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Forum Index : Other Stuff : Printer in cost
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| johnmc Senior Member  Joined: 21/01/2011 Location: AustraliaPosts: 282 |
johnmc |
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| johnmc Senior Member Joined: 21/01/2011 Location: AustraliaPosts: 282 |
Good Day All , mucked up the first post What I am after is how to reduce ink costs for printers, My latest epson printer appears to use a lot of ink. Which printers can be refilled and any other suggestions for a replacement printer. Davo99 mentioned printer costs in a earlier post,but have not found it. Cheers john johnmc |
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phil99 Guru  Joined: 11/02/2018 Location: AustraliaPosts: 2135 |
The printer makers are a step ahead of us. The cartridges often have serial number chips built in, linking to a page counter in the firmware. When the page count reaches the set limit the printer won't print from that cartridge any more, even if it is full. |
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| mclout999 Guru Joined: 05/07/2020 Location: United StatesPosts: 469 |
Get a laser printer for your day-to-day printing and use second-party toner cartridges. If you need color Epson has some pricy refillable tub printers that are rather good. Epson EcoTank ET-2720 or any of their Ecotank line. There are second-party refills for them as well. There are a lot of videos on them. HP and Canon have similar tank printers as well. I think the EPSONs are the best but you do the research so you can decide. Epson https://epson.com/ecotank-ink-tank-printers HP https://www.hp.com/us-en/shop/mdp/printers/tank-printers?jumpid=ma_pr_featured_tankprinters_1_200510#!&tab=vao An example of Canon their webpage is sh*t for finding anything about their devices. https://www.amazon.com/Canon-PIXMA-Wireless-MegaTank-Printer/dp/B078Z65VQY/ref=sr_1_4?dchild=1&keywords=Canon+PIXMA+G3200+Wireless+MegaTank+All-in-One+Inkjet+Printer&qid=1632810613&sr=8-4 |
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| Davo99 Guru Joined: 03/06/2019 Location: AustraliaPosts: 1578 |
First of all, despite claims to the contrary, I have not had a lot of success or much of a liking for Epsom. All my printers for many years have been Canon. They are far from perfect but they work for me. Lots of people Use epsom and if they work for them, good O but not what I have any significant experience with. The current Printer Model I have is a TS5060 and has done over 1600 A4 full colour Photos. This is the 3rd of these I have and I think there are are still another 3 Under the bed after the Mrs stole on for working from Home. They are not available any more far as I can see due to them changing models about every 12 Months to keep the Replacement Ink manufacturers from undercutting them too much. That's why when I need a New printer I go buy one and test it then go buy half a Dozen and put them away. I can then buy a reserve of carts and have them in reserve and just swap out the printers as they reach their pre programed End of life even though they are still working perfect. What's that BS about save the planet and don't create unnecessary waste of resources??  I expect the one I'm using to stop any time due to needing maintence of the ink absorber pad which is canons way of ensuring you only get so much life out the things before they Lock up no matter how well they are still running. Pretty surprised it's gone this long actually. The ink absorber Pad BS is the financial limitation of having to change the entire Drive train in a cheap car with manufacturer New parts.... Not near worth it. A complete insult as it's supposed to prevent damage to the machine... a machine not worth the maintence by a long shot. The canons also come up with warning about not using Genuine carts when you install them and make out like the thing will blow your house apart if you Dare use anything bar their Product. It's a $70 Printer with $120 worth of OEM ink. Who gives a stuff? I usualy sell the OEM ink and break even or make a few bucks on it anyway. If buying from Fleabay, watch out for the little slime balls selling a new printer with COMPATIBLE ink. They take the OEM ink and sell that and probly more than Quadruple their profit but only sell the machine $10 cheaper. To get round the None OEM cart warning you just cycle through the several alarmist warnings and Hold the STOP button till the thing releases and go again. Annoying but very easy to get around and a total load of BS. The Replacement Ink I use is from MIR-Aus. MIR-Aus I also used to use Rihac In Melbourne. I see no difference in the ink quality from one to another. IMHO they are bother BETTER than OEM because they are more true to Life colour than having screaming saturation and contrast. This last couple of years I bought cheapo replacement Carts off Fleabay. I needed the cartridges themselves to refil. I bought a few lots from this YYUDA Mob and found them very good with the ink as well as the carts themselves. YYUDA In my printers, I would say 99% of people would be hard pressed to tell the difference in the ink in those carts and what I consider to be BETTER than OEM in the $30 Canon carts. My machine is colour calibrated and balanced and the ink in those cheap carts was surprisingly good colourwise. I was using it to just print promotional material but I did mix some of these carts in with the reloaded ones and saw VERY little colour shift, certainly not enough to worry about. In reality, my level of pedantic-ness is about 10X Higher than my clients so they would never see it and Neither would I unless I was comparing under the