Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
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!
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.
Make sure you put it far away, I had a bit of printer stuck in my leg for some time.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Yep. I sell all my junk of ebay for a penny ($0.01) plus shipping cost of $20 ($12 actual postage plus $8 to cover incidentals like buying a shipping box, your gasoline, packing foam, etc). SOMEBODY will buy it.
As for the actual printer, I've learned to buy LASER printers. They have a high initial cost but low-priced ink (~$50 for 5000 pages). The laser printer ends-up being cheaper after you pass 800 pages.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
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
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
Oddly enough that really isn't as satisfying as you would think it would be. I took my old monitors and computers out to 'the pit' on some private farm land I owned. Using a shotgun was a little risky because of the potential of those pellets scattering and bouncing back when hitting metal parts. It's also too limited in range to use from a distance and I would rather not die from something as stupid as destroying old equipment. That left longbarrels like rifles. Those bullets just leave holes and do no further damage (Though one of the CRT tubes imploded when they were hit and took out much of the monitor.)
I next tried pouring my equipment with gasoline because of its high combustibility and hoped the bullets would collide with metal and create sparks. It doesn't work that well. Those scenes in the movies where the cars always explode after shooting the gas tanks--not as easy to do in reality as you would think. So imagine trying it on old electronics.
In the end the best two plans are to rig it with explosives or do the good old Office Space scene by taking a baseball bat to the office copier in a field. Not only do you feel more invigorated at letting off some steam at the copier but you will leave feeling much more satisfied. Just be wary of the flyback transformers in these old CRTs. Make sure they have been discharged before you mess with destroying monitors via the Office Space route.
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...
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.
Now you know what to do with a Trebuchet.
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
Make sure they have been discharged before you mess with destroying monitors via the Office Space route.
Or just use a wooden bat.
In the end the best two plans are to rig it with explosives or do the good old Office Space scene by taking a baseball bat to the office copier in a field.
Tannerite is the way to go. There is nothing more satisfying.
Myself and a couple friends spent an afternoon playing with Tannerite a couple weeks ago:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYm-KqzqD2A
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
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.
When I buy a printer I first make sure I can easily refill the ink cartridges.
-Xoltri
Yep. Laser printer for 99.9% of my printing needs, color is either online photo printing (whats the going rate these days, $0.09/3x5"?), or if you need it TODAY I go through wally world for about $0.24/3x5". I don't know anyone who prints enough color photos at home to justify the cost of owning a photo quality printer at home. Unless your home color printer is a dye impregnation printer, that hp-uberjet ink is going to fade in 5-10 years anyhow.
moox. for a new generation.
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.
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.
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 $100 if you need to share it in an office environment), or can carry as much paper in the paper tray, or has multiple trays from which it can print assuming you may need several different types of letterheads or templates, or can print duplex, or any of a huge number of features that one may pay extra for their printer to do.
Then there's the cost of fixing the fact that you're a total knob, which in your case is probably going to be pretty expensive.
I hate printers.
Urgh. The "official" Brother Linux drivers are crap. You get a 32-bit x86 only binary. The visible parts of it such as the shell scripts are really badly written (and break if /bin/sh is dash and not bash). The .deb files are created by alien. They install files in strange locations such as /usr/local. I could never get it working with cups and ended up using lprng and manually configuring it. Then it really doesn't work well. For example, it always adds a huge margin to the top of every page so I have to adjust the margins to be 0 at the top if I actually want something to print how it is meant to be. And they don't maintain it at all. The driver I downloaded when I got the printer is still the latest.
One's that would effect the average consumer? DPI on 'loss leaders' is high enough to not be an issue. The only thing left is doodads. My printer was honestly likely 80$, 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.
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...
"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?
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.
Those kids on your lawn are doing this stuff online. I can apply for a passport, or a driving license, or do my tax return, apply for housing benefit (social housing money), or loads of other government stuff (pay a fine, buy vehicle "tax", etc).
For contracts, it's the business that prints it. I expect a solicitor would print my will.
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.
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
...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...
No, that's KaBOOL. It returns "false", by the way.
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.
One can go to the local Walgreen's drug store and get their cartridges refilled for $10. A cartridge will usually last me about one year.
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.
Almost, yes. I've started "printing" meeting agendas and the like to my Kindle recently, and keeping maps and flight itineraries on my iphone, so there is much less that I need to print.
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.
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.
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.
Actually, in CMYK printers the dots are 2-bit, because there are 4 colours of ink.
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.
I have Canon prints now 9 years old. Keep them out of the light, keep them out of the air, no problem. (In other words, stack them in a neat pile when you're not looking at them.)
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
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'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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.