Spill the beans... on cheap printing

koru

toastiest wrote: »

Last tip, Martin the Awesome from Octoinkjet have waste ink kits. This is quite important as each time you start up your printer or run a nozzle clean, huge amounts of ink are being expelled into a deep dark corner of your printer, which eventually fills up and stops your printer working completely.
You may find youtube videos of people opening up their old printers to find sludge piles of ink inside. Getting a waste ink kit will extend the useful life of the printer and you wont have to pay e.g. £50 to canon to clean and empty it for you.
Downside is you have an extra little box with a tube sitting next to the printer -not the prettiest sight.

This seems to be an issue only for Epson printers.

chrisjgregory

Old Hewlett Packard laser printers (monochrome) are incredibly rugged - I have an HP LaserJet 4050 which is still going strong after 15 years - HP toner cartridges are also very cheap on eBay. So for most printing pick up a refurbished HP LaserJet 4050 on eBay for approx £30-£50 and bid for GENUINE HP toner cartridges whenever you see them. Cost: approx £20 for 10,000 pages + cost of paper which is £2.35 or so per pack in Asda. For anything you MUST HAVE in colour (rare, I find) get a separate colour printer.

Mike_Watson

My first computer supplier put me on to non original inks and I've never had a problem. I use JetTec inks from Premier Inks, 21 ml in each cartridge and £15 for a set of 4 for an Epson D68. You can't go wrong!

ammiLy

If I need to print something from the web, copy paste to Word and format to take the least space possible. Also keeping fingers crossed I get an e-reader for birthday, will save me printing all those papers I have to read :j

stutray wrote: »

No, no, no. The 3rd parties are the greedy ones. Generating revenue from someone elses product without the overheads.

You sound like a rep for one of the manufacturers who are now running an "more expensive printer but cheaper ink" campaign!
Anyhow, we all have a choice. Those companies make a very well calculated decision when they put a price on their products. This applies not only to printer manufacturers, any piece of equipment that requires things such as ink, toner, oil, petrol etc etc is sold at a low price and money is made by high margins on consumables. Remember manufacturers warn you that use of different brand consumables makes your warranty void (or something to that effect). This scares users into paying more for recommended products. At the end of the day it's our choice what to buy. The market is big enough for all the parties.

debbie_w

thanks Londra for your reply and confirming what I suspected. As I am not in a position to buy a new printer at the moment, ( though wish I had bought the Samsung laser one you sent the link for instead of the one I have, which was more expensive as it is also a scanner and copier) I guess I will just have to use the black and white cartridge only!

debbie_w

sorry lordra, spelt your name wrong!

golddustmedia

I buy old laser printers at the car boot sale or similar sales then run them until they break.

The best so far was an old office printer, an HP laserjet 4, bought for £1. I ran it for about a year printing off nearly 1000 pages. When the toner finally ran out and it wasn't printing as well as it should I sold it for spare parts on ebay and got £6 for it!

I replaced it with my current printer which cost £5 but has worked for over 2 years with no new consumables to date!

My mum had my old HP laserjet 4L until a few months ago and I bought that back in 1994! So that had 18 years use!!!

Dickt

I tried the Print Ink companies who advertise in Computer Mags, and they were a fair economy, until a friend told me to try a company who operate out of Hornsea, East Yorkshire. They are on the web, and you will find them on your search engine.
I have no connection with this company, except as a very satisfied customer. The prices make the usual discount ink companies appear expensive and the manufacturer's prices a total rip-off.

SJshah

I use a Kodak printer which have the cheapest ink cartridge prices.
When printing, I always print as a "draft" in the printer options - it prints faster and uses less ink - good quality print too!

When buying new cartridges - buy the XL black cartridge and colour cartridge together from amazon - much cheaper than anywhere in store plus gets delivered to your door.

pennypinchUK

1. If you want to buy original manufacturers ink, buy it on eBay. Don't for heavens sake buy it in PC World or Staples, etc.
2. Start looking for replacement cartridges as soon as you install the last of your current stock, not just as your last cartridge is about to run out/has already run out. Then, you can afford to wait until a good deal comes round.
3. Buy non-manufacturer's ink. It's just as good and way cheaper.
4. Recycle your cartridges by selling them on eBay. Very soon you'll have enough empty cartridges to be able to pay for a "free" replacement.