I could see starting to hate a song if it has some annoying car ad before it. You must mean AOL's IN2TV.com Pontiac ads defending convertable freedom. Regular TV at least has varity for it's commercials, so much so it just becomes background noice. Thankfully I have a mute button... I don't need to hear Stan's request for a convertable is just a crazy as wanting an amp, or having a hot wife is a drag.
I've not used vista that much, but I have had the misfortune to try to install hardware under vista. I have to say that "Tinyfirewall" does a better job alterting you that program a is accessing program b. It doesn't make the distinction between something that requires administrator privilages, nor was it decent for average users that don't know what "cryptic-filename" is or does, or if it should access the net, but it was a good stop gap piece of software which took into account the fact that windows wasn't geared for security served as a useful watchdog, esp for windows it self and software which phones home and auto updates.
I remember when commercial radio was like this... where you could passivly listen to music, 2-4 songs and then an equal amount of time was dedicated to commercials and dj jabber. Odds were you could hop stations if the commercial breaks really bothered you.
Now... I have a hard time crusing the FM dial without finding some radio station that hasn't been infiltrated by the "talk radio craze", which is some solo jackass with a string monologs lasting for 8 hours, not related to the music, but usually a cry of moral outrage over scented toilet paper followed by fart jokes.
I for one welcome our music serving commercial overlords... at least there is MUSIC.
..find these energy efficent bulbs really irritating? I'm all for saving the environment, but I hate the fact the bulbs have a 'warm up' period, and whatever 'colour' bulb I get, it still throws a nasty fluro hue.
Is that just me? Well, the obvious solution is to never turn them off. Bask in the warm glow of ecologically sound mercury filled goodness and hope the every savings justifies it self.
All humor aside... there is a minor warm up period, but this is not a big deal. It is a small price to pay for huge engery savings, even if you need two 22watt CFL bulbs to take the place of 1 100 watt bulb. If those seconds really bug you, then add an incondencent bat-watt bulb to the entry way.
2. Why must such a link be terrestrial/oceanic? Why not use satellite links?
First look at the cost of a launch vehicel and the cost to create a communication satellite. Keep in mind light speed is slow and latency is an issue esp if we are talking geostationary orbit, which starts at at least twice the distance of the cable being proposed. We're talking 360ms on a good day, 500ms typical. Low earth orbit is preferable for communications, but one needs a network of satellites to maintain a link, vs a big ass cable.
Cable might be a low tech solution, but it's a proven one and is the shortest distance between two points.
Shopping and dealing with retail employees never made me lose faith in humanity. Working in retail and dealing with so many horrible excuses for human beings has made me question whether we as a race really deserve to exist. But I have faith that Darwin will take care of things.
Why not? I'm not trying to troll -- I honestly would like to know what your philosophy is. Why would a limited number of copies be OK but an unlimited not?
It fits with the spirit of software, and the spirit of how media was sold in the first place.
For example, you bought a 16mm copy of a film. It's designed to be played in a projector. As film is fragile, it would not be unreasonable to have a backup of the film and use the backup as the original is intended, one machine at a given time.
If you intend to use media in two places at a given time, it's not unreasonable to expect a person to buy two copies. This way if you get divorsed you don't end up with two people each with their own respective copy of "John Denver's Greatest Hits vol 2" when only one was purchaced. Granted it will end up happening anyway, i'm sure people our age might still have cassettes of Simon and Garfunkel made from copies of our parents vinyl, or for the younger/. crowd some obscure 80s hair band.
Understand I'm rather a moderate as far as fair use rights go. I don't feel legaly the user should be given carteblanche to copy everything they own an unlimited number of times. However, if you have teething children and disney flicks, you know for a fact that backups are useful.
I don't feel that DVD-video should be treated much differently than software, where the law permits one backup of a given disk. Unless the license says otherwise, you may install the media on one device.
As far as enforcement... the consumer is not a criminal.
The quality is ridiculous by today's standards (60dpi). It's readable, in the same way that simulated alphabetical text on a 7 segment LCD (pager) screen is readable, but dot matrix makes a typewriter (or Daisy wheel printer) look like fine art by comparison. You can get cheap ink, but they don't take plain paper... You need old ratchet-drive paper, and perhaps with time you've forgotten the nightmare of accidentally ripping finished printouts while removing those perforated strips.
Dot matrix printers were killed by laser printers long ago, and for very good reason. I'm not sure the current dpi on modern dotmatrix printers. The claim and reality tend to be different. Still, a 24pin in draft mode was perfectly readable which should be 180x180 dpi.
