industry has sprung up the last couple of years. You can get ink/toner for a 1/4 of the cost of new when you refill.
Go to Staples, near the back of the store there will often be an electronics recycling bin. Leave the printer there.
If you haven't factored in the cost of disposing of the "empty" printer, you really have no idea whether it cost less than the replacement ink. I suspect that the only way you will "save" money is by externalizing the disposal cost by simply (and irresponsibly) throwing the printer in the trash.
If you can't find anyone who wants a perfectly cromulent printer, find a way to recycle it. I used to use Greendisk, but now my town holds semi-annual electronics recycling. If your locality doesn't, bug them about it...it's much more practical to recycle in bulk, and you'd be doing a really good deed if you could get it implemented.
Make her buy a laser printer. They are much MUCH cheaper than inkjets. Cost per print is fantastically cheaper. And unless you only do a few prints a year it makes perfectly good sense. For a student they pay themselves off in 6months.
King Camp Gillette was a brilliant bastard...
You can often find off-brand inks on ebay as well. The ink for my printer is around $50 retail, but I can get refillable cartridges (I never refill them. Cheap enough to where I'm fine with rebuying them) that are the same size and same quality for $20.
If your going to dump the printer then why not try a local recycling company as to not create more e-waste. Some cities have non-profits like FreeGeek [ freegeek.org ] that can re-use computer equipment.
Push harder towards Open Media/Content
http://www.amazon.com/Epson-Claria-Hi-def-cartridges-T078920/dp/B000I7VL08 Is the OEM ink from amazon for 50$.. If you don't require the HD Claria Ink then get some regular/cheap ink on ebay for 15-20$. Expect to pay more for anything at a local (Best Buy) type store..
Sometimes you can find after market refill kits, with which you can inexpensively refill your cartridge.
It's truly sad and disgusting when we have a society based on swindling one another.
Another peeve of mine; Tropicana juice and Haagen Dazs ice cream, once sold in pints (16 oz) are now 14 oz.
Caveat Emptor!
Don't buy so called photo printers anyway. Especially the ones that use like 6 inks. You can have photos printed through services and Walmart for far cheaper than you can ever do at home and get a higher quality result. The 6 ink printers are just a gimic to now have 3 more carts you have to buy.
Even worse, now some of the HP 6 color photo printers require you to have no empty carts or they won't print, even if you're just printing black and white AND they put expiration dates on the carts that the printer "respects" and will refuse to use, again keeping you from printing stuff not even using the color in question.
If you need to print a little, buy a small black and white inkjet and just get over having color printouts and you'll save yourself a lot of money. If you need to print alot, then you should be getting a laser printer (whether color or not) anyway.
Another good one is Brother printers. Official ink is much cheaper than say HP but 3rd party is even better. Just replaced all 4 carts for a Brother multifunction for $8 on Amazon. Great quality and functions, good price for unit, official Linux support.
Give the old one to the Salvation Army, and go get one after doing some research into longevity and ink replacement costs.
For what it's worth, I've got to the HP Photosmart line and been very happy with reliability, ink costs, and overall quality (except the driver, which blows).
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
Why not purchase new cartridges off eBay? I've been doing this for years, you can purchase brand new, sealed FULL cartridges for 4-5 dollars.
more throwing.
Collect donated waste printers from people on the net. Then epoxy them together as a monument to the efficiency of capitalism!
I'll second this! I bought a Kodak Easyshare 5300 All-in-One on Woot for $35. It came with a bad printhead, but they gladly replaced it. Just last week, I replaced it with a Kodak 5250LE (Wal-Mart Black Friday special). The new one is not as sturdy as the old, but it's working great so far.
They print the retail price of the cartridges right on the box! No bait and switch there. They use pigment-based inks, and as far as I've seen, all their printers are using the same cartridges. It's practically a revolution in home desktop printing.
Beware, they aren't all that friendly to networking. The original line of printers had drivers that actually looked for a device on the USB line and refused to print if it wasn't there. The new 5250 scans and prints wirelessly from my Mac, but as far as I know, there's still no Linux driver available.
I just had a stack of photos printed at Ritz Camera online. Cost me under $3. Picked them up down the street.
And, they'll last a decade, unlike your home printed photos, which will start to fade in 2 years.
A printer is basically a CONTRACT with the COMPANY to buy their CONSUMABLES.
Printers are almost always sold at a cost and you pay for your consumables at a premium.
Cell phones are almost always sold at a discount and you pay a premium for your minutes.
Internet modems & contracts.
The list goes on.
Want a laugh look at how many printers HP has kicked out the door since the beginning of time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Hewlett-Packard_products#Photosmart_printers
My Brother laser printer supposedly came new with a half-sized cartridge. It signalled for a replacement after a disappointingly small number of copies. But - it was really a full cartridge! A little black tape in the right areas and it lasted for the better part of another year.
http://www.freecycle.org/
all my old tech gets given away.
if you want a bit of cash for it try craigslist
http://www.supermediastore.com/product/u/epson-r260-r380-rx580-ink-combo-t078120-t078220-t078320-t078420-rem-4pk?max=15&search=Epson+RX595&offset=0 You can find much better deals on ink. 4 pack remanufactured for $23.99.
If you want to g to the bother, Staples seems to always be encouraging recycling... check with them see if they'll take it. A couple times last year they even gave you $45.00 to trade in an old printer (of any type) toward the purchase of a new one. You might also google computer recycling in your town... here, there seem to be about half a dozen companies that do it. But if I had a choice I like the Idea of seeing if Staples will come back with that trade in option again. Last year combined with the back to school sales it got me both a nice brother laser printer, and a wireless hp office jet for a combined price of about $90.00. The laser is a god send for everyday printing, and for those times you really do need color, or are on your lap top in the back yard, the hp comes in handy.
There is indeed one born every sixty seconds.
more cowbell
that's why in europe there are fakes which cost less than $30 and they are allot better than epson's own cardridges strangely enough...
Just a rhetorical question.. do you really need to print that much? (or your friend?) Lots of time, people print and then it just sits there or is put into a file.. switch to pdf's and skip using the printer..
Have you fscked your local propeller head today?
Why should you pay to ship their crappola to them? Make THEM pay for their mistake!
See if you can't find a bit of mail from that company that's BRE. (Business Reply Envelope) Then, tape the BRE envelope to the box the printer is in so that the BRE account is clearly shown, and take it to the USPS, along with a big sign saying whey you refuse to do business with them taped out the outside.
There's nothing about a BRE that limits its scope to the envelope - anything you stick it to is shipped to them, paid by the BRE account at the USPS. And since BRE is first class, they'll be paying POSTAGE rates for that mail, not SHIPPING rates. Your average printer might rack up a few hundred in shipping fees.
AFAIK, it's perfectly legal... (YMMV, IANAL, yatta yatta)
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
My suggestion would be convert it into a 3D printer (Known as a fabrication machine)
Granted, I don't know your skill set so this might not be a valid option, but you have to admit the results are nice!
Video of a 3d printer made from an old ink jet (Boring to watch straight through, best to watch the first few moments and jump ahead to the end imho):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nbtZOolSIY
Here is a better video showing the output from a production 3d printer, to give you an idea of what is possible:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdzooQQDWGg
Finally, some more basic info:
http://hackaday.com/2009/04/19/3d-printing-at-home/
http://homemade3dprinter.blogspot.com/
Google will have more detailed info if you are interested
Cartridge World wasn't what I expected. They don' sell ammo.
I stopped buying printers 2.5 years ago, there isn't any point personally. I can go to a library or a local office block, newsagents, the cost is getting silly these days with the inks and the price of the printers. Never going to buy one again.
Jonathanjk.com
Park your car in your local ghetto area, leave the printer on the top of your car, go buy a coffee, come back to your car, tadaaa! no more printer!
Now call your insurance company.
PC LOAD LETTER
Look for a local Hacker Space or Makers club. http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/Hacker_Spaces Someone there will take it off you and build something interesting from it. Unless they need a printer. Then they might use one of those refill kits. I haven't had much success refilling cartridges myself though.
Now you know what to do with a Trebuchet.
They sure do. Look at the Canon ink tanks, that plug into separate somewhat sophisticated microfluidic devices, but still cost big bucks for the little plastic tanks. And even more for the somewhat sophisticated microfluidic devices when the nozzles finally clog up and have to be replaced, if you can find them at all. And Epson has for years been mounting their somewhat sophisticated microfluidic devices right in the printer in a way that they can't even be replaced by the consumer, and them selling them just a very expensive and very tiny tank of ink. And I've seen other manfacturers recently, even HP (who in the past at least sold you new nozzles with each tank of ink,) go the Cannon route, much cheaper for them, much worse for the consumer.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
How about a home automation system built entirely from scrap printers?
uh, Office Space anyone?
Maybe they modded it redundant for posting a reply to an obviously pointless post to get their post up near the top of the page instead of in a separate thread on it's own. Some of us have our comments sorted by rating to hide threads like such. Now, redundant certainly is the wrong mod, however you could consider it trolling for karma, or off-topic.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
As somebody who's volunteered at FreeGeek, please don't do this unless you absolutely have to. Printers are extremely difficult for them to recycle: they have to break it down into the various types of plastic, then circuit boards, then metal parts.
Best to not buy these products: second best is to suck it up and buy the ink, even if it is expensive.. and chalk it up to a learning experience. Making it "somebody else's problem" just plain sucks.
I second that. After my Epson 3-in-1 died, I bought a Kodak 3-in-1 WiFi model for about the same cost as comparable Epson/HP units. But the ink is less than half the cost (so I bought replacement ink cartridges as well).
