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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."
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.
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.
[
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'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.
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.
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.
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
The ink cartrides that come with the printeres are never 100% full, they are only about 25% full. It's just starter ink, to get you to buy more in.
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.
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
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)
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.
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.
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.
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?
I've come across this before. It's *way* cheaper to buy a new printer each time ebay the new one & keep the ink (sold as new, get more money) than to keep buying new ink.
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
Don't be dumb! Looks like you can get a pair of complete refill sets for $33 to me...
quite a cottage industry has sprung up the last couple of years. You can get ink/toner for a 1/4 of the cost of new when you refill.
Go to Staples, near the back of the store there will often be an electronics recycling bin. Leave the printer there.
If you haven't factored in the cost of disposing of the "empty" printer, you really have no idea whether it cost less than the replacement ink. I suspect that the only way you will "save" money is by externalizing the disposal cost by simply (and irresponsibly) throwing the printer in the trash.
If you can't find anyone who wants a perfectly cromulent printer, find a way to recycle it. I used to use Greendisk, but now my town holds semi-annual electronics recycling. If your locality doesn't, bug them about it...it's much more practical to recycle in bulk, and you'd be doing a really good deed if you could get it implemented.
Make her buy a laser printer. They are much MUCH cheaper than inkjets. Cost per print is fantastically cheaper. And unless you only do a few prints a year it makes perfectly good sense. For a student they pay themselves off in 6months.
If your going to dump the printer then why not try a local recycling company as to not create more e-waste. Some cities have non-profits like FreeGeek [ freegeek.org ] that can re-use computer equipment.
Push harder towards Open Media/Content
http://www.amazon.com/Epson-Claria-Hi-def-cartridges-T078920/dp/B000I7VL08 Is the OEM ink from amazon for 50$.. If you don't require the HD Claria Ink then get some regular/cheap ink on ebay for 15-20$. Expect to pay more for anything at a local (Best Buy) type store..
Sometimes you can find after market refill kits, with which you can inexpensively refill your cartridge.
It's truly sad and disgusting when we have a society based on swindling one another.
Another peeve of mine; Tropicana juice and Haagen Dazs ice cream, once sold in pints (16 oz) are now 14 oz.
Caveat Emptor!
My 100$ b/w laser printer came w/ full cartridge. I bet yours doesn't print 10x as fast... or w/e metric you may have thought made that a valuable purchase. (Colour can be had for less than 10x the price I'm guessing)
That wouldn't work out for me. I buy the afforementioned "loss leader" printers and then buy cheap third party ink cartridges from places like lasermonks or something. Buying the expensive printer up front would just waste money for me. Of course I don't print much so I'm sure it's worth it to some people to have a nicer printer. My "starter ink" lasts me more than a year.
Check out my lame java blog at www.javachopshop.com
if only there was some agency to break up anticompetitive cartels who keep prices high at their discretion....then again who am I kidding, they're bought out by lobby.
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
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.
This is exactly what I do. I only need to print a couple pages every 1-2 years that I can't just print at work. So when that day comes, I try to print on my current printer. If it's being troublesome or the ink cartridges are no longer good, I go buy the cheapest $20-$30 printer I can find. Of course, that doesn't solve the article's problem of what to do with the old printer that probably works just fine once you buy $80 worth of ink for it. I usually try to give mine away for awhile to any friends or relatives who might be interested and then throw it out if I can't get rid of it. Next time around I may put it up on freecycle.
Collect donated waste printers from people on the net. Then epoxy them together as a monument to the efficiency of capitalism!
The ink cartrides that come with the printeres are never 100% full, they are only about 25% full. It's just starter ink, to get you to buy more in.
What's worse is I have an inkjet printer sitting around that is about a year and a half old. I didn't use it much and the estimated ink levels were still at 3/4. One by one as the 1 year mark hit my printer began telling me the cartridges were expired. I ignored the warnings until finally the printer simply refused to print until I replaced them. I was so angry over this that I ended up buying a cheap laser printer on sale; and an extra high yield toner cartridge for less than the cost of replacement ink. I still use the inkjet once in a while; I replaced the OEM ink with aftermarket ones which as you can imagine were less than half full.
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.