But I remember my last dotmatrix printer very well. I have to say I could do envelopes and plain paper, but why would I want to when onion skin tractor feed was so much cheaper than 20lb standard inkjet paper. Physicaly the feed requirements of an inkjet isn't all that different than a dot matrix. You have a head moving right to left, and paper rolling. Heck early inkjet printers were nice enough to support tractor feed.
The big thing missing on dot matrix was a lack of carbon ribbons like on daisy wheel / typewriters.
Here is a blast from the past... options for 24 pin printers with sheet feeders circa 1985. Only $1495.
If this is so, then the only problem is that not everyone is bringing these printers back as defective. There is no techical reason not to make devices that survive the warranty period in 95% cases, not 5%.
This is not always a bad thing. In the case of epson a replacement comes with free ink. If you get a pair of printers, and have to send one back, you get free ink.
Canon doesn't give you free ink unless it's clear your printhead is not accessable. This is fair, but not such a good deal.
If he was banned wrongly there are other avenues to pursue.
Save switching ISPs, not really. AOL's support is pretty bad. For example mail to aol wouldn't parce out names with periods in them.... I.e. John E. Hancock.
If you want the best quality photos, you shouldn't be using inkjet either. You should either be paying $.017 (17 cents) per print at a warehouse club photo department, or using a dyesub (Dye Sublimation) printer. You can't tell the difference between a dyesub and a photo lab under almost all conditions.
A basic 4x6 dyesub printer will cost under $200 and the print refills will cost about $.22 per print. It'll also take about 2 minutes per image.
Inkjets are like duct tape: Able to do a lot of jobs,but the wrong tool for almost every job.
Assuming you only print 4x6, outsoucing it would be a decent option.
As far home dye sub 4x6 solutions, typicaly as archival as dye inkjets. The Canon Selphy for example makes a claim of 100 years dark storage, same as current generation Canon inkjets. More waterfast, and likely more gas fast. Quality, well, that's VERY debatable.
I don't have an accurate estimate what I spend on bulk ink per print. Paper is about 16c an 8.5*11 inch sheet (costco glossy 120 pack). Assuming 28 pages per tank full (50% yield CMYK) I estimate I spend another 17c/print. OEM would be about 1.70/print + paper.
If your only application is 4x6, then I would somewhat agree, you should outsource it. Dye-sub is a legit option as well. But my personal application is not 4x6. It's CD and covers, mainly 5 1/8 x 4 3/4. I spent about $100 for my ip5200 which serves mostly as a glorified label printer. There is no way I could outsource my jobs for less money.
Epson cartriges are not worth refilling. Unlike many other printers the printing head is not on the cartridge, its in the printer (atleast on all the epsons I've ever had). This means the cartridges are a lot cheaper to make, true epson still charge an arm and a leg, but the clones are very easy to find cheaply and I've never had a problem with them.
I'd agree that epson(tm) cartridges are a pain to refill. They employ a complex multi chamber design which probally does a good job providing even ink flow its entire life, esp since it's micropiezo based which depends on good fluid balance, but make it a royal pain for end users to fill. Now... some of these third party cartridges employ sponges and a more simple chamber design. Sponges will not last forever, but if you just drill a cork in it you can refill with relative ease. Technicaly they are easier than canon to fill as there is a valve that prevents flow when not penitrated by ink feed tube. A sponge is "good enough" for most applications.
My Canon has a separate print head that can be replaced.
So does mine.
But... it's a thermal printhead which will burn out. I estimate 10 cartridge changes on your average ip3000+ model based on canon numbers. Reality is much higher, 15 to 20 in my experence.
Epsons are based on micropiezo technology. Printhead life is rated double or tripple that of canon. It is more prone to clog, but a clog is typicaly not a catastrophic condition, it typicaly can be resolved with blue windex.
It's a question whether you want to employ elbow grease, or throw money at the printer to resolve typical print issues.
Let's not neglect the fact that in the case of canon, the printhead is typicaly 2/3 the cost of the printer, where OEM ink is also about 2/3 the cost of the printer. You may want to keep your printer in service, but replacement is not a bad deal.
People... stop using ink jet printers. I'm not going to talk about brands since I don't want to skew this argument, but for about $500 you can get a really decent color laser printer that will to 20 pages/minute in black and 5/minute in color. Yes, that's five pages per minute not five minutes per page.
Color lasers are cool. They print well on plain paper, they are water proof, and the print is archival.
