Dunno where you can get colour laser toner from, first hit for 890 ink, =A36.99 for black colour pair:
Low cost colour lasers are slow even running mono print, something to be aware of.
For occasional printing probably better value than maintaining an inkjet.
Adam
How much does an HP A3+ printer cost to replace my aging, never blocked Epson 1520? Can you get carts for less than 50p to fit the HP?
My daughter has a lovely little HP for photo printing. Couldn't tell you the model off hand, but she bought it in Waitrose (John Lewis) and it wasn't expensive. Has all the card slots etc. Only about the size of a toaster. I think you can also print A4 on it, but you might have to hand feed it to do that, not sure. As far as inks go, I know a lot of people swear by the non-proprietry cheapos, or refils, but I have a couple of friends, one of whom is a professional photographer, who will not use them, having had serious problems in the past. AFAIK, all HP cartridges have the print head built in, which is why they are a little more expensive, but at least it means that if you should get a (very rare) clog that you can't clear, the printer is not landfill. Personally, just to know that I am getting brand new heads with manufacturer's specced ink behind them, is enough to keep me buying originals. HP themselves do some good 'shop online' deals, and often the likes of Staples and so on, have HP ink deals on the go.
One thing to note about HPs that I think a lot of other printers like Epsons don't do, is that they go 'properly' to sleep when you leave them powered i.e. after a period of time, the heads 'park' over the sealer. I always leave my printer powered as I can't be doing waiting for half an hour as it boots, then self tests, then establishes contact with the host computer, then purges its inklines and so on. When I hit print, I want it to just wake up and print, preferably some time in the next 30 seconds. Both the Epsons that I had used to just power down with the heads left exactly where they last were, which I believe is a contributory factor to them drying out and clogging.
One other thing to note when choosing a new one. If you have a network with more than one computer on it, several of the HP all-in-ones, and possibly the printer-only types as well, are 'proper' network printers i.e. they have an Ethernet port on them as well as a USB interface. This means that you can just plug it into your hub or router or whatever, and it will be seen as just another network node. Then, any computer on the network can make use of it, without the need for any other computer to be on, as is otherwise the case when a printer is 'shared' to a network via a host computer. For this reason alone, it might be worth considering an all-in-one - even though you don't think you want one -where the scanner is likewise fully networked (when you scan via the front panel buttons, a menu comes up listing all of the nodes that are available on the network, and asks you where you would like to send the scan) and also for the fact that you get a very good monochrome or colour photocopier that can also be used for Faxing. It's amazing how often you find yourself using it as a photocopier ...
My 5180 (not the current model I think as a couple of years old now) was only around the budget that you have, and the prices haven't changed much. The likes of PC World are having a hard time of it at the moment. If I were you, I'd get myself down there, and see what sorts of deals there are to be had.
Arfa
Rubbish, nothing came out of the blocked jets but plenty from the unblocked ones... If no ink is being consumed how come the level drops in host computers ink level display? OK if could just be the chip telling the host what it thinks the levels are but you can't ignore that and the printer will stop when it thinks it's run out of ink. You could use a chip reseter on it but then you don't know where the levels are at all. More hoops to jump through just to do a simple print.
If you cost it properly you will find lasers are cheaper to run, especially for photos.
You need a good laser to get photo results but even the cheap ones look a lot better if you laminate the photo.
I use a cheap Samsung CLP300 these days unless its bigger than A4 and then its back to the old Epson which will take A2 paper.
This one is even cheaper, but I haven't seen one.
8<
Do you think an inkjet is fast?
16/4 ppm from a £80 colour laser is pretty fast and is a lot quicker than most inkjets. I have yet to see an inkjet that will print an A4 photo in less than 20 seconds.My local ASDA will print 100 6x4 for £7.50 so its going to be hard to beat on price. Its open 24 Hrs too.
I have a little Samsung dyesub printer for taking on holiday or to parties.
Well they don't usually measure the level in the tanks, they count the number of pulses and use maths to work out how much is left. If no ink is coming out it will still count the pulses as it has no way of knowing.
My Epson 1160 has been completely trouble free since I left it on full time about 6 months ago. Before that it was always needing cleaning and tended to produce blotchy prints. Sometimes it needed the glass cleaner treatment. Now it seems perfect despite fairly infrequent use and being loaded with very cheap cartridges.
It would be interesting to know if this is just good fortune or if there's a reason for it.
Edgar
It probably does automatic maintenance.
Phaser at sub =A380 looks a good deal, as long as its full fill toner and not demo as a full set of toners is over =A3100. Also solid inks believe they like left switched on all the time.
Colour laser versus mono laser, even a cheap mono laser will easily do
20 pages a minute, colour lasers are a lot slower usually, even running mono only, if your doing a lot of mono printing, mono laser is going to be faster and cheaper.Laser is always going to be faster than inkjet.