$1000 for a Colour Laser printer!!!! I paid $400 for mine and still have nearly full toner, I only print 5-6 documents a month and love the fact that a laser printer can sit for year unused and you don't have to worry about the "ink" drying out and thowing out your printer. The only bad thing is I cannot make T-shirt transfers with a laser printer..... No big loss there.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
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.
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.
There is indeed one born every sixty seconds.
more cowbell
Or some people seriously only print a few pages a year. I bought a printer for $60 almost 2 years ago for home, and I'm still on the original ink cartridge. Apart from printing out the odd recipe for my wife, and printing out my tax forms, I find little use for dead tree.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
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.
The starter or even the regular ink, once in the printer, the countdown has started. In a year the ink will be 'out' according to the printer software (well HP and Epson anyway I cannot say for others). The printer knows it has 'old' ink and tells you it cannot print. I used a two year old still in the air tight package cartridge, and the printer still said the cartridge was empty. I can feel and see the cartridge is full, but it still would not work.
Ink jet printers are using the razer blade method of generating profits. The printer is cheap since all the profits are in the ink.
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
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...
How do you keep your ink cartridge from drying out in that amount of time?
When we still had a ink jet printer, it seemed like we had to replace the cartridges every couple of months since they would dry out or clog up.
*sigh* back to work...
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.
Don't you have Internet cafes? Most have a printer that you can pay to use.
I try and print anything I need to at work -- it's probably about 1 page a month, almost always concert/train/plane tickets bought online or sometimes a map. About twice a year I can't do this and have to cycle to the nearest internet cafe -- it's much cheaper than owning a printer myself.
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.
Or some people seriously only print a few pages a year. I bought a printer for $60 almost 2 years ago for home, and I'm still on the original ink cartridge. Apart from printing out the odd recipe for my wife, and printing out my tax forms, I find little use for dead tree.
I went to kinkos and printed out the few pages I needed this year for $1.74
How about a home automation system built entirely from scrap printers?
uh, Office Space anyone?
Maybe they modded it redundant for posting a reply to an obviously pointless post to get their post up near the top of the page instead of in a separate thread on it's own. Some of us have our comments sorted by rating to hide threads like such. Now, redundant certainly is the wrong mod, however you could consider it trolling for karma, or off-topic.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
As somebody who's volunteered at FreeGeek, please don't do this unless you absolutely have to. Printers are extremely difficult for them to recycle: they have to break it down into the various types of plastic, then circuit boards, then metal parts.
Best to not buy these products: second best is to suck it up and buy the ink, even if it is expensive.. and chalk it up to a learning experience. Making it "somebody else's problem" just plain sucks.
I second that. After my Epson 3-in-1 died, I bought a Kodak 3-in-1 WiFi model for about the same cost as comparable Epson/HP units. But the ink is less than half the cost (so I bought replacement ink cartridges as well).
The old Epson? I'll be taking it apart for the motors :-)
will it blend?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
pc load letter what the fuck does that mean?
Then later in the day in jammed on me and then at end of week I took to the woods and beat the crap out of it.
They also come with a full set of cartridges out of the box!
They sell sub-100$ laser printers now...
I have a Kodak AIW5500 that I love, I've never had a paper jam and it will print double sided with the included duplex attachment.
The only real annoyance is that if I leave it plugged in to the computer overnight it gets lost. I have to unplug the usb cable if I'm not going to print for awhile. Of course It could be the computer, I haven't done a clean install of Windows since I built the thing 6 years ago and it is starting to act flakey.
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"
Totally agree with this, I buy a Lexmark or what ever I can get thats the cheapest for printing and when the ink runs out I find some one who wants a year old printer for free (people buy a new ink cartridge and get a practically new printer for what ever it costs to buy some ink)
I get a new printer and usually some paper and other goodies out of the deal.
I just cant stand paying the same amount of money for ink as a new machine when I know the ink will dry up or "expire" in the same amount of time anyway.
If I printed more I would be all for buying ink since I could probably get more out of my money that way.
I do feel bad about the E waste but thats a problem that needs to be tackled at the manufacturers of Ink and Printers, I cannot honestly believe the price they charge for ink... It should be cheaper to fill the damned things then it is to buy a new one.