But
For photos, inkjet is really where it's at. When you take into account special paper, the cost increases. This is very true. But laser doesn't match inkjet for photo quality prints on photo paper.
On another note, what happened to dot matrix printers. I remember we had a dot matrix printer and the cartdges (ribbons?) were $5 each and laster for well over 1000 pages.
Dotmatrix was cost effective, but I'm not sure you remember it as well as I do. A ribbon out of the box would last a long time, but contrast would fade. It was ledgeable, but rather quickly wasn't what i'd call presentation quality. A small ribbon would probally do about 300 pages before contrast suffered greatly. Current generation OKI printers claim 4 million characters, which works out to be about 760 pages assuming 80 characters/line and 66 lines, so 1000 to 1300 pages isn't unreasonable.
But if you remember dot matrix, you must remember tractor feed jams.
But what happened to them? They are still around. For carbon copy forms they are still quite where it's at. For situations where the amount of data per page is small like with a video rental forum they are still useful as they require squat in terms of prep time, and shoot out a page faster than my inkjet thinks about starting to print. They are not the type of printer you would enjoy using with anything but the built in fonts.
Case in point: I bought a Canon i475D for about $40 in 2004. The ink cartridges are easy to find, and cost $5.99 for black and $13.99 for color (at Newegg, about $1 more at B&M). It is far from the first Canon printer to feature a system like this.
Good case in point. The bci-24bk is rated at 150pages, or 4.6c/page for the ink at office depot, 4c/page at your price. Technicaly speaking for thimble class of canon printers, they at one time offered a drop in head on the cartridge replacement which occupied both the color and black slots which was highly cost effective per page. The bc-20 had a yield of 900pages and typicaly cost below 30.00. The i475D was likely after they stopped offering a big honking black.
Don't get me wrong, this is good for a $40 printer, but spending just a little more results in a lower cost/page.
Kodak's cartridges are cheaper, but how many milliliters of ink do they hold? The measurements don't seem to be available anywhere. You have to think in terms of dollars per milliliter to get even a remotely reasonable gauge of cost of operation. (Price per page would be better, but there's no easy way to calculate that.)
they say 3c/page for the black, so we can assume that it's 333pages for the black. I read elsewhere it's 10ml. I don't know if that's at 5% yield or the 1500 character test patern used in the dot matrix days.
Dollars/ml is not always an accurate meter, like dollars/gallon isn't a good meter of fuel economy. Modern HPs tend to be very effecent in terms of ink use. Epsons do use a dence dye but micropiezo based heads require a pump based cleaning cycle which is somewhat wasteful. Canon hasn't done much to improve their ink efficency, the ink looks watered down in contrast to Epson or hp dye. HP has improved a great deal.
But I have to say in terms of cost/page the Kodak here isn't that exciting. HP/Canon/Epson all offer models with pigment black in the same price range.
I've got a canon printer sitting here, with the ink coming in small, dumb, cheap cartridges, and a separately replacable printer head. It's about a year old. As a bonus, it's also rather good.
I own a few canons, so this is comming from a canon user. Canon presently does not have a consumer pigment printer. The pixma pro 9500 (a3+) was slated to be released sometime last year, but the release has been updated to may 2007. This Kodak is at least uses pigments.
Canon is rather poor on the archival front.
But aside from that, this kodak seems no cheaper than an present generation canon base model or epson c series printer.
Exactly. Particularly when the printer is $150, and not some $20 piece of garbage that's just a holder for the $40 or $50 cartridge. Nobody cares really about messing up their printer, when you can just get a new one practically for free -- but when the printer is a significant investment, and the replacement cartridges are cheap, who's going to do that? It's penny-wise and pound-foolish at that point to cut corners.
I'm reading the black as being equal to 3c/page, I would guess 333pages/tank or $15/ream. I read the Kodak 1215581 tank is 10ml, or $1.00/ml Bulk dye ink tends to run $1-$2/ounce or about.03c/ml to.06c/ml. From what i'm reading, the 5300 looks like it uses pigment ink, 1 text cartridge and a photo cartridge with CMYK and clear. That's closer to 15c/ml for bulk pigmented ink, 85% savings is to be expected on the black cartridge. I have no meter for the color cartridge, but 80% savings is not unreasonable for bulk fill pigment based inks.
3c/page is good, but on par with other inkjets including the classic hp 45a cartridge.
I read it has a 6.5pl head for text, 2.7pl nozzles for color.
