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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."
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.
The new printer you bought came with "demo" ink cartridges that are nearly empty, compared with full ones. You didn't get a bargain.
Personally, while I understand the business doctrine of "whatever the market will bear," I think it's time that Congress look into market collusion and racketeering. There's no way that a pigment can cost thousands of dollars per liter.
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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"?
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.
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.
And what good is a printer with no ink, which will require expensive ink cartridges, be to the Salvation Army? Or to put it another way, what makes you think they will have any more use for it than the poster has?
This is like the folks that will give the Salvation Army their old 486 and think they are doing the Salvation Army a favor, when in truth all you are doing is making the Salvation Army pay for disposal.
www.eFax.com are spammers
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
It's also a scanner. Donate it to a school, maybe they need a scanner but don't care about printing (at least from this device).
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.
Don't be dumb! Looks like you can get a pair of complete refill sets for $33 to me...
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
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.
likewise. I work for a charity which accepts computers, and people keep dumping printers on us. Those of us who work on this stuff are computer people - we do computers, not electro-mechanical devices. We also have a great deal of difficulty testing if any donated printer actually works, since we're loath to put our precious donated cartridges into the printer just to see if it works, IF we can find drivers for them (we have no direct internet access, and most of the machines are win98SE), and can do nothing about it if they don't. Sadly, the people who get asked 'do we want...?' tend to just say 'yes' to offers of printers, and so we waste more and more shelf space with useless printers which we don't want, can't use, and can't send to eastern Europe (which is where we send things) because no-one wants them, and because they certainly can't afford ink for them.
FGD 135
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.
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.
Sorry, but a lot of all-in-one inkjet printers (such as Epson) won't scan unless there's ink in the ink cartridges. So if you give someone one of these printers without ink, it's absolutely useless.
Now you know what to do with a Trebuchet.
Make sure they have been discharged before you mess with destroying monitors via the Office Space route.
Or just use a wooden bat.
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.
Wait, what?! I think the printer companies are as evil as the next /.er, but that's a whole new kind of evil. That's almost cell-phone company evil, come to think of it. Have you personally run into this kind of behavior?
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.
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.
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 have. Pissed me off.
"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.
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.
...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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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