More about printer ink rip-offs
The latest shout about how printers prematurely warn they're out of ink came this week from PC World magazine.
The basic premise isn't news, but the article is nonetheless a useful read.
For one thing, the author calculated the cost of a gallon of black ink at $4,731. No wonder printer manufacturers are motivated to make their customers buy more and more. In some of the tests, PC World found that printers "left more than 40 percent of their ink unused."
The tests were done on multifunction printers from Canon, Epson, Hewlett-Packard, and Kodak. To keep things simple, only black ink consumption was measured.
When ink levels get low, a printer may do nothing, may warn you, and/or it may shut down to force you to change the ink cartridge. I'd avoid printers that shut themselves down. Unfortunately, this isn't an attribute of the printer that's likely to be mentioned on the box.
The tested printers from Canon, Epson, and Kodak shut down. Only the HP Photosmart C5280 did not. Thus, if you're in the market for a multifunction printer, the C5280 can save you lots of money in the long run.
Back in August, I blogged about a similar article on Slate, but for laser printers. That article had some tricks for faking out laser printers, so that you can actually use all the toner. As for faking out inkjet printers, it says:
These tricks generally apply to laser printers. It's more difficult to find ways to override ink-level sensors in an inkjet printer, and, at least according to printer manufactures, doing so is more dangerous...There are two reasons manufacturers make it more difficult for you to keep printing after your inkjet thinks it's out of ink. First, using an inkjet cartridge that's actually empty could overheat your printer's permanent print head, leaving you with a useless hunk of plastic. Second, the economics of the inkjet business are even more punishing than those of the laser business, with manufacturers making much more on ink supplies than they do on printers.
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Michael Horowitz is an independent computer consultant and the author of several classes on Defensive Computing. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. 
works with some Epson printers. There is also chip restters for a few bucks that will reset the chip on ink carts to make the printer think there new and start with a full indication even though they are not. I have used these on after market carts when the printer wont recognize them and then they do most times
Nice!
I also appreciate the fact that I don't recall ever needing to re-prime the cartridges like I did with another major brand of inkjet printer. Every time I would leave the printer idle for a week the jets would clog. That just doesn't happen with my HP. In fact at one point this printer sat unused for 3 months while I was out of the country and when I returned it just worked. With my other inkjets I would use up close to 30% of the ink just priming and re-priming the thing to open clogged jets.
This inkjet uses the 02 series of Vivera inks which can last for over a century. The ink cartridge set (6 cartridges) typically costs $35 delivered next morning direct from HP. They also throw in 150 sheets of 4x6 Advanced Photo Paper.
For this HP inkjet, ink cost, one of the major hidden costs for inkjets, is the lowest I've encountered on any inkjets I've owned in the past.
I really like my HP and will definitely purchase another.
I would not believe this figure if I were you. Vivera is not archival in any real sense of the word.
Here is data from Wilhelm Imaging Research [Wilheim-research.com], an acknowledged authority on the longivity of digital images, on the Vivera dye-based inks. As you can see they can last for over a century.
http://www.wilhelm-research.com/hp/WIR_HP_8450_2005_06_29.pdf
According to Wilhelm Imaging Research "HP's recently released Vivera inks are predicted to withstand fading for up to 108 years when printed with six or eight color cartridges on HP's premium papers."
It's worth noting that no inks perform well over time when used with uncoated "copier paper"-style white bond. The sizing (coating) and anti-wicking design of fine art papers are the best way to preserve your investment in inks.
Does anyone else get furious when you own a perfectly good inkjet/laser printer and you can't use it with Vista? Your printer works fine, you have plenty of spare ink but now its a hunk of scrap because the vendor decided not to make a vista driver for this machine. How convenient! If there were any other way to print a document, say a blue and yellow striped turtle that magically spit out your print job when you rubbed its back, I would jump on that technology in a heartbeat...as long as it wasn't from HP or Canon or Epson or lexmark(dell).
We're tired and we're not going to take this anymore!
I'd love to easily be able to find drivers for my periferals for my chosen Linux distro (it's not *buntu). But nooooooo, the hardware companies are too busy li$tening to M$ and other closed source venders. For this reason I told Lexmarks "customer service" on the phone that I would NOT be buying a Lexmark when I needed a new printer last year. A friend gave me a (now) 3 yr old HP 4-in-1 and when I'm ready to use it with Linux (which is coming within the next few months) I hope I can find all the proper drivers for it rather than having to depend upon my LUG <(Linux User Group) to compile them for me.