The old Epson? I'll be taking it apart for the motors :-)
will it blend?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Freecycle.org http://freecycle.org/ is a great way to give any gear away. Each city has their own group. It sends out alerts and people respond. Most of the time they will come pick up the equipment from you as long as it still works. I know that a lot of under served schools in my area use the service.
pc load letter what the fuck does that mean?
Then later in the day in jammed on me and then at end of week I took to the woods and beat the crap out of it.
They also come with a full set of cartridges out of the box!
Post the video on YouTube. [...] Advertising revenue will pay for a new printer.
YouTube users don't get any of the advertising revenue unless they become "partners". You have to have thousands of views on your existing videos before you can think of becoming a partner, and your videos have to satisfy a far more stringent fair use standard because the first of the four fair use factors (commercial or not) no longer weighs in your favor.
Seriously, lasers rule.
I bought a cheap laser printer for less than $200, it's nice, networked, fast, excellent B&W quality, good for 2000-4000 copies and will probably never dry up.
It also prints decent photos, but if you really need that high quality glossy stuff then have someone professional print it out for you.
They have the proper hardware, paper, cheap ink and knowledge to use it, and you basically don't have to pay anything but paper, ink, markup and taxes.
So if you're not printing huge amounts of photos then in the end it's not that much more expensive to order them on-line.
And the printer, send it back to the store, they sell the crap now they get to recycle it (just make sure it doesn't work first so they can't resell it).
If they won't accept it then just start quoting fake paragraphs to them and make a big loud fuzz about it, usually they will just give in to make you shut up.
- "There is nothing quite like an ineffective solution to an nonexistant problem"
Goodwill will take it and someone will buy it. There are charities that take printers and computers and give them to third world nations for their schools and poor.
Did you know that most ink carts are refillable in some way? There are ink refill kits, and ink refill services, and also clone ink carts that cost less to buy. My father refills his own ink carts and he barely knows how to use a computer, so I am sure the average Slashdotter should know how to do that.
I refill my own Laser printer toner carts by adding in more toner via a hole in the cart and a plug. Ink carts refill the same way.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
This sort of misbehavior in the consumer printer market is truly old news, but it never stays old because there are MILLIONS of people who never got the original memos. This Ask Slashdot is a reminder just how many people there are who continue to be disadvantaged by these tactics that some of us have known about for a decade. Where are the Ralph Naders of the tech world when you really need them? (When they're not busy running for public office, that is.)
I guess when buying a printer instead of only looking at the cost of the machine and/or its consumables, it might be worthwhile calculating what the average cost per page printed would be.
Seriously, get a laser and a wireless printserver. Everyone in your house can print using the same printer.
Then use your local drug store's online tools for printing pictures, and your local office supply store's online tools to print color documents. The only way to be economical with an inkjet is to buy a new one anytime the cartridge runs out of ink, and the only way to be environmental is to pay a couple of bucks a page.
If I ran my country (and I really think I should) it would be illegal to sell a device at a loss in order to gouge on the consumables.
Governments provide roads for free and gouge on the motor fuels. Are you also against the gasoline tax?
If you're a DIYer, refill the carts. I just got a kit for $105. I worked it out that each refill will cost $13. That's an entire set (black and color.) It pays for itself.
Also Canon.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
aside from being huge, and only black-and-white. But! Replacement parts are dead easy to find, they're built like a tank, and toner is cheap and plentiful.
If you don't need color, consider one of these.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
A bonus there is you get interest because it's in your savings account!
Big whoop. Consumer savings accounts at (say) Chase currently pay 0.01% APY. This means for each $1,200 in your account, you get 1 cent per month in interest. Switch banks, and you will likely end up paying $4 every time you walk into an ATM: $2 to the bank owning the ATM and $2 to your own bank.
Heaven forbid consumers employ the adage so old it's in a dead language: CAVEAT EMPTOR.
How can a reasonable "buyer beware" when all sellers in the relevant market are part of the racket?
Check with local schools. The one my girlfriend works at has a program where they take donated broken small appliances and let the students dismantle them to explore how they work. Once all the learning's been had out of an appliance, the parts are either given to the art department or to a local recycling depot.
In the land of the blind, the one eyed man still has no depth perception.
The best early example is the safety razor. Where the manufacturer packaged a "free" razor with a pack of over priced blades that only fit the "free" razor. Subsequently one would have to buy more blades in order to use the razor. The difference with the printer/ink cartridge version is the extreme price differential which is based on an assumed comparative affluence* of the target consumer and very probable collusion among the various manufacturers in an effort to flog a rather broad and hostage market(the razor blade manufacturers were guilty of the same). In the current political/business environment it is not likely that anything will be done about such practices.
*affluence in this case not necessarily real but the consumers consumptive potential defined by their perception of normative behavior.
Pony up $56 for plenty of ink.
http://cgi.ebay.com/Continuous-Ink-System-For-Epson-R260-R380-RX580-Printer_W0QQitemZ370299562964QQcmdZViewItemQQptZBI_Toner?hash=item563792ebd4
I'll take the printer off your hands if you don't want it. I'll give you $10 plus shipping.
Monoprice, that awesome, dirt cheap site for (great quality) cables now sells ink and toner, and flatscreen tv mounts. Basically all the stuff the big box stores put obscene markups on.
Urgh. The "official" Brother Linux drivers are crap. You get a 32-bit x86 only binary. The visible parts of it such as the shell scripts are really badly written (and break if /bin/sh is dash and not bash). The .deb files are created by alien. They install files in strange locations such as /usr/local. I could never get it working with cups and ended up using lprng and manually configuring it. Then it really doesn't work well. For example, it always adds a huge margin to the top of every page so I have to adjust the margins to be 0 at the top if I actually want something to print how it is meant to be. And they don't maintain it at all. The driver I downloaded when I got the printer is still the latest.
I had the same problem, but before buying my next inkjet, I found out which B/W cart were best value, then bought a printer that used them. In the end I switched to Laser for general printing as the ink does not evaporate when not in use, and a photo printer for ..., But the photo printer is more expensive than just going to a shop and getting them printed there.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
Good for you. You don't need that printer, but what if someone else needs to replace the same printer?
There are any number of reasons that someone would purchase a modern printer-fax-copier. Just because you doesn't mean that Goodwill or the Salvation Army should pass on it. After all, there are 300 million other people out there (in the USA) and some of them have a use for it.
I've still got a Lexmark inkjet printer. It cost me all of $50 when it was new. It's cheap, but it did what I needed it to do, and frankly it was cheaper than buying replacement cartridges for it's predecessor, whatever printer that was (been so long I've forgotten). I had the same exact thoughts that the OP had about it.
The Lexmark was the last inkjet printer I ever bought. Never again. Printer ink is a HUGE ripoff. I bought a Brother laser printer. Does duplexing, even had an ethernet interface built right into it. I print maybe a handful of pages a month, so the toner cartridge that came with it will probably last for 2 years, and unlike ink, it won't (shouldn't?) dry out and become unusuable. Sure, cartridges for it cost about $90, but that refill (when I actually need it) will likely last several years.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
It is amazing how little most of us really need to print. We print most things to PDF's, and store digitally.
For the once a month item we do actually print a laser printer was affordable to buy, works great, and operates on pennies.
Pictures look (and last?) much better on real photo paper anyway. MPix.com is amazing (among others), and even the kiosk at the local big box store (or neighborhood photo store if you are still lucky enough to have one) work decent.
Opt out... refuse to play their game.
I picked up a Brother laser printer at Office Depot for $49US no rebates it came with a "starter" cart good for 1000 pages, the "standard" size toner cart is $26US and is good for 1,500 pages, the "pro" size is $50US and is good for 3000 pages. Cheapest I could get a replacement toner for my mother in laws really old Xerox was $90US. So it is much cheaper to get a newer printer, better resolution and faster for less than the price of a replacement toner cart.
Seriously, call the warranty claims department and explain that the printer came with defective (i.e. less than full) ink cartridges, and since the ink is the most expensive part of the printer, it was a significant defect. They'll tell you "starter cartridges, bla bla bla..." but be firm, and escalate as high as you can. File a formal complaint with the government's consumer affairs department.
It would be far more honest for them to sell that $50 printer for $50 with _no_ ink in it at all.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Recycle it so it doesn't end up in a landfill. You can take it to Staples and they will recycle it for a $10 disposal fee.
Separate ink cartridges and print heads have the advantage of easy refilling. Monolithic cartridges are also fairly easy to refill if you know the drill (pun intended).
I am mostly interested in black and white printing, so I just refill with ordinary fountain pen ink, using a pipette or a syringe.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
WTF. People still buying inkjets and bitching about it? Is lexmark STILL in business?
It's simple. Don't buy inkjets. Buy a laser that has decent sized laser cartridges. B/W if you print lots of text. Color tends to have small cartridges out of space considerations.
Besides the cost, with inkjets, you have clean the head constantly and if you don't use in a while (say you have a several week vacation or other trip), worry about the printer head drying out. Headaches and a fucking waste of time, imo.
And for photos, dye-subs. Even if they don't beat inkjets on dpi, my 300dpi dyesub beats any 1200x1200 in actual results. You JUST DON'T see the millions of dots with dyesub, it's all blended together, and because there is a clear coat, no smearing of the images, even if you lick your fingers and go across the picture right after it was printed. It looks as good or better than from professional print shop.
I don't even know why this argument is still going on after all these years. Inkjet was and always will be a half-assed home solution when the good solutions have matured and become considerably cheap. In the space of 5 years, I threw out just as many inkjets in the early 2000s with lots of printing problems aggravation. In the same space of time, I have had just 2 lasers and 1 dyesub, all still working (1 for b/w, other a color copier) and I probably printed out 10x the material with them because it was just easier.