For other printers, bulk ink pays for it self after 2 or 3 cartridge changes. This kodak looks like you can get 6 OEM cartridge changes for roughly equal to the cost of the printer. I would expect 7 cartridge changes on bulk ink before it paid for it self. This would be slightly more than 2oz of black ink, and I presume an equal amount for each color plus clear. I do base my cost estimates on epson compatable ink.
As far as who would risk their printer? Companies like MediaStreet seem to do perfectly well offering bulk ink to pro-sumer printers costing $500+. High profit retrofitting wide printers.
While I am not all that excited about this printer, it's nice to see another option other than Epson, esp since Epson pretty much offers a document printer (c series) and a photo printer (r series), but nothing really to cover both bases. Even better yet, Kodak is offering a thermal based pigment printer before canon releases their a3+ pigment model.
My only issue with this is that the DIY refills are usually messy and of a lower quality than the original.
I'm looking forward to this as it could pave the way for cheaper photo-printing options
FAIR COMMENT. And this is commng from someone who self fills.
You can keep the mess down to a minium. Bottles with blunt needles attached, if dye going with sponge type cartrides rather than sponge free which tend to employ vacuum filling. Better yet are CIS systems where big bottles are stored externaly.
As for quality, i've not met a self fill solution, with the exception of pigments, which come close to matching OEM. It's not that one can't make bulk archival ink, just the target market is seen as being cheap bastards. Going with swellable polymer paper and a coat of spray helps. For color quality, image-specalists / formulabs are two major companies who make compairable solutions.
I cant find a reference but I remember reading something somewhere about how someone (Panasonic? Canon?) holds a US patent connected with CD/DVD printing or something and that someone posted a "hack" to get a certain US model from a company who wasnt willing to license the patent to print CDs/DVDs (the overseas version of the same printer aparently printed CDs/DVDs because it was sold in countries where there was no patent)
It was probally me. over on Steves forums there was a hotbed of activity regarding enabling the print to disc feature on Canons. I helped to organize the data, where a gent named knightcrawler took my data gathered mostly from steve's forums and created a useable website.
My issue was the only option at the time was Epson. Epson is great in the color department, but the r200 series is in all fairness based on a micropiezo head, and with a head docking station which seems prone to fail, the nozzles are prone to clog requring at the very least intense cleaning cycles. The Canon models I was interested in (ip3000/ip4000/ip4200/ip5200/ip4300, mp750/mp760/mp780) where IMHO better general purpose printers than the r2xx/r3xx offered by epson. Self filling was easy, and if worse came to worse you can always shell out $50-$80 for another head.
Near as i'm aware, it's an issue with licensing with phillips. For whatever reason, Canon did not want to license models in the US, where it's not an issue elsewhere.
Don't get me wrong, for a photo printer, epson is really good. Micropiezo really is where it's at as far as tolerance to different medium, and you can in theory for under $100 get the printer, swap out the tanks for refillable ones and use pigment rather than dye. But from my experence, my ip3000 printed over 800 discs before I had a problem, a problem likely due to lack of use, and was resolved by a free head from canon. My epson r200 got a full diaper and dumped ink on my desk.
Thanks for driving the costs up for everyone. A warranty is just that, its not a end-of-life replacement program. I would chide you further, but I know I'll get modded to oblivion anyway.
So long as stores are going to offer secondary warranty, why not take advantage of it. It's a pretty safe bet with epson, esp models which use pigment based ink, or even dye models who's diapers get full and the printer stops working. We vote with our dollars, and it's not wrong to use these store warranties to their fullest advantage. If it's a loss for them, perhaps they will throw their weight around and actually get the damned manufacturers to make products which are more end user serviceable. This would include easier diaper swap, head cleaning, you name it.
Personaly, I like keeping a given printer going for at least 3 years. The learning curve for a new printer is high, and so is the cost of ink.
I'm sick of all these do-it-all phones. All it does is make them bigger. It's getting harder to find a decent phone that is small enough to fit in my pocket. They all have cameras, video players, MP3 players, extra memory, web access, games, etc., etc. I don't want any of that bullshit. But I have little choice with my carrier (VWZ). There is nothing wrong with wanting a basic phone. However, there is something to be said about all in one devices. The Nokia 6133 looks very attractive. Quadband, takes micro-xD cards for mp3s, and a crappy camera, all in a reasonable size.
This has been a question on my mind since, well, win95. When installing the OS or larger applications, it seems to go through this annoying phase of "checking for disk space" which could take minutes. This has always been a point of frustration as free space is if i'm not mistaken part of the directory and other operating systems have no issue in this regard.
