All in one printer or seperates?

[Bifta]

Lexmark are without a doubt the worst brand of printer I've ever used. I owned one for a few day's before the plug in power supply, brick type thing short circuited, melted and tripped all the fuses in the house, for the day or two it did work, the print quality was absolutely awful. I bought an Epson R300 after that, even though it seem's to drain ink very quickly, I love it, excellent print quality and more importantly, it looks nice

[ntl customer]

Beware, the cost of the cartridges of HP printers is pretty expensive - nearly £50 a time to replace the colour and black cartridge with originals for the PSC1205. The remanufactured ones are slightly cheaper, but not by much.

For me, it has to be a balance between economy and print quality - there's not much point buying a printer which costs as much to replace the cartridges as the printer itself. You might as well flog the old printer on Ebay and get a new printer complete with cartridges!

Epson printers are OK in terms of print quality and the older ones can be very economical without compromising on print quality (colour + black only cost £4 a pair) , but my last one which was about 4 years old died for no apparent reason - one day it threw up an "unknown" error (whereby all the lights just flash on the panel and it doesn't print at all) whilst printing. I never managed to find out what was wrong with it - was this some kind of time bomb fixed into the Epson printer where it would be set to expire after X amount of pages?

[andygrif]

True, HP ink is more expensive, but shopping around does pay dividends.....

7 Day Shop are doing some good deals on HP ink right now.

Also The Computer Shop (Time Computers branches) are promoting lower inkjet prices....I picked up a black cartridge in there for about £10 when PC World are flogging them for £20!

[ntl customer]

Originally Posted by andygrif

Also The Computer Shop (Time Computers branches) are promoting lower inkjet prices....I picked up a black cartridge in there for about £10 when PC World are flogging them for £20!

Slightly , but ...

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WTF ??

[andygrif]

Hahahaha...well it is Time Computers....what did you expect?

[bob_builder]

Originally Posted by ntl customer

Beware, the cost of the cartridges of HP printers is pretty expensive - nearly £50 a time to replace the colour and black cartridge with originals for the PSC1205. The remanufactured ones are slightly cheaper, but not by much.

For me, it has to be a balance between economy and print quality - there's not much point buying a printer which costs as much to replace the cartridges as the printer itself. You might as well flog the old printer on Ebay and get a new printer complete with cartridges!

You have to bear in mind that most printers these days (including HP) come with cartridges that are only half full. In the case of the HP PSC1205 the printer may cost £49.99 at Argos and the black and colour multipack £41.90 but these cartridges will last twice as long so you would have to pay £99.98 to get the same amount of ink.

[Shaun]

Originally Posted by ntl customer

Slightly , but ...



WTF ??

Some photo printers have four ink carts instead of just one colour and one black.

[Matth]

http://www.ssclg.com/epsone.shtml - crucial tool for Epsons, they DO have a "death counter" - the waste ink counter - you SHOULD service the printer and either replace or clean the waste ink pads, but you may get away with just resetting the counter - be aware that the printer could puke waste ink from a clean, if the waste reservoir overfills.


I'm not keen on "all your eggs in one basket" all in one machines, unless you MUST save that space (though individual scanner and printer are less bulky units, and may fit where an all in 1 would be awkward. or you value the standalone copier feature of some of them.

If you print CD labels, maybe an R200 for printable CDs would be a good move.
At PC World, £49.99 as an accessory for a digital camera, including the cheap little AGFA
Model - AGFA SV VGA
Product Code - 948861
Out of stock, are they getting wise to this dodge?

Model - AGFA SX 1.3MP
Product Code - 948878
Next one up

You could get the printer alone for about the same overall price at Ebuyer, but with both of these, the cheapest scanner takes you over budget.

PS. Epsons DO have a bit of a clogging habit, I'd say you should excercise them once a week to be sure - a normal text/color page, the black and colour test blocks. Or anything you would normally print in some numbers, spread them out.

If you fear a fatal head clog, then stay with discardable heads in the HP, Lexmark and SOME Canons - the best of the Canons, you can choose to replace either the inks, or the whole head and ink set (which WILL need replacing occasionally, as under that system, it's not designed to last the life of the printer).

On any discardable heads, I'd be looking at refills, and on Epsons, probably clone cartridges.


PS.
PHOTO printers, at lest in EPSON terminology, use 5 colours and black, which may be a 5 colour tank, or 5 individual - the individual colours can be a saving, if you use 1 or 2 colours excessively, and with the 5, using up the light cyan in sky tones may be a problem.

In practice, the ultra-high resolution of modern 3 colour + black models, makes them as good as previous 5 colour models - they don't have the light cyan and light magenta, but they can apply exceedingly small dots of the ordinary ones.

[andygrif]

I've got a Photosmart HP, and these have the extra cartidge that give the light shades, plus there's another cartridge for B&W prints that is stunning.