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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."
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.
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.
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What company sells full cartridges as replacements ?
And what good is a printer with no ink, which will require expensive ink cartridges, be to the Salvation Army? Or to put it another way, what makes you think they will have any more use for it than the poster has?
This is like the folks that will give the Salvation Army their old 486 and think they are doing the Salvation Army a favor, when in truth all you are doing is making the Salvation Army pay for disposal.
www.eFax.com are spammers
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
It's also a scanner. Donate it to a school, maybe they need a scanner but don't care about printing (at least from this device).
This is the WORST bait-and-switch with new printers. You're absolutely right, those dirt cheap new printers are often boxed with sub-volume starter ink and then you have to turn right back around and get a set of REAL ink cartridges.
That's because you're buying cheap loss-leader printers. My $1,000 colour laser printer came with full-capacity toner cartridges. The best thing that could happen would be for people to break the cycle and refuse to buy these crappy printers and their expensive ink. But that'll never happen - people find low initial outlay very attractive.
Don't be dumb! Looks like you can get a pair of complete refill sets for $33 to me...
I suppose it's possible that there are other factors that affect the price of a printer than print speed. But I may be wrong.
as this is a family site).
You must be new here!
Free Martian Whores!
True.. But gee, why is that...
Oh, your $1000 printer?!? Hmm... Why doesn't everyone rush out to drop $1000 on a printer. I just can't guess...
Sorry, but a lot of all-in-one inkjet printers (such as Epson) won't scan unless there's ink in the ink cartridges. So if you give someone one of these printers without ink, it's absolutely useless.
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.
Yep. Laser printer for 99.9% of my printing needs, color is either online photo printing (whats the going rate these days, $0.09/3x5"?), or if you need it TODAY I go through wally world for about $0.24/3x5". I don't know anyone who prints enough color photos at home to justify the cost of owning a photo quality printer at home. Unless your home color printer is a dye impregnation printer, that hp-uberjet ink is going to fade in 5-10 years anyhow.
moox. for a new generation.
Wait, what?! I think the printer companies are as evil as the next /.er, but that's a whole new kind of evil. That's almost cell-phone company evil, come to think of it. Have you personally run into this kind of behavior?
This.
..and no worrying about driver support or spyware.
Kinko's and/or Staples for all your occasional printing needs. For less than the cost of an ink cart, you get an entire lifetime of printing service.
Seriously.
"His name was James Damore."
That seems to indicate that you can't use the business reply envelopes as labels on heavy objects and such. If I'm understanding this correctly though, you could theoretically smash up the printer first, then place it inside several of these envelopes. Pack them up nice and heavy so they cost more too.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
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.
Woah people use inkjets in offices? Pretty sure we were talking about individual use. By that I mean, we are talking about home use. Inkjets haven't been used in offices/schools/libraries in years.
... which I'm sure I'd replace before then anyways. My tray only fits 200~300ish sheets but that should be plenty for a home user. And depending on the type of workplace they are probably the cheapest/best choice available in many corporate situations.
For major office use then yes I can see spending more. For regular people an 80$ laser printer will last 5years of normal use. Unless the 1000$ printer is supposed to last 50years
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.
Um, that's theft.
No sig today...
Me too!
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.
It'll never happen because people are bad at math. They look at the initial cost and that's what sells it, without of course taking into consideration the limitations of inkjet printing. Like for instance, how much ink is used per page, such that in the best case, you will only get a couple hundred pages out of a cartridge before you have to buy a replacement. That adds up. Moreso if you don't print that often, such that the jet nozzles get clogged with dried ink and the cartridge (and all that ink inside) becomes effectively worthless and you have to buy a replacement anyways.
It costs about $250 to replace the toner cartridges in my color laser printer, but these are cartridges that last for years without problems. You just use 'em until they run out of toner.
And then of course there's the quality of workmanship you're buying in the printer itself. That much more expensive laser printer is far less likely to break down on you than an el cheapo inkjet printer where the ink costs more than the damned printer.
"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." - Bertrand Russell.
He was talking about wanting people to change from using inkjets. That IS a home use. So most of your list is unnecessary. As your sibling post points out colour laser printers have come down to 120$. 5ppm is fine for home use. Poster printers or anything much bigger than legal/letter will cost a fuckton and not for home use or even office use. 35,000pages per month is plenty for small business use. Hooking it up to your computer(home) or a secretaries negates the networking need. If you NEEDED it you could spend 15$ extra on a router and get something that supports a printer.
And lastly for #6, cost comes into play here. The cost of maintenance, even if it is only a few hours a year will be more than the cost of a whole new cheap printer. Reliability is replaced by the fact that you can buy 10 of them for the same price.
Say they only last 2 years each (Seriously I haven't had a printer die on me ever... even my inkjet which i think is in the basement still probably works, though I am not a heavy user)... And you buy 5 of them. That results in pretty huge savings. Even if the big ones are uber reliable they will need maintenance over those 10years, add 150$ minimum. Also the tinier printers get constant upgrades or get cheaper so they are flexible.
Honestly unless you run a big office with tons of people on the same printer it makes NO sense to spend 1000$ on a printer. And even then it might make more sense for there to be a few smaller printers.
The sub-$100 laser printers are just as bad as the sub-$100 inkjets: they come with starter cartridges, they don't have network hardware on-board, the consumables are expensive, they aren't rated for high duty cycle, etc. You get what you pay for.
Some people don't print much, and are ok with using their desk computer as a print server, in the preceding discussion there are people who talk about getting years out of the starter cartridge. True, the consumables tend to be expensive, but not if you don't use them much. If you need a standalone on the network, 40ppm, and run 10K copies a month, you need to spend more.
If you don't need color, and are in a metro area, you can probably find a decent HP-4, -5, or -6 cheap at a thrift shop (aside from the 4P, I think they all use the same print engine). HPs are nice because there's lots of places selling aftermarket toner at reasonable prices. My HP-6MP cost $1.49 (sale day at Salvation Army) and the only thing wrong with it was a missing lifter spring in the paper drawer (which turned out to be identical to the spring in the dead HP-4P in my junk pile).
"You get what you pay for" is an overrated expression. Sometimes you do, sometimes you don't. And sometimes you get a lot more.
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.