It seems to me that NT/2k/XP microsoft really got their groove on as far as a balance between legacy support and function, and future editions should rather than add in geewiz features should focus on fixing some of the sloppyness of the past. I remember win3.1 where the user could try to copy a large set of files to floppy, and if a file was too big for a floppy it would continue to try to copy the file, until the disk was full, ask for another disk, and continue to try. I think this was actually fixed.
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I've not used vista that much, but I have had the misfortune to try to install hardware under vista. I have to say that "Tinyfirewall" does a better job alterting you that program a is accessing program b. It doesn't make the distinction between something that requires administrator privilages, nor was it decent for average users that don't know what "cryptic-filename" is or does, or if it should access the net, but it was a good stop gap piece of software which took into account the fact that windows wasn't geared for security served as a useful watchdog, esp for windows it self and software which phones home and auto updates.
In my day we called that "commercial radio".
I remember when commercial radio was like this... where you could passivly listen to music, 2-4 songs and then an equal amount of time was dedicated to commercials and dj jabber. Odds were you could hop stations if the commercial breaks really bothered you.
Now... I have a hard time crusing the FM dial without finding some radio station that hasn't been infiltrated by the "talk radio craze", which is some solo jackass with a string monologs lasting for 8 hours, not related to the music, but usually a cry of moral outrage over scented toilet paper followed by fart jokes.
I for one welcome our music serving commercial overlords... at least there is MUSIC.
..find these energy efficent bulbs really irritating?
I'm all for saving the environment, but I hate the fact the bulbs have a 'warm up' period, and whatever 'colour' bulb I get, it still throws a nasty fluro hue.
Is that just me? Well, the obvious solution is to never turn them off. Bask in the warm glow of ecologically sound mercury filled goodness and hope the every savings justifies it self.
All humor aside... there is a minor warm up period, but this is not a big deal. It is a small price to pay for huge engery savings, even if you need two 22watt CFL bulbs to take the place of 1 100 watt bulb. If those seconds really bug you, then add an incondencent bat-watt bulb to the entry way.
2. Why must such a link be terrestrial/oceanic? Why not use satellite links?
First look at the cost of a launch vehicel and the cost to create a communication satellite. Keep in mind light speed is slow and latency is an issue esp if we are talking geostationary orbit, which starts at at least twice the distance of the cable being proposed. We're talking 360ms on a good day, 500ms typical. Low earth orbit is preferable for communications, but one needs a network of satellites to maintain a link, vs a big ass cable.
Cable might be a low tech solution, but it's a proven one and is the shortest distance between two points.
Shopping and dealing with retail employees never made me lose faith in humanity. Working in retail and dealing with so many horrible excuses for human beings has made me question whether we as a race really deserve to exist. But I have faith that Darwin will take care of things.
No, because stupid people make babies.
Why not? I'm not trying to troll -- I honestly would like to know what your philosophy is. Why would a limited number of copies be OK but an unlimited not?
/. crowd some obscure 80s hair band.
It fits with the spirit of software, and the spirit of how media was sold in the first place.
For example, you bought a 16mm copy of a film. It's designed to be played in a projector. As film is fragile, it would not be unreasonable to have a backup of the film and use the backup as the original is intended, one machine at a given time.
If you intend to use media in two places at a given time, it's not unreasonable to expect a person to buy two copies. This way if you get divorsed you don't end up with two people each with their own respective copy of "John Denver's Greatest Hits vol 2" when only one was purchaced. Granted it will end up happening anyway, i'm sure people our age might still have cassettes of Simon and Garfunkel made from copies of our parents vinyl, or for the younger
Understand I'm rather a moderate as far as fair use rights go. I don't feel legaly the user should be given carteblanche to copy everything they own an unlimited number of times. However, if you have teething children and disney flicks, you know for a fact that backups are useful.
I don't feel that DVD-video should be treated much differently than software, where the law permits one backup of a given disk. Unless the license says otherwise, you may install the media on one device.
As far as enforcement... the consumer is not a criminal.
You can get cheap ink, but they don't take plain paper... You need old ratchet-drive paper, and perhaps with time you've forgotten the nightmare of accidentally ripping finished printouts while removing those perforated strips.
Dot matrix printers were killed by laser printers long ago, and for very good reason. I'm not sure the current dpi on modern dotmatrix printers. The claim and reality tend to be different. Still, a 24pin in draft mode was perfectly readable which should be 180x180 dpi.