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.
Oh and $10 for a black cart and $20 for the color.
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?
Also Canon.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
We went through this higher in the thread. That is a completely asshole thing to do, something for which you really should be ashamed if you try to do.
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.
Waterproof colour print that looks great on plain paper, very low cost per page, built-in duplexer, on-site service for five years from purchase, higher duty cycle, etc. I know a good inkjet can produce better-looking print on special glossy paper, but on plain paper, the laser wins hands down.
Yeah this is yet another example of irresponsible production of goods and services. What would happen if we taxed the F! out of companies that produced products based on the ENTIRE PRODUCT LIFECYCLE including disposal and deprecation.
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.
bedder? wtf...
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.
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.
It's not "bait and switch", you imbecile. Stop using that phrase if you do not understand it.
The illegal practice of "bait and switch" involves advertising a very attractive product offer, and then advising customers it is unavailable and attempting to sell an alternative. I.e., "baiting" them with the sale on one product and then attempting to "switch" them to a different product.
If a practice is unfair, deceptive, or detrimental to a consumer, it is not automatically "bait and switch". If you don't stop "bait and switch"ing, I'm going to download the interweb into your modem.
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.
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."
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.
Perhaps, but I doubt your $100 printer will survive as long, or will take as heavy a duty cycle, or has built in networking (add the cost of a print server to you $100 if you need to share it in an office environment), or can carry as much paper in the paper tray, or has multiple trays from which it can print assuming you may need several different types of letterheads or templates, or can print duplex, or any of a huge number of features that one may pay extra for their printer to do.
Then there's the cost of fixing the fact that you're a total knob, which in your case is probably going to be pretty expensive.
I hate printers.
Urgh. The "official" Brother Linux drivers are crap. You get a 32-bit x86 only binary. The visible parts of it such as the shell scripts are really badly written (and break if /bin/sh is dash and not bash). The .deb files are created by alien. They install files in strange locations such as /usr/local. I could never get it working with cups and ended up using lprng and manually configuring it. Then it really doesn't work well. For example, it always adds a huge margin to the top of every page so I have to adjust the margins to be 0 at the top if I actually want something to print how it is meant to be. And they don't maintain it at all. The driver I downloaded when I got the printer is still the latest.
I had the same problem, but before buying my next inkjet, I found out which B/W cart were best value, then bought a printer that used them. In the end I switched to Laser for general printing as the ink does not evaporate when not in use, and a photo printer for ..., But the photo printer is more expensive than just going to a shop and getting them printed there.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
One's that would effect the average consumer? DPI on 'loss leaders' is high enough to not be an issue. The only thing left is doodads. My printer was honestly likely 80$, and also has a good flatbed scanner, can fax, decent display, and plenty of buttons for fast photocopying.
GP suggested that people generally should buy 1000$ printers which I thought was pretty hilarious. I agree with him generally. In fact if he said 100$ I would have 100% agreed with him... could have been me saying it. 0$ inkjet printers are pretty common here (comes with something else). Pretty sure my local staples gave a printer with every 4000 sheets of paper you bought (or something equally stupid). Having people step up to a cheap 50$ printer would be good. Less wasteful and the cheapest solution available for printing. Like I said elsewhere cheap laser printers pay for themselves in 6months vs a free inkjet.
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.
There are.
- Does it have a network card?
- Does it handle duplexing?
- Can it handle "nonstandard" paper (cardstock, label, etc)?
- Does it take just the normal 8 1/2x11 paper, or does it go all the way up to 11x17?
- What's the duty cycle? (number of pages before things like imaging drum and fuser need replacement)
- Does it use a toner cartridge that costs $80-90 for 6,000 pages, or like the current set of $100 piece-of-shit Sharps, a cartridge that costs $100-120 for a mere 1000 pages?
- What's the tray capacity? 50, 100, 150, 500, 1000, 5000 pages?
- How reliable is it? (e.g. can you expect a "random" jam error every 1000 pages, 2000, 2500, 5000...)
- How much memory does it have?
- What's its native printing resolution? Does it spit out 600, 1200, or higher DPI, or does it take (for example) a 2000dpi camera image and crunch it down to 600 or even a cheap-ass (looking at you again Sharp) 300 dpi?
