Y’know, I’m heartily sick of the rip-off printer manufacturers that dominate the market now. I bought an Epson printer some years back which, if I’d bought Epson cartridges, would have cost me £60 a time to refill (5 cartridges at £12 each). However, I bought a kit of refillable cartridges and with much fucking about, inky fingers and the occasional purchase of refilled cartridges on the Internet to get replacement chips – I was reprogramming them and they often went wrong – I did save myself more than three times the cost of the printer itself. But the printer finally died and I had to bin it.
My next purchase was a Hewlett Packard. The replacement cost of the one black and one tricolour cartridge for this too is ridiculous, but that’s not a point to belabour since we all know that most printer cartridges retail probably at something like 10,000% of manufacturing cost. I got my colour cartridge refilled at a local computer suppliers (the machine there drilled the holes for me so in future I would know where to inject ink) but, having left the printer alone for six months, the cartridge of course dried up and fucked up. I’m now trying to clean out the printer head holes to get it working again, but don’t hold out much hope.
Wouldn’t it be nice if some printer manufacturer produced a printer with refillable reserviors and maybe an extra one for head cleaning fluid? Wouldn’t it be nice if said manufacturer made it so it will print on any paper, rather than its own expensive brand? Wouldn’t it be nice if it was built to last rather than fucking up just after the guarantee ran out? Again this is something I don’t hold out much hope for.
So, what I’m after is a printer that doesn’t have its ink cartridges chipped, doesn’t make the printing head integral with the cartridge, has a print head accessible enough to clean, has a transparent cartridge so I can see how much ink is inside and also refill it, doesn’t have software that says, “you’re using cheaper printing supplies therefore I am going to shut down”, doesn’t have a software package that takes hours to load (like the HP), and maybe, just maybe, lasts for a while. Any ideas?
11 comments:
Ever thought about one of the increasingly cheap colour lasers?
http://www.hotukdeals.com/item/282477/xerox-phaser-6125v-n-colour-laser-p/
If you add the printer to basket and add discount code xrp2 the printer reduces to £49.99 + VAT plus delivery. You also get a set of free colour carts to go with the ones supplied.
I got one for my mum a month back and it's a great little thing, quick quiet and wont dry up after periods of no use.
Just a thought. Course if you print photo's it's of limited use.
Nice idea, bascule, until you read down and find out that to replace the toner cartridge costs £110.
When this deal was about last month someone posted a link to someone doing sub £10 recycled/refilled toners.
I'll find it for you.
"Wouldn’t it be nice if some printer manufacturer produced a printer with refillable reserviors and maybe an extra one for head cleaning fluid?"
Polity begins here.
Yeah, it's worth looking into bascule, but I wonder if it wuold be better to wait for this recession to bite a little deeper and see what turns up?
Ahhh my mums was a slightly different model so the carts may not be compatible with this model.
But waiting is probably not a bad idea right now. These deals have been coming along every month. Maybe the next deal will be better.
Keep an eye on http://www.hotukdeals.com/ they always turn up on there.
Seconding laser printers. Fuck inkjets. Be sure to see how many pages a toner cartridge will print. I'm not sure it's as cheap as ink but a b/w cartridge usually does a couple thousand pages (according to Them). Personally I've been pretty happy with the HP brand lasers, but I've got no basis for comparison.
Whatever happened to the "e-paper" that Xerox and other companies were supposed to be developing? Nice concept - programamble sheets of material like paper or cloth that could presumably be folded, bound together like a paperback or magazine, hung on the wall or worn as a T-shirt perhaps... I don't think we'll see anything like this in the shops anytime soon, though.
Epson has done something in asia to break the market but it's taking it's time to come over here! Last I heard Kodak where doing a printer range with cheaper cartridges aswell, I think it was the easyshare 5000 range.
I belive Kodak are doing a printer range with cheaper cartridges, the 5000 range I think, although they're an all-in-one type things (scanner/fax/toaster)
Laser are cheaper, you need to think pence per page to see the value.
They chip the toner carts too though.
You might want to look into a continuous ink system.
Search Ebay for them. They replace the cartridges and have pipe leading out to large external tanks. So you top up the tanks not the carts
http://shop.ebay.co.uk/items/_W0QQ_nkwZcontinuousQ20inkQQ_armrsZ1QQ_fromZR40QQ_mdoZ
Post a Comment