Not for me. I always leave it off. Ran out of ink. So for small stuff like travel directions I pull a piece of paper out of the printer (unless there's an opened trash mail envelope handy) then write it down with a pen or pencil. Like
41 west for 2 miles left on 93, etc.
For bigger stuff I e-mail it to a an Office depot about a mile away and go there. Last time they printed about 6 pages of pdf files and e-mails for about a buck. But I don't run a business and I have a lot of services close by. For me it's a lot cheaper not to buy ink.
Canon chips their inks, but there are chip clearers, and besides, you can as far as I know still print with empty tanks, you just have to override the message each time.
Why is Epson not recommended in the US (I assume most posters here are in the US)? Epson is great for photos, although as I concentrate on linux Canon driver development I only use Epson as a backup. I buy 3rd party inks for my Epson, haven't tried refilling it. I'm not aware of any problems with the ink cartridges, but maybe there are, which is why Epson is not being discussed here?
Nobody has said anything about Epson not being recommended for photo printing. There are many of us using Epson printers and are quite happy with them, actually, very happy. I believe there are some R3880, R3000, and some of the more exotic Epson users here. I am using an R2880. I also have a disappointing Canon i9900 which has never given me results anywhere close to those my R2880 gives me.
I think the issue the OP has, is a particular one with HP and color laser printers and the manner in which HP chips its toner cartridges. I believe he wants a color laser printer which will give him adequate results for photographs, as he rightly feels that the cost of inks for photo quality ink jet printers is excessive. The bottom line is, there is no free, or low budget ride, when it comes to producing quality photo prints at home, or anywhere else for that matter.
In my naive days, I bought multiple HP ink printers from Costco, such as the HP d135, which, due to the extreme expense of replacement ink tanks, I naturally got very good at refilling. However, as noted, it should NEVER be as difficult as HP purposefully makes it to simply refill an ink tank - so - over the years, this frustration soured me on any and all HP inkjets, swearing them off forever - and feeling good about that decision.
Still needing a printer, I immediately matured when I bought for about $600 in those days, an HP laserjet 3200m, soon coming to the realization that there 'was' a better way, which was B&W laser printing. Refilling the C4092A is basically uneventfully trivial.
The kids/wife wanting a color printer notwithstanding, it 'appears' that a color laser printer is not going to be acceptable for family photos; hence I'm back to the only choice feasible - which is ink printers - which I've previously sworn off forever (at least HP ink printers).
Finding out that almost all manufacturers make ink refilling difficult, it appears that I'll have to choose my printer in reverse. That is, find one that allows refilling - and then buy THAT printer.
This appears to be the only feasible method, although this entire process of realization makes me want to kiss my trusty B&W printer in retrospect.
Last time I needed to buy a new AIO Inkie I was going to avoid HP. I read all the reviews I could find, compared features and user satisfaction, plus looked at reported problems. I Finally settled on a Canon that sounded REALLY good from the reviews. After getting it I was VERY disappointed in it's print quality for text and photos, it just did not match the quality on simple run of the mill daily printing that I was used to from my old defunct (my fault) HP. Some users had mentioned it's lengthy startup time for the first page but it didn't sound too bad so I still bought it. Start up time turned out to be a HUGE pain in the butt. If it sat for more then a few minutes it seemingly parked it's print heads and then when you went to print again there was all sorts of start up racket and delay while it brought the heads out of cold storage. Then I discovered that in what it considered normal mixed color and b/w printing it used a mix of all the color inks to produce the "black" which came out more like a dark charcoal. So its prints looked lousy and used up all the color ink!! I took it back and returned to an HP AIO. Good luck with your search!!
Most lasers will have a power save that turns off the fuser heat which is similar to turning them off. You definitely don't want to have one that keeps the fuser hot all the time if you only print once or twice a day and never turn the printer off. Of course, when the fuser is turned off that means a delay in printing when you do want to print. If it's only once a day it's probably not much of an issue.
I don't recall HP saying their printers should be left on all the time, only that they should be turned off properly, which means with their power button, not just by turning off the power strip it's plugged into. If the printer is turned off in mid print by cutting power from the power strip it will leave the print heads un-parked which could lead to ink drying in them and causing clogging. In my experience, no matter what you do there will be periodic episodes when the HP goes into "clean and polish" mode where it exercises the print heads by squirting some ink thru them into a build in disposal reservoir.
I happily used one of the allegedly better quality EPSON-compatible inks for a few years. Not the cheapest, but a good reputation on the web. My own tests had shown me only slight differences in colour, not worth paying all the extra for unless I wanted to do some exhibition quality prints. Which I sometimes did. And so sometimes I ended up doing a few of my family snaps with EPSON inks, and most with the same good quality replacement ink.
My wife pinned those she liked best on the kitchen wall, carefully choosing a position the sun never reached. Nevertheless after a year all the replacement inks had browned off like old masters, whereas the EPSON ink snaps were still bright and colorful. After two years the compatible prints looked like fading sepia prints, whereas the EPSON ink prints still looked newly minted.
So now I stick to the printer maker's inks. Have you tried any lightfast fading tests on your 3rd party inks?
Yes, many of the Canon inkjets which, after all, are made for photo-printing, improve the shades of grey by using other colors. This is quite natural since the point of using them is to print quality photos.
However, if one wants to use the printer for other things, which is also natural, such as low-cost B/W printing, then one has to ensure that the printer comes with at least one plain media mode (not the highest or even medium quality one, in most cases) that prints only using black ink. Then one uses that.
There is a whole range of Canon printers dealing with this problem by shipping with two cartridges: black and color. One can then select black-only cartridge and print all one's work only in black. Refilling either cartridge is also trivial.
The single Canon I tried did have both black and color carts. Yet it insisted on using the color mix for black unless you did something to force it to use the black - I forget the details now. You could work around it but it was a pain to deal with and simply wasn't a problem with the HP. The thing that surprised me most was that so many reviewers raved about its print quality and it was clearly, at least to my eye, inferior to HP for the 90% of the printing I do. When doing 4x6 color on glossy photo paper it did fine but no better then the HP.
At first, I couldn't find that 'feature' by name in the HP 3200 laserjet manual:
formatting link
But, reading page by page by page, on page 228 of that manual, I find this chart which talks about "idle mode" which may be the thing you are talking about?
----------------------------------------------------------- Power requirements = 100 to 127 volts +/-10% 50 to 60 hertz Power consumption = Continuous copy mode: 135 watts Idle mode = 7 watts Minimum recommended circuit capacity = 4.2 amps (110 volts) Idle power = 7 watts
The question is whether it goes into "idle mode" on its own or if I have to put it into that mode. Unfortunately, a control F shows that "idle mode" is used only once in the entire 300-page document! And its at that chart. So there's not much to go by.
Can't speak for yours specifically, but most every printer made in the past few years is in a very low power mode when not in use. The heavy power is the heating element that fuses the toner and that is not on until it is going to print.
Er, of course. You have to select the black cartridge. The printer is not a mind-reader! This ability is what is special. In the other range of models, which have 4 or more separate ink tanks, you also usually have one or more black-only modes for plain media in the mono mode selection, but it is not guaranteed: they might all use other inks as well, that is controlled in the firmware.
With the range I described above, you can select black cartridge only in the driver.
It is up to the printer manufacturer to determine what quality to give for mono modes. Some use only black ink, some use other inks as well for high-quality mono modes, and black only for lower qualit mono modes. You can't rely on the next model having the same specs there.
HomeOwnersHub website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here.
All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.