I dismantle old printers, especially inkjets, for components for Arduino microcontroller projects. Each inkjet has at least 2 stepper motors, a bunch of LEDs and some precision rails.
gigantino.tv - Heavy but weighs nothing.
How about stop printing. With disk space, pdfs, etc etc etc whey do we need hard copies of anything anymore?
I passed on several models of printers for which no aftermarket ink cartridges cold be had. No freaking way am I paying the insane prices they want for OEM ink. No way. I pay less than $6 per tank for my Canon IP4500 ink, and it's about 95% as good as OEM, maybe better. For black print the two are completely indistinguishable.
The worst POS printer I have bought in recent years has been a Lexmark. It was the second Lexmark I have ever bought, and definitely the last, period. I made the mistake of giving them a second chance after the complete screwing I got on one in the mid 1990s. No improvement, this thing is an overpriced, underperforming piece of shit with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. The Canon, on the other hand, has been one pleasant surprise after another. Trouble-free duplex printing and even prints CDs, all for under $100 and with cheap, good aftermarket ink from dozens of sources.
You have two choices. Buy aftermarket ink, or grab your ankles and pray for good lube. Ya gots ta do yer homework before buying.
I don't know where you all are getting your printers, but the last three printers in a row that I bought all included transparent tanks, and you could clearly see that they were full capacity. They weren't expensive, either. (All 3 Canons, if you must know). If you're not getting a full set of inks, look for another printer.
Where I am, there's a local surplus store that does robot workshops once or twice a month. Most of the motors, gears, etc come from scrap printers - they'll pile them out back, and recruit the kids and adults in the workship to rip them apart and collect the parts they need. Whats left over, is sent off for scrap/recycling.
Not only does it help teach the kids how to build things, but they learn the value of salvage and reusing components.
Brielle
Disassemble it. Printers have stepper motors and gear trains inside that you can use for robotics projects, buttons that can be repurposed, and often have PCB boards with full-size electronic components that can be desoldered for reuse. The plastic shell (with all parts and PCBs stripped) should be ABS and can be incinerated cleanly in a waste-to-energy system with a sufficient chamber temperature and resident time.
Hacking is the answer to every question. :)
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
...and get completely off the inkjet treadmill.
You will NOT regret it.
The day I switched was when I needed to replace a color in my inkjet, and the new one needed a head clean. By the time it finished cleaning another color needed replacing...rinse, repeat. It took me half an hour to get all the colors working and when I was done a couple of my 'new' cartridges were 25% gone (you want an option to clean a single color? LOL!). I figure it cost me over $20 to print those two pages (and I arrived late for an appointment...)
It was junked soon after that and I bought a color laser. With the laser I just switch on and print. No muss, no fuss.
It cost me about the same as three sets of inkjet cartridges and I figure it's going to print ten times as many pages.
If your printer usage is "occasional" then don't even *think* of buying an inkjet. No, scratch that... just don't buy inkjets, period. Say no. They look cheap in the store but they're the biggest ripoff in IT.
No sig today...
Forgot to mention Printer box. They print the ink cartridge prices right on the printer box!
Simply trash it, learn the lesson and buy a proper printer next time where the company does not hide the production costs of the printer in the cartridges costs.
> Make sure the new printer comes with FULL carts, not the half-or-less carts they often box with the printer.
Submitter here.
I got new, full carts (Cannon 210XL & 211XL) to go with the new printer and still came out ahead. The new printer itself was on sale for $40. Color ink was $26 and black was $16, if memory serves. And that's not counting the half-full demo ink that, like you said, came with the printer. I just didn't want to slashvertise Canon. The ink prices are merely average, rather than highway robbery.
I'm more concerned about pointing out just how bad a ripoff Epson is and figuring out what to do with this piece of junk. Oh, and for those who say "use it as a scanner", you might be interested to know that the Epson printer refuses to do *anything* when it's out of ink. All the menus on the device get locked, even if you turn it off and on again. I don't think that's accidental...
Plus with a laser you just switch on and print. No head cleaning ... watching an inkjet drain all six cartridges just because *one* color is blocked is truly depressing (and I don't believe for half a second that it's necessary).
After owning a laser for a few months I would NEVER go back to inkjets.
No sig today...
Well I probably wouldn't have bought the damn ink from that store. I can get all 6 cartridges for my Epson R200 for less than £6. No, I don't buy genuine epson, my warrantee period ended years ago. It strikes me that in this case, an idiot just spent too much money because they're an idiot. On the other hand, somebody else's going to get a cheap half decent printer out of it.
Even so, brand name refills often have far more ink in them than the "demo size" cartridges in the retail printers. The cartridges that come with new printers often don't have much ink in them.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
Knowing this site, you obviously must mean bile.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
I have a Brother 2170 W el-cheapo monochrome laser printer. It 'just works' with Jaunty and Karmic.
Use it for therapeutic purposes
"I have downloaded hundreds and hundreds of records, why would I care if somebody downloads ours?" Robin Pecknold
Kodak has had their printer line on the market for over a year now, they place the print head on the printer itself
Big mistake, in my opinion. The print head can get clogged with dried ink, especially if you don't use the printer too often. And you must use a special solvent to unclog them without causing damage.
AFAIK, Epson uses the same head-in-printer design, but their cartridges have annoying smart-chips that try to stop you from refilling them. I have seen third-party devices offered that can reset the chip.
Let's concede that the head-on-cartridge design is to be praised, even if it increases the cost of the cartridges. Fortunately there's a robust after-market that supplies knock-offs and recycled cartridges at lower prices. Andy you can always refill them yourself.
IF you're going to use an inkjet then buy refurbished cartridges. They're like $6-$8 /ea from any number of reputable online suppliers. Less if you're willing to buy bulk -- I usually pay around $5 or $6 / ea and get free shipping by planning for the seasonal sales then buy 2-3 complete sets of color cartridges and 4-5 black cartridges at one time. (I have an Epson Stylus all-in-one printer/copier/scanner)
Why won't the Government step in and DO SOMETHING?!?!?! Simply put another tax on printers to create an economic incentive to be GREEN!
First of all, buying ink cartridges is a waste of time and money. I own an Epson R1800, it's an entry-level wide format printer. (13x19 sheet or 13x44 roll medium max) A set of ink cartridges costs over a hundred dollars and when I'm making a lot of prints, it lasts about a month if I'm lucky. I finally said to hell with that, and bought a Continuous Flow System for it. Which was $300 for the system and 4oz bottles of all the ink. (iirc, the cartridges hold 0.4ozs of ink) Four ounces of ink lasts over a year, and costs only about twenty bucks more than a set of cartridges. And the stuff I get is for archival quality photo and art printing. It's lightfast and waterproof just like the original ink.
One of the big problems with cartridges, besides costing too much, is that in most cases it won't let you 'use up' the cartridge, because any time it runs dry you risk messing up the heads. So unless you buy one of those little things to zap the chip on the cartridge (Not a bad $15 investment if you're not ready for a CFS) you only end up using around half the ink in the cartridge.
As for what to do with that 'piece of e-waste'... What kind of geek are you?! Rip that sucker open!! There's all sorts of cool shit in there! Nice motors (Steppers if you're lucky), optical encoders, all sorts of useful springs, gears, belts, and pulleys...not to mention a couple of fairly precise steel bars. I saw something once about a guy making his own drafting pencils by lathing a bar from a printer. :P
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
Me too!
... after all, Linux has been ported to pretty much every device under the sun. Why shouldn't a printer have it's own distro too?
Fifty watts per channel, baby cakes.
Best decision I ever made. The cartridges are broken down by color, under $5 a piece, and easily refillable. Not only that, but the printers are dirt cheap and work in all Operating systems, even *nix.
Consider that the average inkjet has:
2 stepper motors with drive gears, drive belts and spring tensioned end pully.
A rotary encoder (probably 360 deg/ rev.) and linear encoder with encoder tape .
2 or more optical switches with wire harness prepared and the "little swinging door thing" to close the signal.
2 ground steel rods, possibly with brass bushings Ample surface mount components that no one cares about roasting while practicing their surface mount soldering skills. (Data sheets are easy to google and if you desolder well you have free robot IC's)
Assorted gears, wheels, springs, standard sheet metal screws, and more.
If you're concerned about giving it away on Craigs list to someone who will try to resell it to people who don't understand the cost of ink, rip off the useless (non hazmat) plastic covers, take a picture, and label the add "free robot parts."
We teachers, engineering students, and "Makers" know good project parts when we see them. The trick is just knowing where to find us!
Or, if you just want to be done with it check the EPA’s E-cycling resource page:
http://www.epa.gov/osw/conserve/materials/ecycling/pubs.htm
...use it as a UV chamber. I notice the RX 595 is an all-in-one type with flatbed scanner.
You could stick some UV lamps inside and use it to activate photo-resistive PCB.You end up with a much nicer finish than iron-on acetate.
Also, whatever you do, don't be tempted to buy ink refill kits. I know someone who works in Cartridge World; they stock over 300 different types of ink to take into account things like: temperature (cold or vapour), viscousity, pigment concentration, drying time, among others.
If you own an Epson, which uses individual ink 'pots' as apposed to print-head cartridges, if the ink you use is incompatible you could end up nackering the entire print head - and then you may aswell by another printer for sure.
Most of the big printer names have started quoting the ink volumes in 'pages' rather than actual volume of ink, since people realised they were getting cartridges that were only 1/4 full.
I recently got my number 11 HP cartridge, normally 5ml of black from HP, refilled with 20ml of ink, for LESS.