colour balanced light source I use for checking. IF BUYING A NEW PRINTER>>>>> Make sure you can buy the NON OEM cheapy replacement carts for it. If you can't, means they are Chipped so you won't be able to reload them either. Canon has a series, O think the 60XX which are reload Limited. You can only refil the carts twice and then they lock you out on ink count. Still way cheaper to buy the NON OEM carts and do a couple of refils than pay for the Extortionate prices for the OEM stuff. I have 5 tanks of each colour for the machines I'm using so I refill them all before I start printing then swap them out as I need. Saves having to stop mid run and refil them although if I am on a roll, that happens. The money I save reloading over OEM ink is HUGE. I calculated with the one job I got in this year, with the amount of carts I used, I would have paid around $1200 for OEM ink. I used about 100Ml of each colour ( Some a bit more, couple a fair bit less) but even if I only bought it in 100Ml Bottles ( the 1L Bottles I buy work out much cheaper) ink was about $55. Massive difference and well worth maybe the hour in total I spend reloading them If one was doing Non critical stuff and didn't want to muck around with reloading carts, then the Cheapy Yyuda ones I would say would satisfy people well and truly. Bought a heap for my fathers printer and he's happy with them. I reload a couple of sets about every year as that's all he goes through now so he has several years supply! I have yet to come across bad Ink but I have come across bad Photo paper. Much of it is total crap in reality. I hunt around and only buy the Kodak branded stuff in the heavy paper weight. Ilford and a few others are good but very over priced for little to no benefit. Scored well this year just before lockup when the Local Target or Kmart, whichever it was, had a Clearance on the premium A4 Kodak Paper. Bought all they had in a couple of places. Used to be able to get it real cheap on fleabay. I bought several boxes of 10 Packets, In hindsight I should have bought 50 was so cheap to what it is now. Live and learn. Just like the old Proper photo paper you have to Develop and process, Different papers will give different colour response. Like the Old photo printers that ran the RA-4 Chemical photo paper, you can adjust your printer colour settings to tune to what you want. For best consistency, it's best to do a colour Balance in the camera. I do several when on a big job as the colour temp of the daylight will change a LOT through the day. By colour balancing the images, I can do one colour balance on the printer then not have to worry about it again no matter how many images I am printing over what time frame. The colour ALWAYS shifts. If I come back and put in the same setting I used the year before on the same job at the same place, it's always Miles away. All I do is pick an image from that year, run some test prints mainly aiming for skin tone and when I have them right, I have that correction set as part of an action in photoshop and that's it . From there I just hit F2, F3.. whatever and the printer spits out the Package I want for that order. IF I get a very dark or pale skin Kid I'll do a manual Correction for density but other than that, don't have to worry. You can get 100Ml Bottles of the Replacement ink from MIR and Rihac and they would last most people a Long time. My main gigs use about 100Ml of each colour and I'm doing around 500 A4 Bordlerless Prints. Depends what you are shooting of course as to which colour you will use more of. Don't know how the Kit prices are but you can get Syringes with blunt needes from Chemists. I must have had the ones I am using for coming up 10 years now. Just wrote on the end what colour they are to prevent brain fade but you can see what it is in the syringe although Black and blue can be hard to tell in the syringe. One thing with ink consumption can be how many times you turn the printers on and off. Each time you do they will tend to run a cleaning cycle. That can use a LOT of ink, needed or not. If possible, it's best to print in batches rather than a print here and there with the machine shutting down. I fire mine up and might print non stop for 12 Hours so the cleaning cycles are about every 20-30 Prints ( all A4) when I have to swap the carts. Because a refill cost me literally about 2 cents, ink is the last thing I have to cost consider. Mate of mine has bought a couple of those canon printers with the built in Ink Resivour. He prints a Lot of Documents for his business and is happy with them. I filled his machines for him earlier this year. They take about 100Ml of ink each tank. I might look at one of those when I run out of the printers I have under the bed in reserve. Depends on what else they are offering at the time. The inbuilt tank ones are far more exy than the normal cart printers so one would want to be doing enough to justify them. As for the Hype and BS you will read about using non OEM ink. It's exactly that. BS! I have used TENS of litres of the stuff for.... Probably closer now to 20 years than 10 through several Dozen Different machines, and I have YET to have one single problem caused by ink. Pity I can't say the same for the pre planed and very obvious obsolescence the manufacturer's build into the machines to force you to replace them well before they need to be. |
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| johnmc Senior Member Joined: 21/01/2011 Location: AustraliaPosts: 282 |
Thanking all for the replies, it looks like the old story,corporate greed, so buyer beware, and doing your home work is a must. cheers john johnmc |
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