Printers

[nwtv2003]

I gave up on Printers a few years ago, they were starting to piss me off, plus I didn't really need one. Last one I had was a cheapo Lexmark that ran out of Ink pretty damn quickly, we found in the end it was easier and cheaper buying a new printer than buying the inks seperately.

[Dr Lobster*]

i've got a hp laserjet 2200d, i did have a colour printer but for me it's actually cheaper to get my photos done in boots than it is to maintain another printer

[Nick Harvey]

I still use a fairly long in the tooth Xerox DocuPrint P12 Laser Printer and have never had any trouble with it.

And I know a nice man round the corner who refills my toner cartridge for £25 instead of me paying Xerox £95 for a replacement one.

Oh, and I also know where to find a thing like Gavin's got, if I really need it. Does yours do fax and pdf creation as well, Gavin?

[marksi]

What ever happened in the case of the law suit where someone proved that HP (and others) were cheating consumers by having their ink cartridges flag that they were empty when in fact they weren't?

I'm not aware of that case but it seems rather odd - if they wanted their customers to get less value out of their ink cartridges, why wouldn't they just reduce the amount of ink inside to the same effect?

Because the amount of ink would have to be printed on the packet when you bought it and if it seemed that 50ml of HP ink was more expensive than 50ml of Lexmark ink, it would look poor value.

They way it is alleged they do it is to sell you 50ml of ink and have the printer tell you to replace the cartridge when there's 30ml left in it. They are therefore trying to sell you 20ml of ink for the price of 50ml, if you see what I mean.

Mine (HP) has been running on an "empty" cartridge for 6 months, though I don't do a lot of printing.

[Pete]

it should be stated my old HP Laserjet 2550L claimed to be empty five months ago. Thanks to a complex system of button pushing and flashing lights I reset the thing and got another five months and prob another 500 pages out of it. Sadly I couldn't make it happen again. tsk.

[cdd]

What ever happened in the case of the law suit where someone proved that HP (and others) were cheating consumers by having their ink cartridges flag that they were empty when in fact they weren't?

I'm not aware of that case but it seems rather odd - if they wanted their customers to get less value out of their ink cartridges, why wouldn't they just reduce the amount of ink inside to the same effect?

Because the amount of ink would have to be printed on the packet when you bought it and if it seemed that 50ml of HP ink was more expensive than 50ml of Lexmark ink, it would look poor value.

They way it is alleged they do it is to sell you 50ml of ink and have the printer tell you to replace the cartridge when there's 30ml left in it. They are therefore trying to sell you 20ml of ink for the price of 50ml, if you see what I mean.

Mine (HP) has been running on an "empty" cartridge for 6 months, though I don't do a lot of printing.

Hmm... I sort of buy that but I think most people would see a printer that demands its ink changing every month as being bad value as well, more so than the actual numbers on the cartridge.

[Gavin Scott]

Oh, and I also know where to find a thing like Gavin's got, if I really need it. Does yours do fax and pdf creation as well, Gavin?

It does, as well as being an email terminal for scanned/pdf'd documents.

I'm off on Wednesday to see an add on which uses a propitiatory compression technique which is far more server space efficient than regular PDF. We are archiving masses of files, and tabletop scanners just take too damned long - whereas this thing will take hundreds of pages in the hopper, and thumbnail the resultant images so we can easily discard unnecessary pages.

[Steve in Pudsey]

I'd tend to recommend the route of a cheapo mono laser for printing documents, and using one of the commercial printing services for photos.

I worked out that you're looking at about 20p a pop to print 6x4 photos on an inkjet, so even the one hour printing services undercut it.

[Malpass93]

I've got an awful Lexmark All-in-One thing, but seems to have problems communicating with it when I need to print, but scans and copies fine. Rather daft.

[Gavin Scott]

I worked out that you're looking at about 20p a pop to print 6x4 photos on an inkjet, so even the one hour printing services undercut it.

Wow - you sure did work that out.

[cwathen]

Until recently I used to operate a trio of fairly ageing devices - an HP Deskjet 843C for colour/graphics work (dates back to 2001), an HP Laserjet 4L for mono text (dates back to 1992) and a Mustek Scanexpress 12000P for scanning (dates back to 1999).

Problems with the Laser and scanner having only parallel port interfaces which my more modern laptop and eeepc don't have, and with HP trying to price my rock solid inkjet into it's grave by making cartridges for it more and more expensive, I finally replaced all 3 with a single device about 10 months ago. I now have an HP Deskjet F2180 multifunction device.

Despite the shocking cheapness of modern HP build quality, and the alarmingly small ink cartridges, what I have now is nevertheless so much better. Being USB, I don't have to wait an age for the scanner to do it's job (the annoying 'warming up' process that the Mustek had is gone too), colour output is higher resolution and more vibrant than anything the old DJ 843C could do, and this new inkjet can knock out a page of crisp, sharp monochrome text faster than the old laser printer could.