To avoid hi-jacking the 'puter for college thread I've posted this seperately.
Miss B is off to Uni. She has a laptop, a reasonably up to date 14 inch Toshiba that somebody here kindly flagged for us. At home it prints through the networked 'MFD' but she needs something for in her room at halls.
Can anyone suggest a basic print/scan/copy device that combines a reasonable purchase price with economy ink refills. Her subject is history and politics so should be mostly mono stuff but she'll want chance to print the odd photo etc.
Quite attracted by Kodak's cheap ink propaganda but what are the downsides?
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Kodaks are generally fine :)
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Assuming the intention is to go into halls of residence for the first year, I'd be (a) finding out the layout of the room and (b) getting a space efficient printer. I might forgo a scanner.
In fact I'd also look into what the university offers for printing and scanning as well. It might be a printer is not even needed.
Desk space in modern halls of residence is at a premium. But in older halls it is worse still! But my experience of halls had no en-suite facilities so the room itself was bigger :-)
Last edited by: rtj70 on Sun 11 Sep 11 at 00:32
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Just bought this Canon for the very same purpose as my son is off in two weeks: tinyurl.com/3opalcc
We were advised to get a cheap printer as although the uni offers printing facilities, half the time they are hogged by others. No queuing just to print three pages.
Last edited by: Victorbox on Sun 11 Sep 11 at 08:52
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Bought a Kodak in the end prints well and has a massive black ink cartridge.
Learned a lesson too. Wireless printers do no ordinarily talk directly to PCs. The need a router to manage IP addys etc. A few can apparently be configured manually but not this one. Only a tenner more though and it might be useful when she brings the thing home or next year in private rental.
The hassle trying to get a simple A/B USB cable in a well known office supplies store was almost comical.........
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Kodak shares dropped markedly yesterday - running out of cash was mentioned - I know £50 on a printer is not a lot but..................
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I have loads of those cables, could have posted you on, I pay less than £1 for them :) Bought a load of them as was needing them for jobs, sods law not used any since!
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Thanks Rats. I've got two or three in my own spares box but as I was connecting a wireless printer..........
Shop was trying to sell me a 3m gold plated one for nigh on £20. After I got a bit assertive thay found me one on special offer for well under a tenner. Still far too much but I had to get the thing working.
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Seems to me the prices at PC World and the other shed retailers are competitive for the big box hardware, but they try to top you up for the little bits.
Last edited by: Iffy on Wed 28 Sep 11 at 18:45
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Hope you did not buy a Kodak Printer.
They have just filed for Bankruptcy
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>>Kodak Printer.
Drat. I was thinking of buying a Kodak when my current inkjets expire.
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Kodak were brought down by Health & Pension debts to former employees.
Similar to General Motors - once described as a "Pension and Heath Insurer" that also made some cars
.
Kodak have raised $950million from a bank (using assets as security) to keep running for 18 months while they reorganise.
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Nothing could touch the Kodak for ink prices so that's what we got. Ironically it was swapped out yesterday by PC World as the original would not relaibly print in black.
There are millions of Kodak printers out there and I guess the designs and probably the brand name are assets.
AFAIK they've applied for 'Chapter 11' protection under US law. This allows them to continue trading while restructuring and being protected from enforcement of debts. Various US bodies including major intercontinental airilnes have gone into and out of C11 over the past decade.
It's not fatal.
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...It's not fatal...
Quite so.
I'd buy a Kodak printer, partly for the cheap ink, but also because you can buy a cartridge knowing it will fit without having the old one to match up or a note of some obscure reference number.
Incidentally, I found out where the name Kodak came from.
I was hoping for something clever, but the founder simply made it up.
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>> ...It's not fatal...
>>
>> Quite so.
>>
>> I'd buy a Kodak printer, partly for the cheap ink, but also because you can
>> buy a cartridge knowing it will fit without having the old one to match up
>> or a note of some obscure reference number.
Not quite one size fits all but at least there's not half an aisle of them.
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>> Kodak were brought down by Health & Pension debts to former employees.
No. Kodak were brought down because they failed to accept that digital imaging was going to kill film. In fact in the early days of digital they were in abject denial.
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>> No. Kodak were brought down because they failed to accept that digital imaging was going
>> to kill film. In fact in the early days of digital they were in abject denial.
Today's DTelegraph -Bled $$$$Millions on Heath and Pensions
"Like other established US companies, Kodak faces huge costs for pension and other benefits for workers and retirees that it is struggling to meet."
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>> Today's DTelegraph -Bled $$$$Millions on Heath and Pensions
>>
>> "Like other established US companies, Kodak faces huge costs for pension and other benefits for
>> workers and retirees that it is struggling to meet."