- What form of color calibration does it have, if any? How "true" are the colors it gets from manufacturer-standard cartridges?
I could go on, but I think you get the point. A cheap piece-of-shit Sharp model won't do for networking an office of 50 people after all, you need something designed robust enough for high volume and a long duty cycle...
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.
My $800 b/w laser printer did too, but it's also over 5 years old.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
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
"Here honey, here's a google map of where you're going. Just swing by Kinko's and print out the PDF here on this USB stick ... you know, the Kinko's out by highway 50? No, it's past the Wal-Mart ... No, not that one ... here, I'll put another map on the USB stick to help you find Kinko's."
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
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.
If you can live without colour then a cheap laser is still a very good proposition. Even on the "starter" toners it comes with you can get several thousand pages for something that costs under £100 new. Even the colour ones are coming down in price now, although they tend not to be much good for photos and the toners are probably come with even less toner than the black and white ones do.
Laser prints also last longer and don't smudge as easily as ink.
I really can't see much point in having a colour inkjet these days. You can buy photo prints online so cheaply now they cost about the same or less than an inkjet costs to run per picture. Oh, and don't forget the cost of photo paper and wastage when you make some little mistake. Maybe it would work out better if you re-filled your cartridges but re-fills tend not to perform as well as originals so won't get you the same quality as online print shops anyway.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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.
Agreed on laser. Still I can get a laser printer for 60$ and get huge savings per page. The rest I doubt the average consumer needs. I guess I'd be happy to see people make the jump for the extra 60$ to go laser and end up saving money after a thousand pages.
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 $100 and with cheap, good aftermarket ink from dozens of sources.
You have two choices. Buy aftermarket ink, or grab your ankles and pray for good lube. Ya gots ta do yer homework before buying.
Where I am, there's a local surplus store that does robot workshops once or twice a month. Most of the motors, gears, etc come from scrap printers - they'll pile them out back, and recruit the kids and adults in the workship to rip them apart and collect the parts they need. Whats left over, is sent off for scrap/recycling.
Not only does it help teach the kids how to build things, but they learn the value of salvage and reusing components.
Brielle
There are hacked cartridges that evade this chicanery. http://cgi.ebay.com/Continuous-Ink-System-For-Epson-R260-R380-RX580-Printer_W0QQitemZ370299562964QQcmdZViewItemQQptZBI_Toner?hash=item563792ebd4
Our good friends the Chinese have devised all sorts of bypasses.
Disassemble it. Printers have stepper motors and gear trains inside that you can use for robotics projects, buttons that can be repurposed, and often have PCB boards with full-size electronic components that can be desoldered for reuse. The plastic shell (with all parts and PCBs stripped) should be ABS and can be incinerated cleanly in a waste-to-energy system with a sufficient chamber temperature and resident time.
Hacking is the answer to every question. :)
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Woah people use inkjets in offices? Pretty sure we were talking about individual use. By that I mean, we are talking about home use. Inkjets haven't been used in offices/schools/libraries in years.
... which I'm sure I'd replace before then anyways. My tray only fits 200~300ish sheets but that should be plenty for a home user. And depending on the type of workplace they are probably the cheapest/best choice available in many corporate situations.
For major office use then yes I can see spending more. For regular people an 80$ laser printer will last 5years of normal use. Unless the 1000$ printer is supposed to last 50years
"The ink cartrides that come with the printeres are never 100% full, they are only about 25% full. It's just starter ink, to get you to buy more in."
For a number of years this hasn't been universally true. I boiught an Epson pingment ink photo printer for $99 that had an honest $160 worth of ink. When it ran out of ink I bought another one...
Keep in mind ink is $9 a quart from the right place. You're paying for more than ink.
Need Mercedes parts ?
...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.
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
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)
Yeah, saddle them with the burden and expense of an old inkjet. Your good deed for the day!
Oh, wait, you made $2 on the deal ... 'donations' FTW !!!!!
No sig today...
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*
You can get a Konica color laser at Tigerdirect for $119 so they have finally come down enough that it is stupid to buy the el cheapo printers anymore.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
... 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.
Printers are serious business...
(P.S. I agree with all of the above =P)
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 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.
