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| Thread ID: 45210 | 2004-05-14 02:43:00 | How to get Printer Ink costs down ! | Digby (677) | Press F1 |
| Post ID | Timestamp | Content | User | ||
| 236437 | 2004-05-14 02:43:00 | All users of Inkjet printers complain about the cost of the ink. It is a well known fact that the printer companies make HUGE profits on the ink (selling the printers below cost). What it needs is for a major organisation like PC World to buy 3 printers of of each of Canon, Epson and Hewlett Packard with a set of standard cartridges. Then produce a black and white document say a One page report. Then print this document out on each printer for as many times as the cartridge will do. Then we would have a real world number of pages per cartridge (rather than their optimistic 5% figures) and then one could divide the cost of the cartridge by the number of pages produced by that printer to get the ranking of all 3 printers. This would assist people making puchasing decisons because lets face it all 3 brands are fairly similar in quality of print output. If most new purchases bought the cheapest brand with regards to ink cartridge then this would force the other 2 brands into a virtuous circle where they would reduce the price of their cartridges in an effort to be known as the most cost-effective printer ! If people mostly bought the most cost effective brand the other 2 would soon panic. Any thoughts ? Any volunteers ? PC World ? Compumer Magainze ? Three philanthropists ? Regards Dighby Tauranga |
Digby (677) | ||
| 236438 | 2004-05-14 03:57:00 | I think the Dutch Consumer organisation did this . People buy printers for other "features . " The best way to get your printer ink costs down is to buy a laser printer . :D Or for real cheap printing, you can't beat a dot-matrix . ]:) |
Graham L (2) | ||
| 236439 | 2004-05-14 05:33:00 | Another way of looking at it. How much that is unnecessary is printed out in colour and then thrown away? A few months ago I threw my colour printer out in the rubbish and bought a cheap laser. No more fancy ink prices. |
JJJJJ (528) | ||
| 236440 | 2004-05-14 05:48:00 | Grahams dead right :) My NEC Pinwriter P7 dot-matrix printer is dirt cheap to use. A bottle of stamp-pad ink from Warehouse Stationery for less than $5 will re-ink a ribbon at least 6 times, and with fanfold paper you cant get any cheaper than that, and it works well :D |
Terry Porritt (14) | ||
| 236441 | 2004-05-14 05:50:00 | And if you install Ghostscript (free ;-)) you can use PostScript and get very good quality printing. (Even 9 pin printers can give good looking output). | Graham L (2) | ||
| 236442 | 2004-05-14 06:57:00 | For those of us that have to provide quality output and print colour the options are a little narrower . Stump up for the cartridges (shop the specials) . Get a laser for the BW output, stump up for the colour cartridges . Get it professionally printed off site . I've come to the conclusion that the latter is better for me except for draft output . It has the added bonus of binding and frilly bits all wrapped into the one package . Cheers Murray P |
Murray P (44) | ||
| 236443 | 2004-05-16 12:13:00 | You didn't mention whether or not you have tried any of the cartridge-refilling companies. There are many of these - Inktec in Palmerston North (with a nation-wide service) has had good reviews on this forum and my sister uses them routinely with good results. I don't know their URL but inktec.co.nz is probably worth a shot. Someone else will know it, anyhow. | Robin S_ (86) | ||
| 236444 | 2004-05-16 12:20:00 | My pride and joy is our HP LaserJet 1300n, but to tell you the truth, you can never beat a dot matrix... | Growly (6) | ||
| 236445 | 2004-05-17 06:53:00 | Our households are big consumers in the refill market. We've done so many of them, no problems what so ever, they're about $30 for two bottles (twin pack) and each will print about 800 drafts (We only print in draft mode, it looks no different I reckon to normal) So... 800x2=1600 30/1600=0.1875 Less than two cent, we'll round it up. Still dirt cheap if you ask me. Paper itself costs about 3 or 4 times more!!! Yes, correct, my printer DOES print 800 pages on draft, HP claims it can do 800 on normal, but it doesn't. Still... highly economical.... using HP930C, as much as the printer was expensive, its been a while since it's been paid off ;-) |
~~~~~ s y ~~~~~ (2054) | ||
| 236446 | 2004-05-17 06:56:00 | I'm still going to stick with the laser, Especially my HP LaserJet 1300n . My old printer (Deskjet 670C) used to give about 120 pages before ink needed refilling . |
Growly (6) | ||
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