There are occassionally issues of course, cyan in the magenta compartment etc (:P), but proper refill centres have guarantess against that sort of thing.
I was playing left for dead last night and in one of the safe rooms there was a laser printer. I emptied about 8 magazines from the pistols into the thing before engaging the undead.
I replied to FP because on cursory inspection of the replies, nobody seemed to be pointing out the obvious. Since the "ask slashdot" was (per the norm) somebody begging for the obvious to be pointed out to them, they definitely won't read past the first thread.
Does it have a WEEE logo? Do you know what that is? WEEE directive? Who made the product? A lot of companies now will take back old electronics. Some places in the EU companies are required to take things back. Search the net for extended producer responsibility. Maybe ask the epa? http://www.epa.gov/waste/conserve/materials/ecycling/index.htm
Head-on-cartridge was one of the reasons I ultimately ditched Epson for HP. The HP carts at the time had the print head built into the cartridge, so if I ran into problems, I simply bought a new print cartridge and life was good.
Epsons have the print head built captively into the carriage, which makes cleaning the print head all but impossible unless you work for Epson.
I eventually switched away from HP after I ran into a problem with my HP color printer of many years. It seems that even keeping the print head on the cartridge doesn't eliminate all problems. I thought my HP had some kind of print head clog from me not printing in color for a while, but that wasn't it. Turns out it was a logic problem in the printer.
My solution was to buy a Canon. Canon keeps the print head separate from the ink tanks, and each ink color is in its own tank. I purchased one of the 6-color photo printers which had special photo-cyan and photo-magenta colors in addition to the usual CMYK. What sets Canon apart from Epson, though, is that the print head can be removed from the unit and replaced without any special tools. You install the print head when you unbox the unit and set it up, and only ever remove it if there's a problem -- the only downside to this is, by the time you need to replace the print head, it might be impossible to find.
So in conclusion, I would say that head-on-cartridge is good (especially for low volume printing where quality isn't paramount), but having a user replaceable print head is the best possible solution.
the one thing i have found interesting are the ink packs. I personally have an HP printer that uses 02 ink packs. the funny thing about these is the price disparity on the inks. single colors are 11 bucks with black being 20 bucks. or i can get the 5 cartridge (cyan, light cyan, magenta, light magenta, and yellow) for close to $50, but what i usually get is the 6 cartridge pack (same as 5 cartridge, but it adds a black and 150-sheets of 4x6 photo paper) for 35 bucks. I have asked several stores why the 5 cartridge costs more than the 6 cartridge and I have yet to get an answer other than "yeah, that doesnt make sense either"
You're absolutely right and I might add that as part of my business studies I learnt that the most typical example of product performance degrading price discrimination, is how low-end printers are made slower than they have to be for any mechanical reason. That is, a low-end printer might be exactly the same unit as a more expensive model but slower only because of the firmware. It makes sense for manufacturers since the ideal for any company is to sell their product to each given customer at the highest price that customer is willing to pay. That is price discrimination and whilst home users won't pay much more for a printer that is twice as fast as another, businesses will pay that much extra and thus that is a means to achieve price discrimination. Production costs are obviously identical but that way the manufacturer benefits more.
"At Epson, we recognize the importance of preserving our environment and contributing to the global community. With that in mind, we are proud to sponsor a product stewardship program that enables Epson customers to send back used Epson products for recycling."
http://www.epson.com/cgi-bin/Store/Recycle/RecycleProgram.jsp?BV_UseBVCookie=yes
Head-on-cartridge was one of the reasons I ultimately ditched Epson for HP.
[...]
I eventually switched away from HP after I ran into a problem with my HP color printer of many years.
[...]
My solution was to buy a Canon. Canon keeps the print head separate from the ink tanks, and each ink color is in its own tank.
[...]
What sets Canon apart from Epson, though, is that the print head can be removed from the unit and replaced without any special tools.
I also got an HP to avoid the experience my wife had with her Epson. I would have purchased a Canon but at the time, their Linux support sucked. Does it still?
[same AC as the GP]
Perhaps try Rapid Refill Ink?
I ran low on both color and black ink for my printer a few days ago. Buying them from HP, Bestbuy, etc would have cost about $55 + tax, with Rapid Refill it only ran about $35 after tax. Just remember to bring in the old cartridges and they swap them for filled ones right in the store.
I was faced with the same problem several years ago. I found that Goodwill actually grinds printers into little chunks. They then separate the chunks into plastic and metal and sell them. They sell all they can get. Do not through it away, give it to Goodwill. OTOH, if you are into DIY then you can look at an old printer as a gold mine. There is at least one, maybe two very nice stepping motors, some nice gears, and a couple of stainless steel rods inside each printer.
I solved the printer problem by using Ebay to find a place here in town that refurbishes laser printers. Just searched for what I wanted and then said I want pick up only. Found several place within 15 miles. I bought a refurbished HP 4050N for $80, and a refurbished print cartridge for ~$100. The cartridge is rated for about 10,00 pages and looks like it will get there. Average cost, about 2 cents per printed page. I've not yet had to replace the print cartridge.
Before posting I went to EBay and checked for "color laser printer". You can buy a descent new color laser printer for less than $200. You can get a home quality one for under $100. It looks like you can even get an HP 4550n "gently used" for under $100. That's an industrial quality printer, built like a freaking battleship, for almost nothing.
Why would anyone buy anything other than a laser printer these days? Oh, yeah, photos.... I forgot. Isn't it cheaper to have those printed by an online service? I know that not everyone lives a mile from a Walgreens, but a lot of us do. It seems I can send a photo to them, and pick it up in a couple of hours. Why would I want to own a photo printer? That works even when I am on the road. Just find a local store and pick them up on my way out of town.
Stonewolf
When researching what new printer to buy, I make sure that I can refill them easily and cheaply.
When I was doing inkjet, I had a Canon i970, where each color is a separate tank, and refilling involved popping the top open, squirting ink in with a syringe and resealing it, about 2 minutes and 50 cents instead of $8 for a new tank.
I gave up on inkjet though; the only reason to go inkjet is to print color photos, and you can get photos printed at the drug store or walmart or something by uploading them online, and they'll have them printed by the time you get there (I pick mine up on the way to work, so no extra travel either) and it's cheaper than what the ink and paper would cost me, and I don't have to maintain anything.
I currently have a Brother HL-4040CN networked laser printer, which I bought on sale for $200. Refills for all 4 colors are $99 (versus new carts for about $500 for the set of 4). Works great, can sit there drawing 1 watt for weeks and prints from anyone on the network, and was recognized and set up perfectly by Ubuntu 9.10, Windows XP, Vista and 7. Refilling it involves opening a port, squirting in toner, sealing the port, turning a gear to reset the page count on the cart, and putting it back in.
I bought a 2nd printer for $200; because I like the printer and figured it can't hurt to have a spare, and besides, toner carts do eventually die, and $50 each was a good price for replacement toner carts even if I just threw the printer away.
I also only print maybe 5 to 10 pages a day, I've had this printer almost a year and still am on the original carts, I have no idea how long they'll last.
Higher Upfront Costs? Not the case any longer. You can now buy a Color Laser MFC for $120. This gets you a color copier, scanner, fax and printer for that price with a cost per page of $0.05 even on the starter cartridges good for only 1.5/3k pages. The nice thing about toner is it doesn't dry out like Ink does, plus even with the slightly higher price per cart, you get antyhing between 2-5x the amount of printing before needing replacements. I bought my color laser 3 yrs ago for $300 on sale and finally had to buy new toner for the thing. That's 3 yrs for the starter cartridges and the refills I bought, got damn lucky and picked up a pair of Quad Packs for $150 ea. Means the total cost for this printer has only now hit $600 and I expect the thing to be usable for at least 20 years, brining the cost per year down to $30. Can't buy any ink jets for that price today and get a 20 year lifespan plus Linux compatibility. Because of this, I see no reason to even bother looking at new printers. I've got one that meets my needs and has a useful lifespan without costing "Arm and Leg".
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
Are you implying that people still *print* things in this day and age? Weird, who needs a printer when you have a Kindle and a smartphone? ;-)
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
When I buy a printer, I find a model that lets you refill cartidges. I have found a local supplier that supplies 125ml bottles of ink for a reasonable price (3rd party but a pretty close match and doesn't seem to clog up my printers). So I buy a printer and a bottle of each colour of ink, syringes and anything else I need to refill. Been doing this for a few years now. I have only had 2 pritners die in that time out of 5 and for both of them my issue was that I had to throw away ink at the end.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Urgh. The "official" Brother Linux drivers are crap.
I wish my printer had linux drivers. :(
There are booths in the hallways of every mall that will refill the cartridges for cheap. You can get a kit at the dollar store that lets you do your own refilling, and it works great.
I would add to the parent's statement that bigger and more sophisticated printers yield more mechanical goodies that older printers, scanners and especially old office photocopiers have more mechanical 'guts' in them. As newer electronics became smarter the manufacturers could dispense with some of the moving parts (and why wouldn't they). A nice secondary use for the glass from an old photocopier is that being optically flat, they make a perfect surface plate for model engineering use, thus saving over $100 on a machined steel or granite one.
> The "official" Brother Linux drivers are crap.
Then you're an idiot and didn't get a Brother printer that does Postscript. I won't have a printer that *doesn't* do Postscript.
Fuck printers that need drivers.
One option for those who have an inkjet printer and don't want to keep buying new ink cartridges is to buy a continuous ink resupply system and some bottles of ink, instead. I did that, it works, although it can be messy if you're not careful with the ink bottles.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
When I went to Staples to buy ink a couple weeks ago (yeah, I know, it was something of a printing emergency) the guy behind the counter was helpful in finding the ink I needed. And when he checked the price he said "You're probably better off buying a new printer." Refreshing honesty.