But I remember my last dotmatrix printer very well. I have to say I could do envelopes and plain paper, but why would I want to when onion skin tractor feed was so much cheaper than 20lb standard inkjet paper. Physicaly the feed requirements of an inkjet isn't all that different than a dot matrix. You have a head moving right to left, and paper rolling. Heck early inkjet printers were nice enough to support tractor feed.
The big thing missing on dot matrix was a lack of carbon ribbons like on daisy wheel / typewriters.
Here is a blast from the past... options for 24 pin printers with sheet feeders circa 1985. Only $1495.
If this is so, then the only problem is that not everyone is bringing these printers back as defective. There is no techical reason not to make devices that survive the warranty period in 95% cases, not 5%.
This is not always a bad thing. In the case of epson a replacement comes with free ink. If you get a pair of printers, and have to send one back, you get free ink.
Canon doesn't give you free ink unless it's clear your printhead is not accessable. This is fair, but not such a good deal.
If he was banned wrongly there are other avenues to pursue.
Save switching ISPs, not really. AOL's support is pretty bad. For example mail to aol wouldn't parce out names with periods in them.... I.e. John E. Hancock.
If you want the best quality photos, you shouldn't be using inkjet either. You should either be paying $.017 (17 cents) per print at a warehouse club photo department, or using a dyesub (Dye Sublimation) printer. You can't tell the difference between a dyesub and a photo lab under almost all conditions.
A basic 4x6 dyesub printer will cost under $200 and the print refills will cost about $.22 per print. It'll also take about 2 minutes per image.
Inkjets are like duct tape: Able to do a lot of jobs,but the wrong tool for almost every job.
Assuming you only print 4x6, outsoucing it would be a decent option.
As far home dye sub 4x6 solutions, typicaly as archival as dye inkjets. The Canon Selphy for example makes a claim of 100 years dark storage, same as current generation Canon inkjets. More waterfast, and likely more gas fast. Quality, well, that's VERY debatable.
I don't have an accurate estimate what I spend on bulk ink per print. Paper is about 16c an 8.5*11 inch sheet (costco glossy 120 pack). Assuming 28 pages per tank full (50% yield CMYK) I estimate I spend another 17c/print. OEM would be about 1.70/print + paper.
If your only application is 4x6, then I would somewhat agree, you should outsource it. Dye-sub is a legit option as well. But my personal application is not 4x6. It's CD and covers, mainly 5 1/8 x 4 3/4. I spent about $100 for my ip5200 which serves mostly as a glorified label printer. There is no way I could outsource my jobs for less money.
Epson cartriges are not worth refilling. Unlike many other printers the printing head is not on the cartridge, its in the printer (atleast on all the epsons I've ever had). This means the cartridges are a lot cheaper to make, true epson still charge an arm and a leg, but the clones are very easy to find cheaply and I've never had a problem with them.
I'd agree that epson(tm) cartridges are a pain to refill. They employ a complex multi chamber design which probally does a good job providing even ink flow its entire life, esp since it's micropiezo based which depends on good fluid balance, but make it a royal pain for end users to fill. Now... some of these third party cartridges employ sponges and a more simple chamber design. Sponges will not last forever, but if you just drill a cork in it you can refill with relative ease. Technicaly they are easier than canon to fill as there is a valve that prevents flow when not penitrated by ink feed tube. A sponge is "good enough" for most applications.
My Canon has a separate print head that can be replaced.
So does mine.
But... it's a thermal printhead which will burn out. I estimate 10 cartridge changes on your average ip3000+ model based on canon numbers. Reality is much higher, 15 to 20 in my experence.
Epsons are based on micropiezo technology. Printhead life is rated double or tripple that of canon. It is more prone to clog, but a clog is typicaly not a catastrophic condition, it typicaly can be resolved with blue windex.
It's a question whether you want to employ elbow grease, or throw money at the printer to resolve typical print issues.
Let's not neglect the fact that in the case of canon, the printhead is typicaly 2/3 the cost of the printer, where OEM ink is also about 2/3 the cost of the printer. You may want to keep your printer in service, but replacement is not a bad deal.
People... stop using ink jet printers. I'm not going to talk about brands since I don't want to skew this argument, but for about $500 you can get a really decent color laser printer that will to 20 pages/minute in black and 5/minute in color. Yes, that's five pages per minute not five minutes per page.
Color lasers are cool. They print well on plain paper, they are water proof, and the print is archival.