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"
- What's its native printing resolution? Does it spit out 600, 1200, or higher DPI, or does it take (for example) a 2000dpi camera image and crunch it down to 600 or even a cheap-ass (looking at you again Sharp) 300 dpi?
comparing the dpi of a printer to the dpi of a camera doesn't work. Printer dots are on or off (1 bit), camera pixels are gradual (usually 8 bit).
http://p8ste.com - Web based Clipboard
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
"The ink cartrides that come with the printeres are never 100% full, they are only about 25% full. It's just starter ink, to get you to buy more in."
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
How do you keep your ink cartridge from drying out in that amount of time? When we still had a ink jet printer, it seemed like we had to replace the cartridges every couple of months since they would dry out or clog up.
You just clean the cartridge. I normally send people to http://www.printerhacks.com/how-to-really-clean-an-inkjet-printer-in-5-simple-steps/ for the procedure. It works well.
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
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 cost of building a trebuchet and enjoyment of launching the older printer over the Potomac River is well worth the cost of buying a new printer every few months.
-- Missing_DC ( District of Columbia )
How amazed would you be to suddenly find that you just forgot what I wrote and you needed to reread my post.... again.
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.)
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.
There's numerous things that can be worth paying 10 times the price.
1. Color
2. Speed
3. Different paper sizes i.e. "legal" or custom paper feed
4. Network capability
5. Extra paper trays
6. Support for a long time (being able to buy toner cartridges, maintenance kits, etc.)
6. Reliability
That last one is the key. Your printer is likely to shit out within 2 years whereas one that costs 10 times as much will likely be around for 15-20 years. More with regular maintenance (or even non-regular maintenance to fix a couple small problems).
Some of these printers are rated for page counts in the millions with regular maintenance.
Also, good luck finding replacement cartridges 2 years down the road, if your printer makes it that long.
You're also assuming that this guy is using it for home use. It may be a small office or home office printer where much printing is needed on a daily basis.
You were attempting to criticize his poor purchasing decision but apparently you didn't bother to think about what's actually going on here before flaming.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
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.
"My $1,000 colour laser printer came with full-capacity toner cartridges."
$1,000?! Buddy you bought the printer and ten toner packs for that price, you better believe they should give you full toners with a $1,000 color laser printer.
My $99 color laser printer came with toners two-thirds full but no complaints, it'll be awhile before I print 1,000 pages (two reams of paper!) and by the time I run out there will probably be another $99 color laser printer that's twice as fast, heck I still haven't used all of the starter toner in my $50 b&w laser printers.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
I printed it out at work for $0.
But I agree- I used to work on printers at HP, and while there I got rid of my printer. Post college I would use it 3 or 4 times a year max, and it made no sense to pay for ink when I could run to Kinkos or a dozen other places if I forgot to print it at work.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
When did you buy it? I bought mine over 5 years ago and it was indeed 1000€. It also does Duplex, PostScript Level 3 and is networked. You paid for that back in the day. Not these days anymore, I know. I wanted a B&W printer which was much cheaper, but my wife insisted on colour. (Kindergarten teachers... Well, I guess they need it.) Oh, and I got full toner too.
Anyone asking me what printer they should buy gets the reply: A Laser... B&W if you can live without colour, especially that printing photos is not economic.
I love it when ACs argue. It's like watching a bum having a fight with himself.
Actually, in CMYK printers the dots are 2-bit, because there are 4 colours of ink.
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.
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.
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
.
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.
http://www.brother-usa.com/Printer/ModelDetail.aspx?ProductID=hl2170W
It comes with wired AND wireless network support built in. It did ship with the lower capacity toner cartridge, but at 1500 pages, it should still last a couple of years at the expected use rate (home office + school kids). The high capacity (2500 page) replacement cartridges were $46 OEM or $27 for generics.
The ink-jet cartridges for the printer this one replaced cost ~$30 a pop and lasted only a couple of months before they 'dried out' (half full). Even at $46, a 2500 page toner cartridge should last 3 or 4 years.
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.
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.
I've been using continuous ink for 2 years now - bought my hp c6180 pre-modded in Seoul, where I live. Prior to this I was spending about $350 a year on ink. In the last 2 years I've spent $10 because the 100ml refill bottles only cost $5 each. In about 2 months I'll need to buy another bottle - magenta this time.
