OT - Inkjet printers?

[Harry Bloomfield]

Not much to do with DIY, but I suppose lots of you use these.

Against my better judgement I have just bought one. I bought my first one about ten years ago, it gave me nothing but trouble and cost a fortune in print heads and ink cartridges - since when I have used nice trouble free, cheap to run B&W laser.

I've bought an all-in-one Lexmark x5495, mainly to replace my old faithful photocopier which failed a few weeks ago. This one does photocopy/ fax/ print/ scan and photo printing.

Two questions...

1. Do these things if left on, normally park their heads so they don't get bunged up with dried ink - or should I push its button to turn it on then back off after use. It makes mention of a sleep mode after thirty minutes of no use.

1. It has a black cartridge and a C/Y/M colour cartridge. It seems you are supposed to swap out the black, for a photo cartridge to print photos - but I don't quite understand why. I tried it without swapping

- the results (and very good they looked too) were fairly similar to those I got after swapping to the photo cartridge. The default colour cartridge's holder is marked C/Y/M - the place where the black cartridge normally goes is marked C/M/Black or Black (for an entirely black cartridge).

Is there some difference in the colour cartridge which I have not yet spotted?

[George]

Packard.

Yes,the price of the replacement cartridges.

[Tim S]

Harry Bloomfield coughed up some electrons that declared:

They generally know how to sort themselves out and a decent one shouldn't care. The one thing you should not do is switch them off by yanking the mains as that defeats any final shutdown and clearing procedure that may exist. Which is a word of warning for those "intelligent" power bars that turn off everything when the primary load goes away.

Not really a colour printing guru, so I'll refrain from answering.

[Tim S]

George coughed up some electrons that declared:

I like my HP. It prints photos less well than my old Epson but for knocking out letters it's quick and for the odd bit of colour it does the job well enough. The Epson spent it entire life getting gummed up and being washed out with IPA my me periodically.

It's a multifunction (otherwise I'd just have got a cheap laser) and the bit I like most is the network scanning feature that works with linux (SANE/HP interface). Wish someone just made home grade networked scanners...

Cheers

Tim

[Harry Bloomfield]

George pretended :

No, Aldi :-)

Not that bad actually. I bought it Thursday evening, realised it needed a photo cartridge and ordered some from a cartridge recycler. 3x were delivered Saturday for a total cost of £27 post free. They work fine and the contents gauge showed it as full. Reading up on the subject of refilling them at home, it seems to suggest that you can and reset the gauge simply by telling the printer you have fitted a new cartridge.

[Harry Bloomfield]

Tim S was thinking very hard :

There is a wireless networked version of the Lexmark I bought for around £65. Mine/it has both flat bed scanner and page feed scanning the OCR software which comes with it is the best I have come across, though I have not really used anything recent with OCR.

[George]

Photo750. So basically what you paid for 3 Colour I can get 5B/Wx5Colour. :-)

[Harry Bloomfield]

George presented the following explanation :

10 years ago I bought a Brother. I was paying over £100 for its replacement heads and £20 each for it's four cartridges - so by comparison, this one seems cheap to keep going.

[Steve]

Typically a 6 cartridge printer has Cyan/Light Cyan/Magenta/Light Magenta/Yellow & Black, I guess just missing the Light versions can only be noticed on good quality printer paper in the higher quality settings.

I won a similar lexmark all in one jobby, and it passes the parent test without a single phoencall to me to fix something, so it must be doing something right.

Steve

[Colin Wilson]

I beg to differ, i've had sterling service out of the two HP inkjets i've owned (870cxi and a 5150) - the latter has been in use for about

3 years without any issues, and the former for closer to 7 years before that IIRC, and it went off to find a new home c/o freecycle about 6 months ago still in perfect working order.

My wife had a lexmark - a useless piece of shit with no seperate black cartridge. You can imagine the quality of the output...

[Colin Wilson]

The "black" is created c/o a chemical soup, and isn't very good from my experiences with a lexmark. Other than that, the photo cart has a variation of tones held in the other colour cartridge, which allows it to do better gradation of colours.

