Computer Related > Ink cartridges - a new rip off? Miscellaneous
Thread Author: Iffy Replies: 31
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 Wed 21 Apr 10 10:54 
 Ink cartridges - a new rip off? - Iffy
My newish HP printer has annoyed me.

I print on average a few documents a day, all text, rarely any colour.

I have a fairly new HP Deskjet F2480 which is more than up to the job.

A standard size black cartridge lasts a few weeks.

The other day, the printer refused to print a black text document on the basis the colour cartridge was showing as empty.

It's the one that came with the printer, so I expect it only had a toothful of ink in to start with.

So I had to buy a new colour cartridge before the printer was prepared to print a black ink-only document.

Is this a new way of ripping us off?

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 Wed 21 Apr 10 11:08 
 Ink cartridges - a new rip off? - Zero
I have a canon. It came new with retail carts with retail amounts of ink them. Sure it eats ink and the carts are ferociously expensive, but at least after it bleats about lack of ink, it will carry on printing till it goes blank, which is some several hundred sheets afterwards.

And with the head in the cart, you never block it up
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 Wed 21 Apr 10 11:14 
 Ink cartridges - a new rip off? - smokie
Somneone told me a while back that if you can pick up an old mono office printer (if that suits your needs) the consumables might seem expensive at first but go on forever at the usage rate you are probably using. I believe there is less of a problem with them drying up with low usage too.
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 Wed 21 Apr 10 11:18 
 Ink cartridges - a new rip off? - rtj70
My old Canon printer had separate black for photos and text. The bigger text one lasts for ages. And no chips in any cartridge to stop printing - it detects ink levels using light/prism.

With the high price of ink, I think I'd be looking at a new printer that is cheap to run. Smokie's suggestion about an older B&W printer is a good one. It might even be cheaper to get a new, cheap B&W laser printer.
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 Fri 30 Apr 10 21:41 
 Ink cartridges - a new rip off? - AshT
When I became self employed last year I bought an old HP laser printer (a Laserjet 6P) from ebay for the grand sum of £20, including a part full toner cartridge.
After a good clean up it's been in daily use since - churns out all the documents I need at a fair rate, print quality is excellent, the paper tray doesn't need reloading every 5 minutes, and the original cartridge lasted a couple of months. The aftermarket replacement I bought for about £30 is still going.
I bought it with the intention of supplementing my HP jet ink printer, but I've hardly used that machine since I bought the laser. Admittedly my documents very rarely if ever have any colour in, but for anyone who produces a lot of mono documents it's an ideal solution.
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 Wed 21 Apr 10 11:15 
 Ink cartridges - a new rip off? - rtj70
My step son has a Lexmark and the colour cartridge is empty. Even if you print something and say 'use black and white only' it still complains it cannot print because there is no colour ink. There is a tick box to let you continue past the warning.

ifithelps, what happens if you choose to print in B&W only before you hit print? Sounds like a rip off if it really won't print B&W when it's only run out of colour ink. But you did buy a printer from a company making a lot of profit from ink.
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 Wed 21 Apr 10 18:59 
 Ink cartridges - a new rip off? - car4play
Most inkjet printers use all colours even to print in black and white. Sounds crazy, but actually you get better halftones when a mix of CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, black) is put down instead of just black.

If you view a print of a greyscale image under a magnifying glass you can see the rosette pattern of CMYK making up the dots. Fonts are anti-aliased (removal of jaggies on edges) and to do this requires halftoning which also will use all the colours to get the best halftone effect.
So there you have it. That's why ink jet printers need colour cartridges to print in B & W.

In fact even brochure images printed in just greyscale use all CMYK colours if that is specified for output. You can try this in Photoshop. Open an image, make it a greyscale, output CMYK separations; look at the C, M, Y layers and you will see they aren't blank.
Last edited by: car4play on Wed 21 Apr 10 at 19:03
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 Wed 21 Apr 10 19:06 
 Ink cartridges - a new rip off? - Iffy
...That's why ink jet printers need colour cartridges to print in B & W...

Ah, that explains quite a lot.

According to the level indicator, black is already about a quarter used, but colour hardly at all.

Won't be too bad if I can get one colour cartridge to last four or five black ones.

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 Wed 21 Apr 10 19:45 
 Ink cartridges - a new rip off? - Robin O'Reliant
>> ...That's why ink jet printers need colour cartridges to print in B & W...

Black only printers didn't, and they did the job ok.
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 Wed 21 Apr 10 19:53 
 Ink cartridges - a new rip off? - Zero
Only when printing text, usually from preloaded inbuilt fonts.
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 Thu 22 Apr 10 11:13 
 Ink cartridges - a new rip off? - BiggerBadderDave
"Most inkjet printers use all colours even to print in black and white."