So what if using this voided my warrantee. If my printer breaks, I'll buy a new one and use the same continuous ink system and it will pay for itself the first time I need refill ink.
Apparently you don't know the bird is the word.
It gripped her hand gently. 'Regret is for humans,' it said.
My favorite part of the whole movie is when Michael throws away the bat and attacks it with his bare fists.
I've felt that kind of animosity for inanimate objects many times.
Except for one tiny problem: laser jets are as harmfull to ones health as somebody who lites a sigarette in your room. I don't know what it's called... fine dust?
Here be signatures
Nah... just do this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfCYzJAgwrw
Here be signatures
I still have, and use, an Epson 740 (circa 1999) as my primary printer. Black cartridges cost me ~10$ 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..
Our good friends the Chinese have devised all sorts of bypasses.
What do you mean, why's it got to be built? It's a bypass. You've got to build bypasses.
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.
Eh? Your comment doesn't make any sense. Do you speak English as a second (or third) language?
Gut the thing for the stepper motors. I will GLADLY pay for the shipping for you to send them to me.
I hear you. I built a trebuchet and launched my old LaserJet over the Hudson River in the middle of January this year. Not sure where it eventually landed as there was an Airbus A320 obscuring my line of sight.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
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.
That line is from the movie "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy".
Since you did not recognize it as such, you are instructed to proceed directly to the front office and turn in your geek card and all keys, swipe-cards, or other company-owned security devices in your possession.
Oh contrare, the fact that you are attempting to use such a poor movie as an official canonical source of geekdom means that you are the one who should report to the nearest security checkpoint and surrender your geek identification. Oh, and bring a toothbrush - you're going to need it.
http://lasermonks.com/
I haven't paid full price since 2003.
No way man! I've become pretty certain that inkjets are inherently less reliable -- even for the same price. And toner always goes further than ink -- per cartridge of course, but also per dollar.
After going through three inkjets in as many years and too many ink cartridges, I got a ~$100 Brother B&W laser printer. I've had it for 2.5 years now; it continues to work perfectly and I'm still on the original (originally 1/2(?)-full) toner cartridge! And when I need to print something, I can count on it working reliably. The only downside is the lack of color, which frankly doesn't concern me at all.
You're right; it doesn't have network hardware. That's not much of an issue since (1) I have a 'nix server running for other purposes anyway; CUPS does the trick nicely (works from Windows too, without Samba on the Linux side), and (2) even were it not for #1, the fact is that the printer's next to my desk anyway, so plugging the USB cable into my laptop directly would not be an issue.
Obviously other people may have other requirements, but I don't think that the kinds of use cases I described are atypical.
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.
"Ones"
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
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.
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.
They just have two sizes; it was the smaller one. The only reason it stopped printing is because they have one of those idiotic designs where the printer refuses to work when it thinks it's out of toner. Unfortunately most Brother lasers I've seen can't tell for crap how much toner they have. Trust me, it'll do that with the next cartridge you buy too.
<sig> </sig>
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).
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.
Indeed, they _are_ doing everything they can to make the consumables more expensive. Smaller and smaller toner cartridges. Doubtful they'll be able to make them as expensive as ink cartridges but I'm sure they brainstorm the idea regularly.
I'm still nursing along an HP1100 on the home Hawking server for large (and slow) book-sized B&W printing because the 3000 pp cartridge is easy to recharge at least once reliably which comes out to a really nice cents/page ratio.
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
This s an interesting statement. In all the many, many years I've owned color inkjet printers, photo printing has been something I've almost never done. When I print In color, I'm printing things likes reference charts that use color, or color documents, and other similar things. Color is definitely useful for things other than photo printing.
Stylish sheet to fix many problems in Slashdot's D3: https://gist.github.com/801524
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.
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.
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.
You also need an audio system of some sort and a copy of "Still" by the Ghetto Boys.
I have a word for you. That word is "Kinko's".
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it! --Longbottle
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
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.
laser jets are as harmfull to ones health as somebody who lites a sigarette in your room. I don't know what it's called... fine dust?