Should keep laser printers away from right beside you as well because of the ionising effect of the corona wire and toner floating in the air, mine lives in a hall cupboard with a network cable to it.
7.5p per sheet would be hard to get decent glossy paper at the price.Some of the portable dye sub printers look actually affordable to run, not the Lexmark strangely ;-)
Adam
They aren't Epson cartridges but "compatible" ones. Same vendor for Epso= n carts =A337.48.
129.99 / 4 =3D 32.49 - Read what I wrote a set being about the same pr= ice as a toner. Note that they sell HP (new not remanufactured) cartidges at= =A363, PC World Business have them at =A356. Dabs =A351. But note that y= ou'll get considerably more pages from the laser compared to the inkjet, and when one colour goes you just repalace that colour not the whole colour =cartridge.
I have a "low cost laser" (HP LJ1200) that'll go from standby to finishe= d print of a normal letter in about 15 seconds. The Epson 890 might have g= ot
1/4 of the way through it by then.Agreed, especialy with occasional use and most of the expenisve ink goes= down the drain in cleaning cycles.
Exactly so you end up with a cartridge that says it is empty when in fac= t there is plenty of ink in it. And with the stuff costing not far short o= f =A3500 per litre you don't want to be chucking it away.
not true on all printers my HP inkjet all 6 are individually replaced
mine recycles ink back to the cartridge
It says 700 colour and/or 1500 mono on the included toners.
I think its just a rebadged Samsung clp-300 laser and not a solid ink inkjet. Looks the same, has the same lights, buttons, spec.
The networked version of the phaser is about £15 more.
They are never going to be as cheap as Asda, but they can be fun.
nightjar It can just take a lot of cleaning cycles to get an Epson that has been left
Yup. I gave up - not impressive when I have folks waiting :-)
In my experience zero cleaning cycles required for my Canon ip4300 printer that gets infrequent use as most of the non-colour stuff goes to a laser printer. Excellent photos, quite up to the standard of my previous Epson Photo 750.
If ye wanna a laugh, and have got a defunct Epson printer that's going nowhere, take it to pieces and boggle at the volume of felt cloth they have installed in the bottom rear to absorb all the ink that is wasted during cleaning. Over engineering or perhaps Epson expect the customer to be wasting all that champange priced ink?
Then strip out the stepper motors and flog 'em on eBay ;-)
Compare the cost of an inkjet printer to that of its cartridges... It's =
not unknown for it to be cheaper to bin the printer when the ink runs ou= t and buy a new one rather than buy new cartridges.
Toner is a fine powder. If the print gets a bit streaky towards the end =
take the cartridge out and give it a shake to redistribute the toner. Ca= n squeeze a good few more pages out of one by doing that.
Faster maybe but cheaper? The black toner prices are much of a muchness
Agreed.
For just a few pages a day in a SOHO I don't think that is a worry, you =
probably get more exposure to ozone and particulates when you go down to= the shop for a pint of milk. For a an office workgroup printer churning =
out hundreds of pages a day it is more of a concern.
The black toner cartridge in my Epson laser printer has reported as being low for 6 months now
We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember Adam Aglionby saying something like:
Interesting, I'll try that.
Ho ho ho... don't, whatever you do, fill an old cartridge with distilled water and run a cycle - it leaks onto the leccy bits and releases the smoke. Of course, by the time the old ink has dissolved into the distilled water it makes a nicely conductive solution, as I realised later.
I now have three Epson 600s - one is almost brand new, in that it was bought a decade ago and only printed less than 100 sheets before it terminally clogged - the others were gathered in the past year in an attempt to make a spares pile. Annoyingly, both the replacements were working, but clogged soon after - seems they just don't like sitting for a while and I was careful to run a page through them every fortnight just to keep them clear. I have an HP for normal output, but I'd like to get a 600 working for rough output - DVD cases, etc.
I'm in a similar position with blocked jets on a Stylus 760. I got it going again after using up a whole cleaning cartridge but it only lasted a few weeks befor it blocked up again. To be fair I should say that this is the first serious blockage in 8 years and I've seldom needed to clean the jets previously.
I'm still trying to decide between another inkjet or a laser. If I go for an inkjet I could be tempted by the HP K5400N, at £75 (from Misco) for the network version. HP claim low running costs for this (2450 pages per cartridge for black and 1700 for colour using ISO/IEC 24712 colour test pages) . How that comes out in real life is another matter but the relative cost per page is certainly much better than what they claim for their other inkjets. In fact the page yields are comparable to those of the cheaper lasers where the cartridges would cost about twice as much.
I bought a new set of cartridges for my magicolor 2350 15 months ago when it reported the cyan low. It now reports cyan empty, but I have yet to change the cartridge, as it still prints ok. The black one reported low/empty for 6 months before I needed to replace it.
I tend not to use colour unless necessary, or for the occasional photo, so the cleaning cycles of an inkjet would be expensive.
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