A Buyer's Guide to Inkjet Printers 399
An anonymous reader writes "CoolTechZone.com has posted a good writeup on how to select an inkjet printer without falling prey to many of the common marketing gimmicks."
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A Buyer's Guide to Inkjet Printers
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With your bare hands?!?
Re:This is an easy one... (Score:5, Interesting)
They're doing it with laser printers, [dell.com] too. $25 for a USB cable and $65 for toner.
The people responsible for this greed will pay one day.
Continuous inking ability (Score:5, Interesting)
Linky linky:
http://www.nomorecarts.com/ [nomorecarts.com]
http://www.brandonstaggs.com/epson-r200-continous
http://www.atlascopy.com/cfs/ [atlascopy.com]
What I've learned about IJP's (Score:5, Interesting)
- IJPs is an anagram for "jips"!
- If you're like me and only want to print out "The Onion", in color, once a week: by the time the next week rolls around, the inkjet heads have clogged. You waste a sheet or two of expensive paper in finding this out again for the galumpty-umph time.
- If you use the "control panel" to clean the heads you have to put up with 5 minutes of Grandpa-getting-out-of-a-Miata-type groaning coming from the printer. And it wastes a whole boatload of ink in the process.
- If you instead take the printhead to the sink and give it a Sitz bath, you get your fingertips all colored in the process, as you forgot how indelible the ink is.
- Some of the HP IJPs require a 59MB download to install one 37k driver. And 39MB of slow, clunky, and unreliable "Print management" admin software doodads. Which do not want to uninstall themselves.
- The HP installer hasnt heard of virtual LPT ports-- it bombs out if you don't have a real, live, 378h hardware LPT port, even if you wanted to use a USB virtual port.
- Don't buy even slightly past their expiration data ink cartridges-- I thought I was a real winner buying a bunch of HP ones for $1 each cause they were a bit expired. The red ink had magically turned into dark brown, like overnight. Not good if you're printing skin, er, I mean job-related bar-graphs.
- Don't buy one of those refilling kits, just don't.
Instead scarf up some lightly used color laser printer at some local auction. You won't regret it. Oh wait, you will if it needs a new photoconductor belt, $350.Do Not ask me how I learned these things.
Just buy it at CompUSA (Score:2, Interesting)
Well, after about a year and a half, it starts messing up.
So I have it run down to the store and they give me a brand new one for free and sold me Yet Another Extended Warranty for $50.00.
So for an inital deposit of $350.00 and $50.00 installments every year or so, you get a free laser printer replacement.
Not bad if you ask me.
Choosing an inkjet printer (Score:3, Interesting)
If it's rated for industrial use, but it either doesn't have Linux drivers, or the Linux drivers aren't under an OSI-approved licence, don't buy it -- even if you don't want to use it with Linux today.
If the Linux drivers for your industrially-rated printer were written by a third party, it might be worth buying -- after all, it's a good sign that somebody actually thought it was worth bothering to support.
Bear in mind that you have already managed up to now without an inkjet printer. Investigate all alternatives fully before you buy one. Can you e-mail your files, or host them on some web space somewhere? If you want to show off some photos, try burning them onto a CD-R -- most DVD players will read CD-Rs of
Re:This is an easy one... (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't. If it hasn't been pointed out a million times already, the majority of the consumers out there simply don't know any better. For example, I recently recommended to someone the $300 Dell Dimension 2400 [dell.com] only to find that the sales rep talked them into upgrading to a "better model" so that they could get a 19" LCD "bundled" (note that Dell won't offer things like a DVD-R or large LCD monitor with their low-end stuff - that's how they getcha).
I tried to explain that they could have just ordered the PC and monitor separately but this was obviously well over their head. They didn't care. In the end, they ended up paying over $1000 so they could do basic internet, email and photo printing.
Lovely.
Lasers are the way to go except for photo printing (Score:4, Interesting)
With budget Laser printers on the market these days, even if you have to pay twice the cost of an inkjet printer, for 99% of your printing needs the Laser is the far far better deal. You can get the Samsung 1710ML, for example, at less than $100 on some sales.
I do sometimes need color, and a color laser would be nice, although the colors from such a printer are not good enough for some applications such as photo printing. Photo printing is the one last domain of the ink jet, and probably always will be. But I do that so rarely that taking my photos to walmart to print is the best deal for me.