I don't print enough to notice this dreadful side effect. However I can tell you my toner last a lot longer than 6 months!
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.
And toner doesn't dry up or clog like ink cartridges. I'm nursing a toner cartridge that's over 10 years old and it still prints with the same quality as it did when it was new.
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!
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.
I agree, those old HP LaserJet printers work really well. I think I somewhere have one from 1992 still running perfectly.
I don't know about the sub $100 laser printers, but the cheap sub $500 colour laser printers are often fairly decent. My parents have an HP at home and it seems to be well designed. Even the cheap Konica Minolta ones last fairly long with one in our company now only falling appart slowly after several years.
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.
The movie may have sucked, but the line is in the original radio series. Which was excellent.
So then you have to color all the points? I think you need 3 bits to also represent "no ink".
no, 4-bit
Cbit Mbit Ybit Kbit
proud caffeine whore
- Does it take just the normal 8 1/2x11 paper, or does it go all the way up to 11x17?
I don't know. I'm simply happy that it goes to 11.
But if your printer is cheaper than the ink you should invest in a more expensive printer. It'll save you money in the long run, and whatever you do for God's sake stay away from HP. (unless you can score a laser printer from the early '90s those were built like tanks.) It's not worth the grief.
8 bit? Drop your Grandpa's Mavica and get a real camera please. It may get converted to 8bit per channel in the camera butt your average modern sensor records in 14-16 bit per channel.
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.
My parents have had a (heavily used, as they're running a small business) HP-5P printer for like 10-15 years, and it's working as well now as the day they got it. That's quality. (me I don't have a printer, I don't print much and I live close to school so I use one of theirs (HP, color, duplex) for free when I need one :))
You can get black and white inkjets? Perhaps this is telling about me but i dont think ive ever seen a monochrome ink jet, (although im sure they did/do exsist.)
You are entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
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.
> 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
I absolutely agree. For year I was using an old HP 4, and now I have moved on to an HP 6. Windows 7 still has the right drivers (!), and it is working like clockwork. The toner lasts a few thousand pages (still going strong), and a replacement costs less on ebay than your average ink cartridge.
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.
Nah... Unless you spill the toner (which is a very fine plastic particles mixed with pigments) it's practically harmless. Airborne toner (and I mean a huge cloud) would be a serious issue as every other fine dust (particulate matter like PM10 and lower) would be. To learn more I suggest you check: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PM10 Some time ago there was a study about potential Health & Safety risk associated with laser printers (photocopiers) as they emit some amount of ozone while working - but still it isn't an issue in a even average-ventilated office. If you have a dozen of those machines sitting in a tiny room with a window that never opens - that would be some area of concern - but still I wouldn't be panicking. Regards
- What's the duty cycle? (number of pages before things like imaging drum and fuser need replacement)
- Does it use a toner cartridge that costs $80-90 for 6,000 pages, or like the current set of $100 piece-of-shit Sharps, a cartridge that costs $100-120 for a mere 1000 pages?
I don't think those are independent questions. The expensive cartridges for cheap printers seem to include a drum (and possibly the fuser too - printers aren't my area of expertise).
I use ISO 216 paper you insensitive clod!
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.
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"?
out of curiosity what exact printer did you get ?
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
Gack. I bought a continuous ink system at someone's enthusiastic recommendation, and it was a nightmare: a Rube Goldberg mechanism that leaked, had hoses that kept coming off, and was a major pain to prime and to move. Does anyone make a printer that is designed from the start to take bottles of ink?
I bought a $300 HP printer that printed horribly dark pictures directly from the built-in card reader. It used their new Vivera inks and I expected better.
When calling HP about it, someone named John, with a horrible accent, from halfway around the world (I'm trying to be politically correct now...) told me that the inks that came with the printer are "starter inks" and are not designed to be used to print anything. They were supposed to be used to flush ink placed in the printhead at the factory that kept the heads from being dry. He said I should buy an entire new set of inks and he'll be "happy to take my order right now".
What a crock of BS!!! I was able to get pictures to print just fine when I printed from software and not from the built-in card reader. It was a poor excuse for poor printer internal software.
I decided to keep the printer because it has features I like, and I was still able to print decent pictures using my own methods. I have since then bought 3rd party inks and they do just as well as the official inks.