[John Rumm]

Many of them do a clean at switch on - that can use quite bit of ink if you switch it on and off every day but don't print much.

The photo one probably adds light magenta and light cyan to allow for better reproduction of lighter shades / skin tones etc. You may find that the photo black has different archival qualities.

[Dave Liquorice]

I suspect the colour/black cartridge has lighter shades of cyan and magenta compared to the colour cyan, magenta, yellow cartridge.

[Andrew Gabriel]

I bought mum an all-in-one HP C6180 about 18 months ago, IIRC. Her computer use is limited to reading and printing emails, but the significant thing about this printer is that it sits on the Internet, has a separate photo card tray, and the rest of the family can print photos out on it from anywhere around the world, which she much prefers to receiving an email picture. Having become a grandma a couple of years ago, there are plenty of photogenic opportunities to exploit it.

It has 6 or 7 ink cartridges. The yellow ran out after about a year but all the others are still originals, although it's now saying the black is almost empty (all of which I can check up on remotely).

I've also used the scanner remotely. Useful for things like "Mum, can I have your ginger shortbread recipe? Just put it on the scanner, and I'll read it from here".

Also important to me, the printer works with Solaris.

My main gripe is the HP software for it constantly springing up adverts for new cartridges (and for remote users, its constant polling the printer for the ink levels across the Internet). I eventually worked out how to install just the print driver without all the HP adware. Also, the software for scanning multiple pages into a PDF file crashes after about 3 pages. It would be a very good printer except for this and the adverts.

[nightjar]

The colour cartridge contains cyan, magenta and yellow inks. The photo colour cartridge has photo black, light cyan and light magenta, which gives better quality photo prints and reduces the rate at which the standard cyan and magenta are used. Balancing the use of different inks a good thing when you have three inks in one cartridge and have to replace it when one runs out. However, you get a lot less black ink in the photo cartridge, so the standard black ink cartridge is better when printing documents.

Colin Bignell

[Invisible Man]

Moving on.

I have a Canon PIXMA Ip4200. At 2.5 years old and with little use using only genuine Canon refills it has gone a bit awol. Keeps telling me there are 2 cyan tanks installed. There are not. Taking out and replacing the cyan tank or sometimes all of them results in printing a perfect test pattern. Canon suggest replacing the cyan and if that does not work replacing the print head or sending it to a service centre for repair.

I have asked Canon to send me replacement tank/s or repair it for free as a goodwill gesture. In the alternative I will ask the retailer to fix or replace it. I doubt whether Canon will say that their printers only have a 30 month life expectancy.

[nightjar]

It sounds like a fault with the printer, rather than the cartridges. Any claim against the retailer would have to rely upon the Sale of Goods Act and I rather doubt that 30 months before failure would be considered unreasonable. Were that the mean time before failure for all printers of that type, it might be, but not for a single example.

Colin Bignell

[tinnews]

Yes, many HP printers seem to suffer from this bloatware. I have an HP Officejet 7310 All-in-one and when I first bought it I had no end of trouble installing the software (300Mb or more of it). Lots of other people appeared to have similar problems. I eventually found that installing just the 'basic drivers' ('only' 30Mb or so) gave me a much more usable All-in-one device.

The Linux CUPS drivers for the same printer were much more usable right from the start!

The printer itself works well.

[dennis]

"nightjar.me.uk>"

That is irrational.. how can one that fails early not be covered by the SOGA. Its there for this very reason. If they all fail early it could be argued that they meet the design requirements and are fit for purpose. I think you have the logic reversed.

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember [e-mail] (Andrew Gabriel) saying something like:

That's my bugbear with the HP I've got - a 5440, bought on a whim because it was ultra-cheap. As a general and even medium photo printer it's fine, even if the cartridges are a bit small. No, what got me is that the install insisted on loading in all kinds of crap I'd never want or need. I discovered that XP has a capable basic driver inbuilt and that's fine for me. The only slight annoyance is every time I start the printer XP asks me to install the HP software - no chance of that happening - but a quick flick of the mouse and that's gone, leaving XP to get on with it, using the Windows driver.