Commercial A4 colour printer whose ink doesnt cost a fortune!

manglesey25

We get through about 80000 A4 sheets a year using HP7780 printers. While replacing the hardware is cheap enough - £20 per unit off ebay, but the cost of ink and printheads is reaching £6000 a year.

We tried domestic Epson SX printers but got through one a week before it developed a fault (horisontal banding). If an Epson SX Printer has a "compatible" ink cartridge installed, it develops the horisontal banding fault after printing 244 A4 pages. We discovered this when we rapidly got through 8 Epson SX550W units and measured the timing of the fault using genuine and compatible cartridges.

We tried Kodak Print and Prosper but the hardware fails after a couple of months and the consumables are still very expensive.

We want to go to CISS printers and buy the ink by the litre online etc. Currently its £20 per litre per colour.

Can anyone recommend a good strong printer that runs with a CISS without developing faults or need special chip programming equipment.

santer_2

Depending on the type of document, have you looked at laser printers with compatible toners?

manglesey25

I havnt recently, but we used lasers until about 4 years ago, the cost of the toners was the reason why we ditched them.

Doc types are B&W, easy enough, but we do a large amount of photo printing and this is where the cookie crumbles. We are spending lots of time running print diagnostics and alignments dealing with minor imperfections and that all costs ink.

santer_2

These do CIS and have a lot of youtube videos, asking them which printers can hack it maybe be worth doing. Wonder if it is worth getting a high end printer, mine are from Epson with their three year warranty, have used that a few times, you contribute £10 towards the courier and they exchange the printer, all of which have arrived with a complete set of inks.

With Marrutt, you may be able to get everything cheaper elsewhere, however, they have been around a while so should be able to help

http://www.marrutt.com/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bY20d1ZKNAc

If you use a lot of photo paper, these are reasonable

http://www.photopaperdirect.com/