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...
... but that's what comes standard in Europe in all printers! :-)
Herve S.
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)...
Not only that but a camera image DPI is entirely arbitrary. a 4000x3000 image has no actual physical size as an image file and any DPI is simply a setting in the file and could be changed with appropriate software without otherwise affecting the image.
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.
PC LOAD LETTER - What FUCK does that MEAN?
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.
That sound exactly like my wife!
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!
One jet or another, who cares....
no, I don't have a sig
There was a panic about that a few years ago, but it turned out to be just another scare story hyped up by the newspapers with no factual basis.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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?
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.
I second that! I have had a few different printers over the years, various inkjets, various lasers. The HP 2100M that I bought in 1994 or so is the only one still working - and has been used as an everyday printer for 15 years now. It only has a Centronics interface, but damned it can print! :)
For home use buy one that uses the same cartridge. /.
I learned that on
No brain, no pain.
My LaserJet 2100 cost me $25 at the local uni's surplus equipment outlet. Came with a nearly-full toner cartridge, too.
Karma: Poor (Mostly affected by lame karma-joke sigs)
If you're really going to print pictures, you're MUCH better off getting them done at the local Wal-Mart's online photo printing service, which charges, last I checked, something like 13c per 4x6 photo. Printing something like that off an inkjet on glossy paper would be dollars or more.
Karma: Poor (Mostly affected by lame karma-joke sigs)
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.
Unfortunately, people in my office (which is a university) are still buying inkjet printers from time to time because they appear to have no concept of the difference between inkjet and laser beyond the up-front price difference. I try to stop it, and am sometimes successful, but... often not.
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.
I think my post should win a minor award for the number of words per mod point. Must be slow today :).
I heard the automotive industry has the same kind of "bait-and-switch." Did you know if you purchase a car from some dealerships, you have to turn right back around and put gas in it! It is almost like it is a consumable. The crooks!!
Look up "bait and switch." If you buy a product and get the promised product, you have not experienced the switch part. Yes, you might have be baited by the low price. However, that is not illegal.
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.
Yeah, and that's a big issue for me. I sometimes don't use my printer for a month or two (especially if I am away). Every inkjet I have ever owned, be it an Epson, a Canon or a HP, they have all clogged up if not used regularly. In fact the manuals often say you should print at least one thing a week. You then piss away ink trying to unclog them, costing you even more.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Also, good luck finding replacement cartridges 2 years down the road, if your printer makes it that long.
I have an HP PSC 2175 that I bought back in 2003 that I have no problem finding ink for. Sadly the cartridges are still way over priced, but finding ink for a printer from a larger manufacturer isn't that difficult. Drivers for new versions of Windows are another story (in HP's case).
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
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.
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.
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:
For what its worth, I did some research and purchased one of these recently. One of the things I heard about these brother printers is that the toner is detected by a light sensor in the toner cartridge. If you cover up the "window" in the toner cartridge after the printer tells you the toner is out, you will actually get to use all of the toner until you start mis-printing. From what I understand you can get hundreds more pages out of a toner cartridge this way.
And currently these are marked down for sub-$100 at amazon.com for anyone who is interested.
Why would I travel to Kinko's (or whatever my local copy shop is) every time I want something printed out in color? Inkjet printers work well enough, especially when supplemented with a reasonably high quality laser printer for B&W prints. Even though it costs Kinko's less per page than it costs me, they charge me more than it costs me, not to mention cost of time.
Belive me. I recently spent a fair amount of time without any working printer, and having to get stuff printed elsewhere (even free) is a real pain.
Stylish sheet to fix many problems in Slashdot's D3: https://gist.github.com/801524
I used to have color inkjets, and on the rare occasion I need something printed in color, I'm happy to pay per page. The cost of keeping an inkjet's carts in working order for as little as I (and several others I know) has long since outstripped the per-page cost at print shops.
I print a few pages in B&W (I have a monochrome network laser) and I love being able to run off copies of my resume or whatnot when I need to... but Kinko's is open 24hrs, and the two times a year I need color printed, I can go the 1.5 miles.
Of course, YMMV. But personally, I don't really see the need anymore.
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it! --Longbottle
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.