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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."
Ship it back to the manufacturer if you want to make a statement. Corporate HQ is probably the best since they don't have the on site means/processes for disposal.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
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.
Arrgh for the love of mod points, that's insightful.
Next - a series of combat robot competitions where the components must come from discarded printers. Who's game?
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
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.
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.
Oddly enough that really isn't as satisfying as you would think it would be. I took my old monitors and computers out to 'the pit' on some private farm land I owned. Using a shotgun was a little risky because of the potential of those pellets scattering and bouncing back when hitting metal parts. It's also too limited in range to use from a distance and I would rather not die from something as stupid as destroying old equipment. That left longbarrels like rifles. Those bullets just leave holes and do no further damage (Though one of the CRT tubes imploded when they were hit and took out much of the monitor.)
I next tried pouring my equipment with gasoline because of its high combustibility and hoped the bullets would collide with metal and create sparks. It doesn't work that well. Those scenes in the movies where the cars always explode after shooting the gas tanks--not as easy to do in reality as you would think. So imagine trying it on old electronics.
In the end the best two plans are to rig it with explosives or do the good old Office Space scene by taking a baseball bat to the office copier in a field. Not only do you feel more invigorated at letting off some steam at the copier but you will leave feeling much more satisfied. 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.