There are various ways around this. You can (well, I can) save your document as a black only pdf for example which will print without the C, M or Y.

As Car4play says though, the print out quality suffers, it's no good for presentations.

Most printed material will have other process colours running through the blacks, black alone is too weak. I generally use C-60 M-40 Y-20 K-100, some people just mix cyan and black. Never do it with small, fine fonts though as it will look blurry when plates mis-register and don't go overboard boosting up your blacks as most print-houses have a percentage limit because is tends to affect ink drying times.

If I were Ifithelps, I'd be looking at a b&w laser printer though.
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 Wed 21 Apr 10 11:17 
 Ink cartridges - a new rip off? - Tooslow
Nah, it's an old way of ripping us off. About £1 per ml for manufacturer cartridges. I'm using OEMs at less than half the price and I'm going to try local refill shop next time.

If you're printing photos and you're super critical about them there may be a difference but print should be fine.

I have read that keeping your printer switched on all the time saves ink by avoiding some sort of cleaning cycle but that probably costs more in electricity.

JH
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 Wed 21 Apr 10 11:42 
 Ink cartridges - a new rip off? - Iffy
...what happens if you choose to print in B&W only before you hit print?...

Didn't think to try that.

Hopefully, the new colour cartridge will show as 'full' for a long time, but if it happens again I will certainly try the 'print black and white only' command.

It's actually my work printer.

I did well to get them to agree to buy it, and they will pay for the ink, although anything more than a cartridge a month would probably be frowned upon.

I like to keep expenses down anyway, as my rant in another thread about the BBC executives demonstrates.

It says something in my company handbook about keeping expenses to a minimum.

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 Wed 21 Apr 10 12:17 
 Ink cartridges - a new rip off? - Zero
>> It says something in my company handbook about keeping expenses to a minimum.

well its not gonna say "fill yer boots" is it!
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 Wed 21 Apr 10 16:21 
 Ink cartridges - a new rip off? - Iffy
...well its not gonna say "fill yer boots" is it!...

No Zero, it's not.

But it could have been silent on the issue.

Common sense says keep expenses to a minimum, although that doesn't seem to apply to those BBC fellas in the other thread.

Not that I'm becoming obsessed about that, of course.

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 Wed 21 Apr 10 11:45 
 Ink cartridges - a new rip off? - Robin O'Reliant
I also have a 2480, a very good printer but the cost of a replacement black cartridge was £9.99, the cheapest i could find on the net. I have previously used Epsons and they are by far the cheapest for replacement ink, you can sometimes source a full set of black and colour cartridges for less than a tenner.

I notice in recent years though that the manufacturers have been increasingly making third party cartridges incompatable with their printers, the last time I bought a set for an Epson D92 some would work but the printer refused to accept the others, all exactly the same make.
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 Wed 21 Apr 10 12:27 
 Ink cartridges - a new rip off? - Bellboy
i stopped using my epson when it kept on coming up spool errors whatever that was
for the last 4 years ive used lexmark and everything has always been done in black never ever colour
i find i get lots of invoices etc out of it and usualy have thrown the printer away and replaced every second time when it starts failing to autofeed
i also like the canadian voice saying
PRINTING STARTED in a very large voice :-)
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 Wed 21 Apr 10 20:11 
 Ink cartridges - a new rip off? - Ateca chris
I also have the same F4280 printer and the color cartridge has recently gone, i just removed it and it works fine printing documents in black only.
Last edited by: shadyarea on Wed 21 Apr 10 at 20:14
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 Wed 21 Apr 10 20:43 
 Ink cartridges - a new rip off? - rtj70
Interesting about the grayscale bit. I'll try that later.

My Canon printer has two black cartridges - one for photos/graphics etc and a larger one for text. They use different types of inks - one suited for good text. It's also cheaper.

I cannot comment on it using colour or not for black and white printing as it's always got colour cartridges in. But this explains why my son's Lexmark wants a colour catridge.
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 Thu 22 Apr 10 20:38 
 Ink cartridges - a new rip off? - MD
>> I notice in recent years though that the manufacturers have been increasingly making third party cartridges incompatable with their printers the last time I bought a set for an Epson
D92 some would work but the printer refused to accept the others all exactly the same make.
>>
Epson probably sent a message to your printer when you were on line. They did to my colleague. Sam result.