I did end up buying a new printer which fortunately was easy and trouble free to set up. (remember the rpinting emergency).
What to do with the old one? I've scavenged a lot of the parts out of it. Between it and another printer that I found on the sidewalk I have most of the parts I need to build a decent quality CNC machine. If I end up cycling through any more printers I'll start collecting parts for a 3D printer. (like RapRep or MakerBot.)
"Pedantic"? Moi?
You are welcome on my lawn.
Why the heck do you need to print anything anymore? Forget the e-waste dude, you're a tree killer! :)
Why should it be rated troll or off-topic? It is neither of those two things. It is an on-topic post that adds valuable information to the discussion. Doesn't matter where it's placed.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
Oh the Geekiness!
In my area there's a place called TechShop which takes pretty much any old electronics that have re-usable components. They are then free to use for the members who want to make something (robots, clocks, plotters, mobiles, whatever). See if you've got one where you live.
The obvious answer : collect the stepper motor and driver board. When you have a few, build a CNC router or laser engraver.
No, I really do. It does great color and I like the scanner. I have an Epson V500 scanner also, and they both use the same software. I love the system. Now, the cost of cartridges I do confess is driving me batty. I am about ready to get one of the continuous refill systems, like this one for $70: http://www.inkproducts.com/ink-store/catalog/Epson-Continuous-Ink-System-CIS-For-Epson-R260-R280-R380-RX580-R-p-435.html. But when my Epson RX 595 dies, I'm going to get another one.
Dump inkjets and switch to laser. Color laser printers aren't as cheap as their inkjet counterparts, and the toner cartridges do run you a small fortune, but from a cost-per-page standpoint, laser beats inkjet anyday. I rarely use my laser printer which means, on average, I change out toner cartridges every two years, whereas with an inkjet printer I was changing them out every month because the damned cartridges would clog from disuse. Not a problem with toner.
"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." - Bertrand Russell.
A mid-range or high-end recent inkjet will produce very high quality photo prints. Many professional photographers use inkjets to produce their fine art prints for sale. The best inkjets have a color saturation and sharpness that is superior to dye sub, with droplet size small enough that it takes a strong loupe to distinguish. Most people have trouble with inkjets because they buy cheap inkjets.
That said, the biggest argument against them is the frequency of use. You do have to use an inkjet to keep it in fine printing condition.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Use it until it stops working and then throw it away. It's the way the market is currently set up, for consumer dye ink printers.
If you're an occasional user, the next time you need it your $80 set of cartridges will probably be dried up anyway, or it'll be dried up at the print head, requiring cleaning that consumes a significant portion of the ink remaining in your cartridges. Or the print head may never come clean, leaving you with the choice of living with a streaky image or replacing the printer. It's best just to get another.
You know that dye ink printers are a loss leader to get you to buy overpriced ink cartridges. If you can't afford to switch to (more expensive) pigment ink or toner printers, the only reasonable choice from a financial standpoint is to buy a new printer when yours runs out of ink. Yeah I know it sucks for landfill, but what does one do? Fortunately most consumer dye ink printers fit conveniently in a typical garbage can, saving you a visit to the dump.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
If you only print occasionally then an inkjet will dry up and you'll have to clean the heads five or six times every time you want to print something. Five or six cleans is a third of a cartridge so printing gets very expensive.
I've had my laser for two years now and the toner is still 80% full .... and the best part is that I just switch on, print, switch off.
Bottom line: The economics of lasers works no matter what your printing frequency is.
The only reason I can see for owning an inkjet is if you're a professional who needs to print high-def glossies on A4 paper several times a day.
PS: For printing your holiday snaps one of those little sublimation printers is better than an inkjet (or just print them with the machine at the mall).
No sig today...
An old printer you don't want is a good way to find out if it's really true that aftermarket refill kits will damage a printer.
Try it, what you learn will save you a bundle.
That used to be true, but Canon has been putting chips in their cartridges for several years now (my ip4300 has chipped cartridges). I had two Canon S520s that I ran thousands of pages through--those took $2 generic ink tanks. The ip4300 has similar looking ink tanks (no printhead), but they have chips on them, and generics are more like $8 due to the chip.
Sent from my iPhone
If you're using that printer for photo printing, you may be paying twice as much to print your photos at home as it would cost to have them printed at a store (upload, order, pick up) or to have them printed by a service (upload, order, get in mail).
The quality from the store will probably be better as well.
Of course, if you're printing out nekkid photos that you don't want anyone else to ever see, print them yourself.
fencepost
just a little off
I am the submitter. Anss123 and Grishnakh are entirely correct. The damned thing locks out the menu and refuses to do anything unless supplied with ink.
That's why I was so frustrated with that piece of crap Epson (and why I made sure to mention the brand name in the summary). Mind you, I did NOT buy it originally. Grandma did, and she's no techie.
I hate it when HP sells 'demo' ink cartridges with the printer (5 ml), and the stores carry the 60 ml sizes. Don't get me wrong, paying $92.50 for 60 ml of fluid should make this champagne worth $1156.75 per bottle, or $2300+ per magnum. Gasoline at that cost would cost me (Chev Malibu) $70,145,833.33 (seventy point one million dollars). It seems like its a bit expensive to me.
.
Why? It's costing you money. What do you save by keeping it? Maybe my attitude comes from listening to too much Dave Ramsey lately (g), but sometimes you just have to cut and run.
As others here have suggested:
1 - Donate it.
2 - Throw it away.
3 - give it to someone you don't like for Christmas. :)
Cogito, igitur comedam pizza.
I put all of my used electronics in the large green metal storage box in the parking lot. That way if I need one or more items in the future I can just call the number on the big box and I assume someone comes out and retrieves it for me. The box seems to have an almost infinite storage capacity so it seems like a better plan than just throwing the stuff out.
Epson used to do this (maybe they still do). The problem is that the print heads can dry up and stop working, or just fail, when this happens the printer is useless. With other inkjet printers you get a new head each time you change the cartridge.
Send the pos printer back to Epson.
The best thing to do is look at the price of ink/toner before buying the printer. This was the first thing we did when me and the old lady were looking to buy a new printer.
Apparently you don't know the bird is the word.
It gripped her hand gently. 'Regret is for humans,' it said.
My favorite part of the whole movie is when Michael throws away the bat and attacks it with his bare fists.
I've felt that kind of animosity for inanimate objects many times.
Nah... just do this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfCYzJAgwrw
Here be signatures
I still have, and use, an Epson 740 (circa 1999) as my primary printer. Black cartridges cost me ~10$ at the local grey market computer shop. It even got me through university. As soon as they started including print heads in the cartridges, or shutting down all printing until the color is replenished, I said 'no thank you' to the idea of a new printer. Something tells me I am not Epson's target market.
With a note..
It's called capitalism and it isn't perfect.
Gut the thing for the stepper motors. I will GLADLY pay for the shipping for you to send them to me.
With the right skills, that'd probably be quite doable. A standard printer, by its nature, is capable of precise control of several motors, with input from several sensors, based on input from a buss of some sort that is easily connected to common computer hardware. With newer HPs(the ones whose guts I'm most familiar with) the printer even tends to be built around one or more ARM SOICs running VXworks. I'd assume that other manufacturers aren't fundamentally different, though their SOIC and OS choices may differ.
Unless they've really locked down the board(disabled JTAG, goofy firmware encryption tricks, etc.) you could probably just reprogram the existing board, and use it as an interface between the computer and the bag of motors and sensors. This would be particularly cute, of course, now that wired and wireless network printers have really come down in price.
If your l33t skills don't extend to reprogramming undocumented embedded systems, there is still the nice collection of motors and sensors(and possibly some drive circuits that can be chopped off more or less intact) ready to be connected to an arduino or something.
http://lasermonks.com/
I haven't paid full price since 2003.
Inkjets have higher resolution than dyesub printers. I explored dye sub printers but returned to Epson inkjet printers for high quality prints. Some people will argue that the wide range of ink levels that a dye sub can place on the paper will make up for the low resolution (typically 300dpi), however the dye sub ink also spreads and the heating element has a slow response so you don't even get 300dpi. A Epson Inkjet can place dots a 5760dpi so it can reproduce high resolution detail; the ink dots need to be dithered to produce shades, but the dithered pattern can still be placed at 5760 dpi compared to a dye sub can only place a pattern at 300 dpi. Another way to look at it is that a dye sub can place a fuzzy pattern on a 300 dpi grid, but an Epson Inkjet can place a fuzzy pattern at 5760 dpi and this does make a big difference. Inkjet printers also have a wider range of inks so product a much better color gamut. For example: if you combine the CMY on dye sub you get a dark brown. An Inkjey printer typically has a black ink for better blacks. Inkjet printers are a good option, and dye sub and laser printer do not appears to be replacing their quality any time soon.
Or do you plan to keep doing this?
Go to Ebay and buy after market cartridges. To get 6 Epson cartridges for my R300 printer cost about $80. I found that on EBay, I can pay less that $30 for 3 sets of catrridges, and that is after shipping charges! Thats less than $2 per cartridge folks.
I have an ancient LaserJet 4 HP printer , I will cry when it dies . I had several inkjets and i vow never to go back , I used to buy them and when they ran out of ink go out and get another ($25 for printer or $30 for black ink ?) . I got it from my wifes work with spare toner .
i have no sig
Different model, but otherwise "ditto here." I never installed drivers from Brother; the foomatic/CUPS ones do the job fine.
Buying a whole new printer with camera and ink is cheaper than buying the refill ink cartridge. LOL!