Say no to inkjets except for multifunction devices (Score:4, Interesting)
This is to say, if you replace your ink cartridges on 1x/month basis - an inkjet is more expensive than a laserjet. I have several clients who change both the black and color cartridges on a monthly, or bi-monthly basis: $25/chartidges (bulk) x 2 x 6x/yr = $300/year for cartridges. This is the cost of a color laserjet.
Based on the duty cycle of the $100 high capacity cartridges in my Konica Minolta 2430DL, an inkjet cartridge with a capacity of 300-800 pages will cost between $830 and $300. (If we assume that black is 800 pages, and colour 300 pages, you are paying between twice and three times as much for ink)
Further, you get to escape the duties of changing the cartridges and making a mess on a (bi)monthly basis.
If you need a color copier, and a fax - then a multifunction inkjet makes sense. Otherwise, anyone who prints often should get a laserjet.
OH, almost forgot: Yes, Epson inkjets are wonderful for printing photos. However, if you are really serious about printing pictures - a color correction system (~$200) is required and can match your screen to any printer. And some (my)laserjet printers do have pictbridge so you can print directly from the camera. (Without proofing, why?)
Re:This is an easy one... (Score:3, Interesting)
You have to pick and choose your products, these days. The $279 2400N is a great price for a desktop (subtract $20 for no monitor), once you remove all the garbage.
So yes, I recommend Dell desktops but not printers. As a side note, I always keep a stash of Canon iP3000 [newegg.com] printers in stock. These printers are cheap, quality and Canon makes the cartridges very easy to refill. When someone runs out of ink, I offer to refill their cartridges for $20 or explain to them how they can DIY for just a couple bucks.
Long story short - every vendor has a "catch" and a "loss leader". You just have to pick and choose the latter.
Continuous inking RULES!!! (Score:3, Interesting)
I have been using an Epson 1520 for about 5 years now. Very good at printing photos, and being a 4-color unit (not 7 or 15 color), it is cheap to get ink, and continuous ink supplies are available REALLY cheaply.
With people complaining about inkjets, you have to realize that this is the cheapest possible printing technique. Unfortunately, most manufacturers don't pay attention to what people want in a printer, and make their products to sell units -- not to last, or work great, etc.
This is why I bought a used HP 8000N laser printer. Now, I can print all the documents I want, and use my Epson for color photos. I have the best of both worlds!
But Does It Look Good? (Score:2, Interesting)
Sorry. but unless you're willing to invest in something like a Fiery system or lease an imagesetter, your "cheap" lasers would be laughed out of any decent graphics house. They do run a lot less expensively in volume- and also a lot faster- than an inkjet, but none but the top-end systems come close to quality of output. Even dye sublimation technology has been left far behind- especially when it comes to large-format printing. Try proofing full color tabloid sized images on one of your "better solutions" and see where your investment winds up.
Those expensive inks and ludicrously priced paper stocks nowadays produce a level of quality that amazes any of those that grew up with the first inkspitters. I doubt any of them thought they'd ever produce anything near the near-photographic quality that they do nowadays at the relative pittance of price.
The bad-old-days of film, darkrooms and expensive photo stocks are long gone. Expensive in the long run or not, the inkjets give more value for buck than all but the most expensive, high end equipment, and I doubt you'll see anyone in the graphics industry that will balk at the price of an ink cartridge when they consider the alternatives.
You want to bang out lots of halfway decent printing? Go with the cheap laser printer of your choice. They churn out passable stuff at a much more reasonable per print price. However, don't expect me to feel sorry for you when the color printout of the images you took on your digital camera turn out like crap or the art director at your company laughs at your "printer ready" documentation.
Of course, all this only holds until the next great thing comes out.
Re:Continuous inking ability (Score:1, Interesting)
Inkjet printing is such a water downed version of real inkjet printing.
Drop on Demand vs Continuous Stream
http://www.cone-editions.com/conetech/3047.htm [cone-editions.com]
Now thats a real printer, anything less is uncivilized.
Re:Troll? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Even for photos, inkjets suck. (Score:4, Interesting)
I am a professional photographer and I have been using the Epson 2200 and Espon 4000 for my work, and there is NO WAY a dye-sublimation printer could do the work these pigment-based inkjet printers do. I use a bulk-feed system for my 2200 with the Lyson Cavepaint pigment inks and I have compared my 13x19 prints with dye-sublimation. There is no comparison, the inkjet is far and away better in color gamut, subtle tones and in the huge variety of archival and canvas 'papers' that are available.
Now let's talk about the content of the article (Score:2, Interesting)