Kodak is NOT an established company, it was but has been in terminal decline for years.
May I suggest you look at the net income over the last 20 years before you blame the demise on the pension and health cost.
Had it been a successful company it would not have been a problem, the management is solely to blame, not the pension.
It wont survive.
In 1975, Kodak engineer Steven Sasson created what the company says is the first digital camera, a toaster-size prototype capturing black-and-white images at a resolution of 0.1 megapixels.
Although the technology did not catch on immediately, analysts felt the company's failure to capitalise on this was the start of its decline.
Overtaken by rivals
Former Kodak vice president Don Strickland claims he left the company in 1993 after he failed to get backing from within the company to release a digital camera.
The switch to digital undermined Kodak's reliance on conventional film sales
He said: "We developed the world's first consumer digital camera but we could not get approval to launch or sell it because of fear of the effects on the film market... a huge opportunity missed."
Through the 1990s, Kodak spent $4bn on developing the photo technology inside most mobile phones and digital devices.
But a reluctance to ease its heavy reliance on film allowed rivals like Canon and Sony to rush into the fast-emerging digital arena.
The immensely lucrative analogue business Kodak worried about undermining too soon was virtually erased in a decade by the filmless photography it pioneered.
Chris Cheesman, of Amateur Photographer magazine, said: "We repeatedly questioned why Kodak chose to concentrate its resources on low-end compact cameras and the sharing of digital images.
Last edited by: Zero on Fri 20 Jan 12 at 09:04
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bankruptcy - effect on Kodak pensioners in UK
www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/industry/9026435/Kodaks-UK-pensioners-may-face-fight-with-creditors.html
The company's UK pension scheme is likely to have a "significant general unsecured claim" according to the bankruptcy filing Kodak made in a Manhattan court on Thursday.
In 2007, the US company agreed to guarantee payments to the plan that its UK subsidiary is required to make.
Last year, Kodak said that the scheme, which has about 15,000 members, would need payments of about $800m (£517m) over the next decade.
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The technology behind today's digital cameras was basically invented by Kodak. One design, the Bayer Pattern filter (Bayer worked for Kodak), appears in the majority of digital cameras. They produced the first digital camera in 1982 or something like that.
They should have embraced the new idea and been ahead of the game. Didn't Kodak produce the first digital SLR? But with fear of destroying income from the cash cow that was film (and associated development and printing) they perhaps quite obviously didn't.
To cap it all, they lost out to FujiFilm for the most popular film products too.
Simply having a digital printer business won't be enough to support what was the Kodak business. They should have had high end digital cameras but left that to Canon, Nikon, etc al. What camera business they had was/is at the low-end and that has been eroded by smartphones with cameras.
I was once on a course in the late 90's and someone on that asked us a question about what was the philosophy behind Kodak (or words to that effect). I don't recall if he worked for Kodak but this was a question that came up on this business type course because of digital photography. Lots of wrong answers but he said that their business was all about memories.
Maybe Kodak was too big and making too much money until fairly recently to embrace digital. When did most people get their first digital camera? I got mine in 2000 I think.
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Coming full-circle on this topic.
Elsewhere it's stated that one of the things that did for them was moving into, er, inkjet printers.
Apparently taking on the entrenched market leaders of HP and Epson has cost them an arm and a leg and they're still a minnow in sales.
Incidently, my first digital camera was a Fuji and you could buy exactly the same internal electronics with a different lens and case from, er, Kodak.
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It is said HP make a big chunk of profit from their printer ink business. There is certainly an element of truth in that. So they sell printers cheap and make the money back later. Amazon does the same with Kindles.
Now Kodak tried to win business by selling their inks cheaper than anyone else. But when someone buys a printer they often see the price of the printer and not the ink cartridges as well.
So their new business was flawed in so much they weren't going to me making big money on he inks. And they entered the consumer printer business in earnest too late with HP, Epson, Canon, etc. well established.
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>> Now Kodak tried to win business by selling their inks cheaper than anyone else. But
>> when someone buys a printer they often see the price of the printer and not
>> the ink cartridges as well.
I think the message about Kodak and value cartridges has spread fast. Certainly a good crosssection of them amongst Miss B's hall mates.
PC World guy said they were moving fast when we swapped out the faulty one the other day.
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But if they don't make enough profit per cartridge to turn a profit then the business will fail. If they are selling lots of printers because of this model, the whole business model is rather flawed.
I see they bring in about £3bn per annum from patent licensing. They'd probably make more profit per annum if they shut down the business apart from patent licensing.
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Printer for College - RattleandSmoke