M
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 Thu 22 Apr 10 22:00 
 Ink cartridges - a new rip off? - Robin O'Reliant
>>>> Epson probably sent a message to your printer when you were on line. They did
>> to my colleague. Sam result.
>>
That's an interesting one, Martin. Presumably re-installing the original driver would solve that problem, and not registering the printer online would prevent it happening again?

Well out of order if that is what they are doing, and I would question the legality of it too. It amounts to sabotage.
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 Fri 23 Apr 10 08:27 
 Ink cartridges - a new rip off? - MD
Look at moreink.something on Amazon.
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 Mon 26 Apr 10 11:41 
 Ink cartridges - a new rip off? - ....
I've just gone through this with my Epson DX6000.
Thought I'd save a few pennies and buy some aftermarket cartridges.
Black didn't work at all, colour gave some odd hues. Replaced with genuine cartridges, worked straight out the box.
In future if I want to save money I'll see what happens if I get the original cartridges refilled.
Aftermarket items have not worked for me.
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 Mon 26 Apr 10 12:38 
 Ink cartridges - a new rip off? - smokie
Just been through the refilling experience myself. I'm sure it works for some, but not me. Aftermarket cartridges have generally been OK but not always.
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 Mon 26 Apr 10 13:52 
 Ink cartridges - a new rip off? - rtj70
I used some aftermarket ones for my Canon. The ones I tried were fine for general printing but photos had a bit of a green hue. I got close to getting it calibrated but it wasn't worth the hassle... I got genuine ones again in the end. And they don't cost the earth for this printer anyway.
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 Mon 26 Apr 10 15:16 
 Ink cartridges - a new rip off? - L'escargot
>> I bought a set for an Epson
>> D92 some would work but the printer refused to accept the others all exactly the
>> same make.
>>

It's impossible for a pattern part company to replicate the dimensions of genuine cartridges. All they can do is measure a few samples and hope that what they come up with is near enough. The only way they could get the proper dimensions and tolerances would be to get access to the genuine cartridge drawings. The same thing applies to car parts, or to any other parts.
Last edited by: L'escargot on Mon 26 Apr 10 at 15:17
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 Mon 26 Apr 10 16:19 
 Ink cartridges - a new rip off? - CGNorwich
When I bought my Canon Pixma 5200 3 years ago I got it for a very competitive price, only a few pounds more that a set of cartridges. Since the printer came complete with a set of cartridges and I a new printer head cost £80 I bought 2 printers and kept one for spares.
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 Mon 26 Apr 10 17:20 
 Ink cartridges - a new rip off? - RattleandSmoke
I have a friend who has a fully blown cartridge refilling system going on. She does toners too but she dosn't seem to quite understand that you have to change the toner fuses too!

Personaly live is too short so I just buy genuine inks but I have in the past bought a new printer instead of replacing the inks because it was cheaper!!
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 Thu 29 Apr 10 13:00 
 Ink cartridges - a new rip off? - sajid
i bought a canon 4500, 2 years ago, my previous printer a canon i865, had developed a fault the paper handling roller failed, and to get that fixed would have cost me £80, it was a shame as priniting cost was cheap i was using compatibles and when i came to buy another one running cost were important to me, i chose the 4500 model its successor the 4600 did not appeal to me due to the fact that the cartridges ink capacity was smaller than the previous model, i ruled out epsom and hp, their printer spent most of the time cleaning, cost of ink was more expensive
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 Fri 30 Apr 10 20:27 
 Ink cartridges - a new rip off? - Robin O'Reliant
>>
>> It's impossible for a pattern part company to replicate the dimensions of genuine cartridges. All
>> they can do is measure a few samples and hope that what they come up
>> with is near enough.
>>
I didn't mean it wouldn't fit the printer, I meant that the D92 wouldn't recognise it and refused to print.
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 Fri 30 Apr 10 21:24 
 Ink cartridges - a new rip off? - Zero
>> It's impossible for a pattern part company to replicate the dimensions of genuine cartridges. All
>> they can do is measure a few samples and hope that what they come up
>> with is near enough. The only way they could get the proper dimensions and tolerances
>> would be to get access to the genuine cartridge drawings. The same thing applies to
>> car parts or to any other parts.

Absolutely not the case. All you need to do is laser scan the part, and the genuine drawings appear out of the computer.

Last edited by: Zero on Fri 30 Apr 10 at 21:25
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 Sat 8 May 10 17:05 
 Ink cartridges - a new rip off? - -
Canon MP970 bought 2ish? ago took roughly 12 months to empty the first of the original cartridges, been using pattern parts ever since which don't seem to last quite as long but overall work out cheaper, and give the same high quality prints.
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