But
For photos, inkjet is really where it's at. When you take into account special paper, the cost increases. This is very true. But laser doesn't match inkjet for photo quality prints on photo paper.
On another note, what happened to dot matrix printers. I remember we had a dot matrix printer and the cartdges (ribbons?) were $5 each and laster for well over 1000 pages.
Dotmatrix was cost effective, but I'm not sure you remember it as well as I do. A ribbon out of the box would last a long time, but contrast would fade. It was ledgeable, but rather quickly wasn't what i'd call presentation quality. A small ribbon would probally do about 300 pages before contrast suffered greatly. Current generation OKI printers claim 4 million characters, which works out to be about 760 pages assuming 80 characters/line and 66 lines, so 1000 to 1300 pages isn't unreasonable.
But if you remember dot matrix, you must remember tractor feed jams.
But what happened to them? They are still around. For carbon copy forms they are still quite where it's at. For situations where the amount of data per page is small like with a video rental forum they are still useful as they require squat in terms of prep time, and shoot out a page faster than my inkjet thinks about starting to print. They are not the type of printer you would enjoy using with anything but the built in fonts.
Case in point: I bought a Canon i475D for about $40 in 2004. The ink cartridges are easy to find, and cost $5.99 for black and $13.99 for color (at Newegg, about $1 more at B&M). It is far from the first Canon printer to feature a system like this.
Good case in point. The bci-24bk is rated at 150pages, or 4.6c/page for the ink at office depot, 4c/page at your price. Technicaly speaking for thimble class of canon printers, they at one time offered a drop in head on the cartridge replacement which occupied both the color and black slots which was highly cost effective per page. The bc-20 had a yield of 900pages and typicaly cost below 30.00. The i475D was likely after they stopped offering a big honking black.
Don't get me wrong, this is good for a $40 printer, but spending just a little more results in a lower cost/page.
Kodak's cartridges are cheaper, but how many milliliters of ink do they hold? The measurements don't seem to be available anywhere. You have to think in terms of dollars per milliliter to get even a remotely reasonable gauge of cost of operation. (Price per page would be better, but there's no easy way to calculate that.)
they say 3c/page for the black, so we can assume that it's 333pages for the black. I read elsewhere it's 10ml. I don't know if that's at 5% yield or the 1500 character test patern used in the dot matrix days.
Dollars/ml is not always an accurate meter, like dollars/gallon isn't a good meter of fuel economy. Modern HPs tend to be very effecent in terms of ink use. Epsons do use a dence dye but micropiezo based heads require a pump based cleaning cycle which is somewhat wasteful. Canon hasn't done much to improve their ink efficency, the ink looks watered down in contrast to Epson or hp dye. HP has improved a great deal.
But I have to say in terms of cost/page the Kodak here isn't that exciting. HP/Canon/Epson all offer models with pigment black in the same price range.
I've got a canon printer sitting here, with the ink coming in small, dumb, cheap cartridges, and a separately replacable printer head. It's about a year old.
As a bonus, it's also rather good.
I own a few canons, so this is comming from a canon user. Canon presently does not have a consumer pigment printer. The pixma pro 9500 (a3+) was slated to be released sometime last year, but the release has been updated to may 2007. This Kodak is at least uses pigments.
Canon is rather poor on the archival front.
But aside from that, this kodak seems no cheaper than an present generation canon base model or epson c series printer.
Exactly. Particularly when the printer is $150, and not some $20 piece of garbage that's just a holder for the $40 or $50 cartridge. Nobody cares really about messing up their printer, when you can just get a new one practically for free -- but when the printer is a significant investment, and the replacement cartridges are cheap, who's going to do that? It's penny-wise and pound-foolish at that point to cut corners.
.03c/ml to .06c/ml. From what i'm reading, the 5300 looks like it uses pigment ink, 1 text cartridge and a photo cartridge with CMYK and clear. That's closer to 15c/ml for bulk pigmented ink, 85% savings is to be expected on the black cartridge. I have no meter for the color cartridge, but 80% savings is not unreasonable for bulk fill pigment based inks.
I'm reading the black as being equal to 3c/page, I would guess 333pages/tank or $15/ream. I read the Kodak 1215581 tank is 10ml, or $1.00/ml Bulk dye ink tends to run $1-$2/ounce or about
3c/page is good, but on par with other inkjets including the classic hp 45a cartridge.
I read it has a 6.5pl head for text, 2.7pl nozzles for color.