Fsck ./ ./
Bad
Kodak consumer printers use pigment inks? I'm impressed! I'll have to check that out.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Being only 20 years old I have never owned an ink printer and I am very glad. I bought a laser printer (monochrome I admit) for $90 Australian. It's been going strong for 2 years with no issue and no refill. It gets carted 500km up the highway and back twice a year, it gets neglected for weeks at a time and still it just works. And it's fast (at least on Windows, the Linux driver is a bit dismal).
> Just be wary of the flyback transformers in these old CRTs.
> Make sure they have been discharged before you mess with destroying monitors via the Office Space route.
If the flyback transformer still stores energy after you carted the CRT to your field, then you might want to send that remarkable device to the LHC guys at CERN, who would sure like to have a look at it!
How the hell does PostScript imply "doesn't need a driver?" Oh, you mean you don't "need a driver" because any UNIX app with print capability does so using PostScript? What this really means is that a printer driver is built into every fucking application that exists. That's RETARDED design. I don't want to have to figure out PostScript (which, when it comes down to it, is an implementation detail) just so my app can print something.
And don't even get me started on the fucked up architecture of App->PostScript->Pre-filter->Print-processor->Post-filter->lpr in order to speak to a printer that does NOT use PostScript. No, everything in the damn universe should not have to divert through PostScript land to speak to a simple raster-based print device.
Oh, did I mention that PostScript is device-raster based which means that any device that uses it (especially color devices) needs to have a shitload of RAM?
The "wonders" of PostScript are one of the largest mass-hallucinations in the UNIX world. Dude. I do not need my printer's PDL to be a Turing-complete programming language.
Used to work for HP and this is one of the serious stupid aspects of how they've run their business over the last two decades: their only real value and IP, dollar-wise, is inkjet cartridges. They don't make much else themselves (OK, blade computers but I'll bet not that much of it is actually hp-made even then). This is such a weak business model and position it's absolutely mind-boggling! Pretty much why I liquidated every share of stock and stock option I had the first chance I got.
I could care less about printers, but the fact that the same model is used in the nuclear industry is abhorring. Rather then developing the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor for which there would be plenty of thorium fuel (thorium is way more abundant than Uranium) they keep selling the Uranium technology so they can keep selling fuel at premium prices. In effect running a fuel cycle, as opposed to the Thorium one, which is know for its notoriety as a source of fissile material which can potentially end in nuclear weapons. Thorium on the other hand has a fraction of waste by-products and barely any significant quantity of potential weapons materials.
And for photos, dye-subs. Even if they don't beat inkjets on dpi, my 300dpi dyesub beats any 1200x1200 in actual results. You JUST DON'T see the millions of dots with dyesub, it's all blended together, and because there is a clear coat, no smearing of the images, even if you lick your fingers and go across the picture right after it was printed. It looks as good or better than from professional print shop.
Um, no- dye sub (wax) printers produce unbelievably fragile prints. You can scrape the wax right off the page with your fingernail, it creases easily, etc. Also, since it's a dye, and not a pigment, it fades within months.
They also suck up enormous amounts of energy and take a good 5-10 minutes (or longer) to warm up because it has to melt (and keep melted) all the damn wax and internal printer bits. Even with fairly sophisticated energy saving functions, the damn things still eat you out of house and home, and the melted wax has a smell that permeates the room. If you want to move the printer, you have to trigger a special cool-down mode and wait a good 30 minutes so that you don't spill wax inside the machine...
Please help metamoderate.
Target practice? How many .40 S&W rounds do you think it can take?
The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power. -- Daniel Webster
Inkjets suck, they drain your wallet whether you print a lot or not... if you print a lot you use up the ink, if you don't the print heads can get clogged and you waste ink on the clearing process-- or worse, the clearing process doesn't work and you have to replace the cartridge anyway.
Get a laser printer. If possible, an older one that has been well taken care of and was a popular model (to ensure that you'll be able to get toner for a while). The older stuff, particularly HPs from the early 90s, was really built to last-- especially compared to the cheap, throwaway shit that is sold today.
I'm still nursing along an old Apple LaserWriter Select 360 that I bought new in 1994. It cost $1400 at the time. Toner carts for it cost about $80. I'm only on my second toner *ever*-- including the (full, not "starter") one that came in the box with the printer. I just got Snow Leopard to play nice with it, since the printer doesn't speak TCP/IP and Appletalk is gone from SL. A decent parallel port print server and less than an hour of monkeying with it to get the settings right, and I'm back in business. I may buy a color laser at some point, but as long as I can get it to work with my current systems, I plan to keep and use the Select 360 until one of us dies.
~Philly
Second. For office environments I'm a total "laser printer ONLY" Nazi but last Christmas I bought a Kodak ESP-7+ and I couldn't be happier with it. The ink is cheap, cartridges last a reasonably long time, and so far this thing hasn't had any problems. Even the wireless printing and scanning works!
Ditto everyone else: buy a laser printer. But since you didn't, buy it from Staples. They have cheap(er) refills... see http://www.staples.com/Stylus-Photo-RX595-Epson-All-in-One-Machines/cat_CL163297 Or... check Google Products.
HP now has inkjet printers that have cartridges (940xl) that print ~2,200 pages for $35.
The "first post" was a troll/off-topic post. His was not on-topic to the thread. It was on topic ot the story, but not the thread it was contained in. By your argument, we may as well not have threaded replies because all comments are prudent to all conversations.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Hi, welcome to Slashdot! Irrelevant, humor-destroying pop-culture references are one of the many things geeks love.
A reference isn't a joke. The joke was funny in context. Out of context, it's just a shibboleth.
I've got an old printer that I intend to take apart and use the innards on a terrain project for a miniature game. It will be thrown away, but it won't be in a land fill.
Heroscape, it's like legos combined with anachronistic wargames.
Be aware that they don't offer any Linux drivers! You'll need to run XP, Vista, or 7 in a VM in order to be able to use the printer if you are a Linux user.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
Practice printer sequestration. Keep your old printers out of the environment. Use them for footstools, coffee tables, stack them to replace your sofa, bedside table, bed, cover the wall with them instead of wallpaper, fill your basement so you add additional support to help hold up all the printers.
There's no way that a pigment can cost thousands of dollars per liter.
Agreed, but people will pay for it. Fiorina drove HP into the ground by drooling over short term profits from ink while neglecting the core business that had made HP great 20 years ago.
R.I.P. Hewlett-Packard. We will miss you.
-Former HP employee
You also need an audio system of some sort and a copy of "Still" by the Ghetto Boys.
I use an HP LaserJet 4, that my company gave to me when they were throwing away all the old printers and getting new ones. So it was free, in 2000 or so. I've been using the original toner cartridge that was in it when I got it. So that's what I suggest, a big old used Laser. Only problem is it uses the Parallel Port which two of my new computers don't have.
My laser printer, an HP LaserJet 6P, was pulled out of a dumpster at some point in the distant past, and is still running strong after all of these years. I print a relatively light workload on it, but it's survived several moves and a lot of accidental nudging over its life. (It's currently eleven years old.) Would that all of my consumer goods performed so admirably.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I've usually found that the cartridge that comes with the printer has about half as much ink as a new cartridge - so even if a new printer costs about the same as a new cartridge, it's usually better to get the cartridge. (Not always - sometimes a store will be selling the Model N-1 printer a lot cheaper, and sometimes it's helpful to have a spare printer in case the other one breaks, but it's seldom helpful to have more than one spare.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
It was off-offtopic, and therefore on topic. Also, I might point out that you're bitching about moderation and complaining about people being off-topic in the very same sentence. See the irony? Finally, you meant "pertinent", not "prudent".
Nah... just do this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EK2tWVj6lXw
But place it on top in full view. SOMEONE will pick it up, and think that it is a deal.
This sort of problem has been around for years (Decades). One friend of mine would purchase some of those cheap, crappy printers on sale, then when it ran out of ink, he would swap it out for another disposable printer.
One thing I tell everyone who goes printer shopping is to look at BOTH the price of the printer AND the ink. That way they do not get stuck with buying really expensive ink.
You might have *paid* less this way, but it certainly didn't *cost* less: http://storyofstuff.com/
What are you talking about? I have none of those issues. Pictures from 5 years ago, not faded. It registers less than 1-3 watts in stand-by (but I unplug it anyway). When I start it up cold as in not plugged in, I could print in less than 30 seconds - now, I have no clue whether this is just waiting for the OS of the machine to start and selecting my picture or there is really some warm-up time. There is no wax coming off the page with a finger nail, I just scratched a picture - nothing, it is clear coated. There is no transit time, the little guy even has a handle to be portable! I never ever smelt wax from the thing.
You must be either talking about ancient machines or big ones which I'm unfamiliar with.
Mine is a previous generation of this Sony (otherwise mostly same):
http://www.amazon.com/Sony-DPP-FP97-Picture-3-5-Inch-Tilt-Adjustable/dp/B0022NHQBY/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=office-products&qid=1259906998&sr=8-1
For 8x10 prints, there's Hi-Touch, which from their 4x6 printers I tried, were similiar to my experience on my Sony.
> My reading of the summary suggests that the guy got the new printer with the starter cartridges and extra full ones for less than the cost of refills for the original printer.
Submitter here. Your reading is 100% correct. I got a new $40 printer as well as a 210 XL (black) and 211 XL (color) cartridge for less than Epson's ripoff ink carts.
Much as I am a fan of small government, the government does have a duty to regulate the market. How about a general regulation that prohibits a standard sales price that is less than the manufacturing cost of the product? I.e., no loss-leaders. It's pretty clear that the printer manufacturers are selling the printers at a loss, planning to make it up in ink sales. If they sold the printers at a fair price, the markets both for printers and for ink would be less distorted.
