Printer mafia

[SnoopDog]

A friend of mine works in a printer-shop and he told me about those bastards and criminals from the major printer companies.

It's all just a big hoax to get our money.
Ink cartridges that don't contain as much ink as it should do.
This whole chip-equipped cartridge is just a way to make nothing work on your printer so you have to buy the 'original' ink in order to be able to print (because if one colour is empty you can't go on printing with the other)
So, no compability at all.
Prices are unbelievable. When you compare production costs and costs of the ink you buy in the shop you'd get a heart attack.
After two new cartridges you could also buy a new printer.
Then there's this photo-ink, which is absolute crap since it's just a little lighter yellow,cyan and magenta. Or the photo-black which is basically grey which is light black.

And if one of those is empty you'll have to replace the entire cartridge.

It's a mfai, believe me. Never ever pay the original price for ink. Buy refill or other brands though it's likely the won't work.

It's really depressing.

Snoopy, end of rant

 

[R. Richard]

You are talking about ink jet printers here.

The problen with ink jet printers is that they have adopted the razor company strategy. The razor companies give the razor away and sell you blades. The ink jet printer guys damn near give the printer away and make their money on the ink cartridge refills.

BOHICA!

 

[Clare Quilty]

It's a simple matter to defeat the chip protected ink cartridges and refill them at ones leisure. I did this for years until I wised up and got a laser printer that, as coincidence would have it, uses the same toner cartridges as one of the printers at work.

 

[The_old_man]

I have been refilling ink cartriges for years. $29 worth of ink will refill eight or nine black, or at least six color cartriges. As for the cutoff chip, reset tools are available, the one I bought for 'Epson' cartriges cost $30 and is good forever.

The old pin printers needed ribbons at $10 to $15. They could be reinked once, as they would start to fray by the end of the first reink. Then there were the dry transfer ribbions, once and out.

I prefer the ink jet over ribbon.

 

[doormouse]

Speaking of printers...

I went out and bought a new cartridge for my printer (cartridge costing almost half of what the printer did).

Since my move recently, the damn cord to the printer has vanished!! So now I have a newly replenished printer that's worthless without its power cord. *pout*

 

[Guest]

This is to the topic. I'm going to look into the cheaper ink but also hope to figure out how to refill my own cartridges. - Perdita

Extract:
Inks and toners for computer printers and multifunction printers (which do extras such as faxing, scanning and copying) were a $32.5 billion industry in 2003, according to market research firm IDC.

That same color inkjet printer that sets you back a mere $50 at Costco or comes free with a PC at CompUSA can guzzle $35 every time you replace the tri- color ink cartridge and an additional $30 for the black cartridge. With a scant 17 milliliters of ink in some cartridges, you end up paying about $2 for a few dribbles. Do the math the other way, and you're paying about $8,000 per gallon.

Laser printers are now as cheap as $150 for black-only and $500 for color, but the toner cartridges are guaranteed to induce sticker shock. It's about $130 for a black cartridge that holds 500 grams; color ones can run more than $300, and you generally need three -- one each of cyan, magenta and yellow.

 

[oggbashan]

I still use dot-matrix printers for multiple copies of text documents.

I can buy replacement ribbons for about two pounds and they last for 3000 A4 pages before getting faint but still readable.

The dot matrix printers still WORK. I have 3 ink-jets that won't accept instructions. They print test pages but not real work.

Og

 

[The_old_man]

My pin printer (Panasonic KX-P2624) workes fine, ribbons cost 15.95 each, black only. As OG says, the ribbon is good for 3000 pages "If they don't dry out first!" I live in an area where the Relitive Humdity seldome gets over 20% and has been known to get into the single digits for a week at a time. Anything but dry ink ribbons will dry out far befor the 1000 page mark for my usage.

I have to vacuum pack jet cartriges to prevent drying out befor using.

 

[Lucifer_Carroll]

My question is why are we talking about planned obsolescence as if it was NEW! As if it was an isolated incident.

All the companies have been doing this for years. Why do you think Microsoft Anything exists? Or McDonalds? Or why book bindings don't seem to last all that long? Or cars always seem to be breaking all the time? Companies build things that break because if they built it to last forever they wouldn't make money on repurchases and worse yet they'd be unable to be undercut the competition for Johnny Tightdollar's wallet. This aint new and it aint isolated either.

It seems if you want to avoid being screwed you can only go to Mr. Teddy Bear, he at leasts asks first.

 

[Clare Quilty]

Laser printers are now as cheap as $150 for black-only and $500 for color, but the toner cartridges are guaranteed to induce sticker shock. It's about $130 for a black cartridge that holds 500 grams; color ones can run more than $300, and you generally need three -- one each of cyan, magenta and yellow.

Your printer may be different, but the color printers we use require four toner cartridges--cyan, magenta, yellow and black (CMYK). As to why 'k' stand for black, I have no idea. Also, a $130 black toner cartridge will typically produce over 10,000 pages. There are also refillable toner cartridges available for many laser printers.

If you have a popular brand of ink-jet printer, you likely wouldn't even have to buy the chip re-setting tool. I was able to download a software resetting solution for free for my old epson c60.