No, I'm using a 13-year old LaserJet 5mx with Mac OS X 10.5.5. GimpPrint is built in, so I don't usually have trouble using any of my older printers if I need to.
For the Unix/Linux community, find out about it here:
http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net/
if you don't already know.
Hopefully, Canon, Epson, and Kodak will be served soon. I can only imagine the high dollar value of this fraud for a business that uses one or all of those brands of printers. Some enterprising class action attorney could make a name and a lot of money with this ridiculously easy case.
what?
Before buying anything you have to do your research. In the aquisition world its called Market Research. Look around, read reviews, do comparisons and figure out what you need for the money. I just don't understand why people whine about how the product they own operates when it was their choise to buy it and they agreed to its specifications by making the purchase.
Its called free market, and you're free to make your choice..
It's one set of ink cartridges with a 6-tube umbilical which runs out to 6 tanks of ink..
I only buy ink in bottles now and simply pour the ink into the CIS tanks... the system keeps a constant flow.
You can find them on amazon, ebay etc at a cost of around $50 with prefilled tanks! Mine shipped with 6 completely full tanks, which would probably cost $500+ if the ink came in cartridges.
Of course, if you are doing fine photography prints- this may not be for you.
I print our family photos, and they look just fine.
Jeff
Thank you for mentioning the continuous ink system. I'm kind of suprised I've never heard of it before, but thanks to you, I now have. It is going to save me a lot of money. I have an Epson 2200 that was given to me without the ink of course. And when I saw what I was going to pay for ink, I kind of set it to the side labeled under "someday". Now I can afford to actually make good use of it. Thank you very much!!
Instead of the privilege of replacing only ink cartridges, Epson's professional wide-carriage inkjet printers for fine art require replacing the "tampon" or a chip-monitored _overflow bin_ filled with cotton. You can't clean this bin out and slide it back in; the same chip-based monitoring system that requires you to replace the cartridges does the job for the overflow drawer.
The cost of this bin? $75.00. That's right - you pay $75.00 for the privilege of buying a plastic drawer full of cotton batting that exists to sop up all the extra (expensive!) ink the printer spills in the course of making prints.
But what are you going to do? Ultrachrome printers from Epson are some of the best for printing fine art - the gamut and longevity of the inks is fantastic. So you shut up and take it. What lawyer is going to up against Epson, Canon, HP, etc. for "lying to customers" when it is plainly evident that the printers have high per-page costs to subsidize the low buy-in prices?
Trust me, if there was a class action here, it would be underway.
Works for getting that last bit of ink out of it, also for if you're refilling your own cartridges.
Ink-Jets last only a few months if you don't print regularly. Buy pretty much any ink-jet, print 1 picture and then let the printer sit a few months and then try printing again, and more likely than not the jets will be clogged, and either need replaced to "cleaned" which ends up using a quarter or more of the ink.
Just ditch the stupid ink-jet, and pay $0.10 a picture to have MUCH MUCH better quality prints made at the local photo-shop. If you use a decent print shop, they will be using printers that cost thousands of dollars and the prints will not only look much better, but they will almost certainly last much longer, they are also VERY MUCH cheaper.
I highly doubt anyone (that isn't professional and buys a dye-sublimation printer) has ANY reason to use a crappy ink-jet other than "I'm lazy and don't want to run to the corner shop". Why spend $100 or more to buy a printer, then spend $60 or more every few months just to print out what would cost maybe $50 a YEAR (that's 500 photo prints!) if you had the corner shop do it better? Just seems stupid to me.
reset your epson printer waste tray and even reset the cartridges. This program has been around for a long time now.
Save all your print cartridge purchase receipts because there has to be a class action suit here somewhere.
Not very long ago (15 years or so), a B/W inkjet printer cost over $1000, and a colour one double or triple this price! So this is the strategy that the ink jet printer manufacturers stumbled upon: sell the printer cheap and make money out of the consumables.
If you want to fight them in court, then good luck to you, but we may end up either paying again hundreds of dollars for a printer, or the big guys will get altogether out of this business -- thus no more inkjet printers to buy!
My suggestion is if you need prints of your images then send them out to someplace like mPix. It is time to throw the bone to the printer makers for a change.
Robert
- by john55440 November 8, 2008 1:49 PM PST
- My ancient HP LaserJet 4P doesn't even have a "toner low" sensor.
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Showing 1 of 2 pages (35 Comments)When that printer can no longer be used, I will probably get an HP color laser printer. Among other nice things, laser printers don't have any ink to clog.