For what it's worth, I second the earlier vote for HP lasers. However, be careful: HP has a mid-line of devices (such as the CM2320) that they have gutted. Although marketed as network printers, they are intimitely tied to a PC - they cannot process anything themselves. They rely entirely on the processor in the PC for everything - even scanning a picture! There are dirty tricks even in the laser printer market...
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
For a start, it's very good printer. I have one. Edge-to-edge printing, CDR printing, and 6-colour photo printing to a very high quality. Second, it's a good flatbed scanner too - so it can do photocopying without the host PC being on. Third, it can print straight from files on USB sticks and flash cards.
Now I'm not saying you're using all those features, but frankly you seem to be bitching about the cost of a full set of carts for it. There are two other options: el cheapo cartridges as others have pointed out are a lot cheaper than originals, or you can buy individual ones - and I find it hard to believe you've run out of all 6.
For me, it's not a problem. The cartridges last a long time, the photos it produces are wonderful and (so far) are fade-free, and it's a very quick copier/printer for other documents. The scanner's great too.
In summary, the cheapo replacement printer will NOT BE AS GOOD, unless you're only using it for printing, and only printing documents, not display-quality photos. In which case, she bought the wrong thing to start with.
I use this with all my Epsons and it works beautifully and by far the cheapest.
Refilling the cartridge takes me maybe 2 mins all in all.
It's nice to have thin latex gloves if a drop of ink spills, it's kinda hard to wash out from hands and fabric, but that's a minor bump...
I haven't had a printer in the last five years.
Thats not to say I've never needed one, but when I do I go down to the shop and have them print it out - sure its more expensive, but then I do it maybe thrice yearly.
Just don't print, duh!
Bite the bullet and get a new machine. All of the advice to go laser is outdated by most of the modern inkjet printers. Always remember to check ink prices were you will be buying them in the future.
Many of the low-end laser machines now are MORE expensive per page than inkjet printers, and have WORSE output to boot.
See, this is why I keep my own squid.
Chinese importers are selling cartridges for the popular HP and Epson printers with Resettable Chips that can be easily refilled. Not only can these cartridges be refilled, but there's no waste, so you don't have to toss your printer or cartridges. I call it the "CMYK Revolution" (as opposed to the "Green Revolution"). The only downside is if you have a shaky hand, you can squirt ink all over the place during a refill, but other than that, the whole thing is a no brainer. Oh, and the inks are really good too, smudge proof and fade resistant, every bit as good as the OEM ink. If anyone's interested, PM me and I'll hook you up.
Printers and scanners are excellent sources of scavenged parts for robot projects. They contain motors, stepper-motors, pulleys, belts, gears and all sorts of other useful bits.
He who laughs last, thinks slowest.
User want these printers. When they go out to buy a printer, they search for a cheap, a very cheap printer. They don't look at the quality, or the price of the consumables, the only look at the price. Once they start using the printer they see the quality sucks and the ink is as expensive as gold. And then they start complaining. It is there own fault, they should have looked at what they bought, not only at the price. And because the users want cheap, the constructors give them cheap machines and earn there money at the consumables. The cheaper the printer, the more expensive the consumables, and this counts for all constructors.
I still use my epson LX 800.... Dot Matrix forever....
Send it back to the manufacturer with an explanation, I am sure this will stir some corporate uproar internally and no one will know what to do with it.
Buy a laser printer!!!!!!! Unless you "need" colour - and lets face it most of us don't - buy a mono laser. Higher initial cost, longer life, cheaper per page cartridges..... hell you'd have to be mad not to. We went mono laser while our children were still at school because of the costs of them printing a colour page and then binning it because they noticed a mistake.. No guys, you want colour, you colour it! Now we have mono networked laser - Brother 8460N. I'm sure there are similar other brand printers out there that are just as good. Do we print in colour? Yes! at the friggen photo booth.
on weekends that i decide to go shooting, I usually bring useless tech garbage to my range and shoot it all to hell.
Epson is the only manufacturer that uses piezoelectric printheads in their inkjets. These in theory (when used properly with good quality ink) could last for a life time. That's why the printhead is not replacable (well... at least notuser-replaceable...). HP, Canon etc. use bubble-jet technology in their inkjets which relies on heating the ink so it's being pushed onto the paper. This technology is much more prone to failure (heated/cooled ink clogs the jets, micro heaters in the priniting head just burn and die). That's why those printheads are replaceable - they are also a consumable. Epson's solution is in theory superior.
Google and you will find all about it.
You're a douchebag, like GP AC said. You gladly insult people online, but I bet you're a whiny little coward in reality. I'm ACing here so that you get a taste of that for yourself.
Local Cartridge World here used to push Canon printers, but now Canon are forcing people to buy new ink. (They, Epson and other printer manufacturers sabotage their printers so they won't work with refilled cartridges.)
If you buy a Brother inkjet printer, all their cartridges can be refilled at a fraction of the cost and they don't play games with their
printers/cartridges to prevent refilled cartridges from working.
What you do is buy a CISS (Continuous Ink Supply System) I have been using them for years. They only clog up when you go on holiday for a couple of months in the hot weather. I pay around $50 for a system with 6 colours and refills. Made in China, of course! I make hundreds of full-colour prints each year as teaching aids. I never buy "genuine replacement cartridges".
Some even cheap printers include some good rotary encoders and servos. This robot was build mainly from parts of old streamers and printers.
Buy a new printer every time the ink runs out, donate the old one to a school or charity for the tax credit.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
The problems with dye-subs is the print will last maybe 10 years (according to Wilhelm). That's great for a picture that you will hang on your refrigerator for a while and then be replaced, but not as good for something that will last longer. Another problem is because the ink and paper come as a kit, you don't have much choice as to the paper, and likely there will be no clone versions of the ink/paper combinations, and when the manufacturer stops making it, you need to replace the printer. Dye-subs are great for things like photo setups at festivals, where you want something that can do print after print for fixed costs all day long, and the photo is immediately protected against the elements.
We had a pile of useless office all-in-ones that were donated to our radio station that did the same thing. We ended up hauling them off to an electronics recycling event - they were all useless, and half of them required special power supplies that didn't always get included with the machine. At least the laser printers use standard 110/220V power cords.
I've actually got a few old inkjets sprinkled around that use cheap reman'd cartridges, and a ancient beast of a LaserJet 4 as the primary printer. One Brother PSC/Fax, that is more trouble than the rest of the printers combined. I pray for the day when that thing chokes on its own vomit and dies - we've got the money for a HP laser all-in-one waiting...
Why can't I mod "-1 Idiot"?
I just always use the laser printers at work. Brings my costs down to zero.
I'm a satanic clam.
check on google an look for deals its great for save money
Some years back, before the manufacturers "invented" half-full starter cartridges, I saw a presentation by a Lexar rep to a major school district. The guy was a newbie; he used a cost analysis showing the district would be MUCH better off buying a huge quantity of their loss-leader printers and discarding them when empty, than ordering cartridges for them. Oddly enough, I never say that particular Lexar rep on the circuit again...
Or a mac :) No windows here...but it works fine. It is true though they do lack proper linux drivers at the moment but hopefully they will come or at least offer to open things up so the community can make their own.
Seems to me cameras went digital, I wonder if the next digital revolution will indeed be e-readers (not the current somewhat bulky ones but ones that actually virtually replace paper)...
If they have a Freecycle distro for your area (Google it) you can get rid of it painlessly and to someone who probably needs it.
ive got a dell all in one, and it scans fine, with or without a cartridge in the printer. and with or without a printer driver. in fact i can get the scanner working with the scanner app that comes with xp, without even setting up the printer drivers, which require more downloads.
This printer costs between $500-$600 canadian. I believe it was given by our dealer because they couldn't sell it, or because they knew that if we used it they would make a small fortune selling us replacement toner. Their are 4 toner cartridges each costs $80-$90 for xerox brand replacements. The cartridges are rated for 1900 pages which is like going through a box a tissues! Any serious printing of full color pages would burn through the toner in a month or less. Needless to say we use it sparingly, and collect $1 per page from students to use it. The toner almost costs as much as a the printer did new. How insane! While we are happy to have a color laser printer, I would never have bought this one.
I don't think it's ever going to catch on.
They can also be very economical to run. You just have to refill them yourself. I buy my ink from inksupply.com (there are probably a dozen places on the internet to buy ink) and it costs me about $1.50 to refill a cartridge. I have had cartridges last for years. The trick is to refill them before they go completely dry.
No problem... I just buy the new printer. It's a loss leader, aka the company selling it takes a loss it plans to make back through ink sales, and I don't buy ink. So they subsidize my new printer.
For the old printer, I recycle it... either through an electronics recycling facility, or through my own hobbies. Printers usually have one or more stepper motors, timing pulleys, belts, useful metal shafts... great for amateur robotics folks. The electronics can be used for BEAM robots.
Long term I'm planning on dumping the printer altogether... once e-ink books get to the point where they're color and cheap, I won't need paper hardcopy, I'll just transfer over the docs to my e-book.
Erik
You are confused. Dye-Sub Wax. Do a little searching before you show your ignorance.
Oh yeah and someone mod parent down since it isn't informative, it is incorrect.
If you can't be good, be good at it!
Dye-sub is not wax. Dye-sub transfers color from a dye applied to a plastic film in a heating process. Dye-sub prints CMYO where the O is a water & UV light resistant overlay layer instead of black dye. It is very durable.
As for myself, I recently ditched all ink-jets in the house and just got a color laser printer. One of the best things I've ever done. I will never buy another ink-jet ever again.