For other printers, bulk ink pays for it self after 2 or 3 cartridge changes. This kodak looks like you can get 6 OEM cartridge changes for roughly equal to the cost of the printer. I would expect 7 cartridge changes on bulk ink before it paid for it self. This would be slightly more than 2oz of black ink, and I presume an equal amount for each color plus clear. I do base my cost estimates on epson compatable ink.
As far as who would risk their printer? Companies like MediaStreet seem to do perfectly well offering bulk ink to pro-sumer printers costing $500+. High profit retrofitting wide printers.
While I am not all that excited about this printer, it's nice to see another option other than Epson, esp since Epson pretty much offers a document printer (c series) and a photo printer (r series), but nothing really to cover both bases. Even better yet, Kodak is offering a thermal based pigment printer before canon releases their a3+ pigment model.
My only issue with this is that the DIY refills are usually messy and of a lower quality than the original.
I'm looking forward to this as it could pave the way for cheaper photo-printing options
FAIR COMMENT. And this is commng from someone who self fills.
You can keep the mess down to a minium. Bottles with blunt needles attached, if dye going with sponge type cartrides rather than sponge free which tend to employ vacuum filling. Better yet are CIS systems where big bottles are stored externaly.
As for quality, i've not met a self fill solution, with the exception of pigments, which come close to matching OEM. It's not that one can't make bulk archival ink, just the target market is seen as being cheap bastards. Going with swellable polymer paper and a coat of spray helps. For color quality, image-specalists / formulabs are two major companies who make compairable solutions.
Don't go for any kit which is universal.
I cant find a reference but I remember reading something somewhere about how someone (Panasonic? Canon?) holds a US patent connected with CD/DVD printing or something and that someone posted a "hack" to get a certain US model from a company who wasnt willing to license the patent to print CDs/DVDs (the overseas version of the same printer aparently printed CDs/DVDs because it was sold in countries where there was no patent)
It was probally me. over on Steves forums there was a hotbed of activity regarding enabling the print to disc feature on Canons. I helped to organize the data, where a gent named knightcrawler took my data gathered mostly from steve's forums and created a useable website.
My issue was the only option at the time was Epson. Epson is great in the color department, but the r200 series is in all fairness based on a micropiezo head, and with a head docking station which seems prone to fail, the nozzles are prone to clog requring at the very least intense cleaning cycles. The Canon models I was interested in (ip3000/ip4000/ip4200/ip5200/ip4300, mp750/mp760/mp780) where IMHO better general purpose printers than the r2xx/r3xx offered by epson. Self filling was easy, and if worse came to worse you can always shell out $50-$80 for another head.
Near as i'm aware, it's an issue with licensing with phillips. For whatever reason, Canon did not want to license models in the US, where it's not an issue elsewhere.
Don't get me wrong, for a photo printer, epson is really good. Micropiezo really is where it's at as far as tolerance to different medium, and you can in theory for under $100 get the printer, swap out the tanks for refillable ones and use pigment rather than dye. But from my experence, my ip3000 printed over 800 discs before I had a problem, a problem likely due to lack of use, and was resolved by a free head from canon. My epson r200 got a full diaper and dumped ink on my desk.
Thanks for driving the costs up for everyone. A warranty is just that, its not a end-of-life replacement program. I would chide you further, but I know I'll get modded to oblivion anyway.
So long as stores are going to offer secondary warranty, why not take advantage of it. It's a pretty safe bet with epson, esp models which use pigment based ink, or even dye models who's diapers get full and the printer stops working. We vote with our dollars, and it's not wrong to use these store warranties to their fullest advantage. If it's a loss for them, perhaps they will throw their weight around and actually get the damned manufacturers to make products which are more end user serviceable. This would include easier diaper swap, head cleaning, you name it.
Personaly, I like keeping a given printer going for at least 3 years. The learning curve for a new printer is high, and so is the cost of ink.
This has been a question on my mind since, well, win95. When installing the OS or larger applications, it seems to go through this annoying phase of "checking for disk space" which could take minutes. This has always been a point of frustration as free space is if i'm not mistaken part of the directory and other operating systems have no issue in this regard.
It seems to me that NT/2k/XP microsoft really got their groove on as far as a balance between legacy support and function, and future editions should rather than add in geewiz features should focus on fixing some of the sloppyness of the past. I remember win3.1 where the user could try to copy a large set of files to floppy, and if a file was too big for a floppy it would continue to try to copy the file, until the disk was full, ask for another disk, and continue to try. I think this was actually fixed.