The Great ‘The Most Economical Printers’ Hunt

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  • Nikolic
    Nikolic Posts: 21 Forumite
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    I've got a HP c5180 all-in-one that I bagged for £90 at the start of the year direct from HP. It has some intelligent ink recycling system, so rather than wasting ink cleaning the heads, it recycles that ink.

    I've printed over 300 pages from it, a mixture of colours (school documents etc) and all the colour cartridges are full, the black is 80%.

    New ink costs £25 for all the cartridges, plus 150 sheets of 6x4 photo paper. (Official, top quality HP ink).
  • Davesnave
    Davesnave Posts: 34,741 Forumite
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    Serif Software do an ink saver program in their PC tools section for about £15. This allows you to adjust the amount of ink your printer uses to just above the point at which degradation starts to show. I haven't tried it as my ancient HP895CXi has a draft mode which prints fine for everyday text etc and is very economical. Haven't had good results with generic inks, so I buy HP carts on line from W2W.com. Others may know of cheaper sources.
  • aris
    aris Posts: 339 Forumite
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    I have a Canon i550 - they don't make it any more, but the carts are cheap - they used to sell them at Poundland even, and one stage were on a 50p special offer. The newer Canon printers have carts which use a chip - but I believe you can get around this quite easily.
  • eagleeye
    eagleeye Posts: 284 Forumite
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    i prefer multifunctional canon mp110 and brother mfc 5840cn .The later one comes with Fax.The inks for both of them is cheaper from the phoneixdirect and justify the purchase of such lovely printers in long run
  • Gorf123
    Gorf123 Posts: 77 Forumite
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    barneydog wrote: »
    The most economical way to print with an inkjet is to use a CISS (Continuous Ink Supply Systems).

    This is the one I use with my Epsom R220 (it came with 12 150 ml bottles of compatible ink, 2 of each colour) and cost £19.99.

    Replacement ink costs £5.99 for 6 150ml bottles.

    http://svp.co.uk/products-solo.php?pid=1171&prepg=3

    This particular model is currently out of stock at SVP but they are available at other retailers including Bigpockets or on E-Bay....

    For the sake of a few pence, wait for SVP. They have the best post-sales service I have experienced from an online-only retailer.

    dellboy102 wrote: »
    I did come across that but i've heard CISS is fiddly to fit...

    It's fiddly to fit, and can be messy on an ongoing basis when you refill the ink tanks. Still - it saves money (which is the whole point of this site), and is better for the environment than buying cartridges.



    Whatever ink source you use, in the long run it is usually cheaper to leave your printer turned on. The power cycling procedure uses ink, and ink clogs in the heads if the printer is turned off for a week or two. The head cleaning cycle that you need to go through to clear this blockage uses ink. Depending on how expensive your ink is, you may find the electrical cost of leaving your printer switched on is offset by the cost of the ink if you don't.
  • gf3_3
    gf3_3 Posts: 8 Forumite
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    similar to the first post i use http://www.continuousink.com/
    works for me
  • Middlestitch
    Middlestitch Posts: 1,486 Forumite
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    The older Epson printers can churn out endless pages and are especially good if you just need loads of reasonable quality black printing. Try e-bay or Freecycle at https://www.freecycle.org (you can ask on the latter site if anyone has an old Epson they are no longer using or see if one's being offered locally). Cheapest compatible inks I've found are from https://www.7dayshop.com
  • AlanUdale
    AlanUdale Posts: 86 Forumite
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    I purchased a Canon Pixma ip5300 I used pricerunner to find the best deal at £74.

    Put little holes in the tops of the ink cartridges and covered this with bluetac.

    Now just push a needle through the bluetac refill the ink and cover the bluetac over.

    Each refill costs about 11p.

    INK was from local computer store in bottles.

    Tested with differant printing papers and all seems fine.
  • JimOllerhead
    JimOllerhead Posts: 6 Forumite
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    I use an Epson D88 Plus but with the cartridge monitoring disabled because the thing prints on LONG after the Epson software says it needs replacing (AND the warning LED flashes on the printer).... disable it (can't remember how) and then use a freebie utility called SSC service utility to REALLY tell you how much ink is left
  • chrissyp_4
    chrissyp_4 Posts: 7 Forumite
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    I bought a Brother DCP 115C all in one scanner and printer for around £38 at Tesco and have bought full sets of compatable cartridges for around £9 in total from Choice Stationery. Much cheaper than the compcarts for my Epson.
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