I bought a cheap printer 18 months ago. During those 18 months, I printed 20 pages at most, only letters I had to send to organizations that you can't send email to. The ink in the printer, no matter how little they put in, will probably dry out before it runs out. Compared to those of you who buy new cartrigdes every one or two months, how many trees have I saved?
Just don't print. Save trees.
no, I don't have a sig
If you do end up stuck with a printer, or printers, you might want to see if you are, or if you know, any electronics/robotics hobbyists. Even cheap and ghastly printers contain a reasonable supply of motors(some conventional DC, some steppers) and gears and optointerrupters and other fun little gizmos. The larger and more sophisticated printers can contain pretty impressive quantities of such.
I always hear about how an old inkjet would a great starting point for a robotics project, but I can never find any practical examples. A Google search yields nothing. It sounds like a great idea, but does anyone have pointers to a real project that can be built with old printer parts?
You obviously don't care that you created the ewaste, otherwise you would've paid the extra money for the ink.
If, along with sales tax, there were a consistent return deposit imposed by the government.
This return deposit would reflect the cost of proper disposal.
In many states this has been done with soft drink containers so the establishment of infrastructure is demonstrated.
At a personal level, ask yourself, what the disposal cost (per unit time) is for the product. :-)
(and yes I am trolling
A while ago I was averaging the cost of ink per mL and it worked out to about 10 cents per mL. Considering an average 1 Litre bottle of wine is about $10, that makes ink 10 times the price of wine.
I know some kids that used to draw stamps on the envelopes. Little birds, a christmas-tree etc. They even drew in a crude border with tacks like stamps have. They sent me one and I still have it. With stamp from the PO.
Please do NOT donate to your local school district. some clueless administrator will thank you profoundly. Then they will give it to a teacher (or business or Computer Science dept.) and expect the teacher to smile at the gift. When the teacher asks for money to buy ink, they will be berated for wanting to spend that amount of money. If they ask for a printer with reasonable ink/toner costs, they will be yelled at for wanting to spend precious district resources when they have a "perfectly good' (though inkless) printer. We got this a lot when people wanted to get rid of mercury. Give to the the school! Do you have any idea what it costs to get rid of hazardous waste? Of course, the teacher caught the flack! oh, well .....
For home use buy one that uses the same cartridge. /.
I learned that on
No brain, no pain.
Reading this article, I have just had one of those lightbulb or epiphany moments.
If inks cost more than a new printer, why should I care about the manufacturers warning that using third-party inks will damage the printer? I'll never buy the branded inks again.
Just stop buying Inkjets. Color Lasers have dropped in price and provide better output and cost less over the life of the printer. Problem solved.
I assume you're referring to wax phase change printers such as the Phaser 800 series and its subsequent models, as opposed to dye sublimation printers. Dye sublimation printers don't need to keep any wax melted; the print head sublimates the wax using a thermal printing head. You can think of phase change printers as similar to inkjets, while dye-sub printers are similar to thermal receipt printers. Dye sublimation != phase change; they don't even use the same type of pigment (dye sub uses dye on a ribbon, while phase change uses wax with pigments).
As a prior owner of a Phaser 850 phase change printer, I can say that I was generally happy with it over the 7 years I owned it -- except for some rubber solenoid heads turning to goo due to the high heat in the printer. I also got to maintain a Phaser 8400, which made its users quite happy. One great advantage of these printers at the time they were released was that they had a very small dot size and excellent registration (as all the ink comes out of a print head, as opposed to a drum transfer process in a color laser) and printed faster than the color lasers of the time. They did all of this at a relatively low upfront cost, and Xerox even gave you black wax ("solid ink") for the life of the printer for the cost of shipping. Companies such as MediaScience quickly replicated the wax recipe and offered comparable consumables at an extremely low cost.
That said, phase change printers do suffer many of the flaws you mention; the standby on the Phaser 850 was about 250W, IIRC. The later models brought that down some, but the printer did need to keep wax melted and the printhead hot, which made their power costs relatively high. The printers also chew wax at an incredible speed, especially since they have to dump part (or in the case of the 850, all) of the melted wax if they ever went through a power cycle.
Nowadays, the advantages of the phase change printers are more or less gone; color lasers have caught up and come down in price, while cheaper inkjets do the job well enough with a lower upfront cost. That's essentially squeezed them out of the market.
The Freelance Wizard
Buy printers that can use generic brand ink cartridges and also make sure when you buy it, that the cost of an ink cartridge is not >= to that of the printer, also don't buy new printers right away, as the makers know this, and will intentionally lower the cost of the cartridges temporarily to make it look good, then raise the price on the cartridges , I usually wait 6 months to a year before upgrading to the next model.
You know, one of the problems with ask slashdot, especially if you get on a story shortly after its been posted, is a lot of times, I miss if a good answer was ever found. No I hear you dude, I am running into this issue a lot myself. Epson has gotten to where they chip their cartrages now, so generics are practically illegal unless and you end up having to get them imported. The problem is, Epson constantly changes their cartraige standard. If your printer is over a year old, you practically can no longer find cartrages for it, and if you do, they are freakin expensive.
I have gotten to where I keep my epson stylus cx6000 around simply because its a great scanner and useful as a card reader, but I cannot find ink for this thing hardly anywhere. I started getting cheap printers for around $40 that I use for my every day printing, and just throwing them out by the curb when the cartrages go bad and getting new printer. Talk about a huge carbon footprint I am leaving.
Usually, if I need to print documents or something, I will either do it at work or church, and for pictures, I just send them off to CVS or Walmart as the quality is better, and its MUCH cheaper than printing at home.
Wait until your company disposes of their old workhorse laser printers to replace them with fancy color laser printers. Grab the indestructible ones, refurb them yourself for fifty bucks, then print forever on one toner cartridge.
Use 3rd party ink from online vendors... MUCH CHEAPER. www.inkjetcartridges.com. Don't worry i dont work there and not spamming slashdot. I've bought from there and had good results.
Freecycle is a great place to go to get rid of stuff. Believe me, someone will want it. And you can usually arrange for them to pick it up. Find a local chapter, join the group and then post your offer. You won't get any money for it, but maybe someone could use it. www.freecycle.org
You can throw it away, or you can get yourself some nice stepper motors to play with. Buy or build an Arduino board and make something completely new with them! There is plenty of info in www.arduino.cc Or you may check other online stores to buy some extra components. Fun stuff!
Don't tell those poor people that! Kodak easyshare has the most bloated software around (and you *have* to install the software, it won't let you just install the driver) I've seen the easyshare software install fail more often than I've seen it succeed (and yes, I have worked with around a dozen different models), and you'll feel a rage like you've never felt before when you call Kodak support trying to find out why your brand new printer won't share over the network properly, and the tech tells you that the printer *doesn't support that.*
Doesn't support simple printer sharing?
Kodak printers are the worst out there, no doubt about it.
The cost of your printer is almost meaningless. Focus on what it'll cost to run the thing--long term. This PC Magazine article should help.
Since the submitter made the video, wouldn't he/she hold the copyright on it?
Even if the submitter made this video, this video is not the only video on the submitter's channel. Other videos on the submitter's channel aren't entirely original; they may contain criticism of other copyrighted works under the fair use defense, such as this video about the similarities between a U2 song and three other songs. For partner channels, the scope of what qualifies as fair use becomes more strict than it is for non-commercial channels.
The fixed head clogs up anyway. Fell for it twice already.
Using head-in-cartridge style printers now, haven't looked back since.
Epson is garbage in the first degree.
I've become fairly skilled at answering such questions: I disassemble the thing into its constituent parts, setting the circuit boards aside for my city's next toxic waste round-up. Most of the item (whatever it is) is easily recycled plastic and metal.
Cranky educator.
koff RepStrap /koff
best sort for this are defunct HP All in One "bricks as the rails and head blocks are pretty standard.
Doesen't have to be pretty, and the existing positioning hardware is able to achieve resolutions of fractions of a mm with minimal effort.
If it works on the Mac, and not on Linux, that'd be surprising... Considering Apple makes CUPS, the Linux/Unix printing software.
How about you stop being a sucker. Try buying a real printer (I recommend a Xerox Phaser Solid-Ink printer). Yes you spend a large chuck of change up front, but guess what? You will SAVE money on ink over the life time of the printer, and best of all the printer actually works and works well. Oh, you might think that cheap inkjet printer works fine, but believe me by comparison it's a piece of junk.
:T:R:A:N:S:
All Fedex Kinkos (Fedex Offices in some markets now) Have a consumer electronic recycling box, that gets shipped out once it's full. I don't know where it goes, nor do i care, all I know is that the box leaves once a week.
It is true that the lower end inkjets overwhelming make their profits via supplies and cost per page is not overly competitive (as in NOT). It is also true that the higher end business inkjet products are designed for low cost per page. They generally have longer life print heads and larger ink supplies. There have been some claims in the marketplace that these higher end products can have lower cost per page than equivalent color laserjets. However, if you just need monochrome there are some inexpensive laserjets that can't be beat when you look at overall cost of ownership.
There are a number of sources now for Canon cartridges with the chips needed to work perfectly fine. I've been using them for a while now with zero problems; the printer still thinks I'm using Canon ink. It's not AS cheap as the old non-chipped cartridges, but they're still cheap compared to factory ink.
I have an old HP LaserJet 1200 that I use for everyday printing.
Cost me nothing (office castoff, IIRC) and i snagged a new cartridge for all of $30 (my dad had spares, too). I have about 5000 pages worth of print capacity for $30. My only regret is that is isn't networkable natively (haven't gotten a print server for it yet).
I'm eyeing a Color Laser, but there's no hurry.
I gave up on Ink long, long ago.