[Macworld]

Post your comments for Ink-onomics: Can you save money by spending more on your printer? here

[Gary]

The issue of using Tri-color cartridges vs individual cartridges is not always staight forward either. If printing graphics of pictures that predominate in one of the colors, then yes you will run out of that color first leaving a lot of ink remaining in a tri color cartridge. If you print a variety of pictures and there is not a predominant color use, say green for landscapes or pictures of trees etc., then you will tend to run out of all of the colors equally. I used to work with a third party company for HP in amrketing, and HP did studies that showed that if people pritned a variety of different type of pictures their tri color cartridges ran out equally or close to equally jsut like the individual color cartridges. I have a HP MFP 8200 series printer which has cartridges like the 8600 and when i run out of color all three of the cartridges tend to be close to empty.

[Gary]

Oh, and one more thing. Depending on the manufacturer, you have to be careful regarding the type of inks they use and or their print head technology. Epson is well known for issues regarding their print heads clogging or drying up when the printer is not used for extended periods of time. You could waste a lot of ink doing print head cleanings. On the Canon printers, i know they used to have an issue with the solvent used in the ink cartridges which tended to evaporate while the printer sat. When i worked at Circuit City we often had Canon cartridges evaproate a lot of their ink when they sat.

[joekewe]

The thing that killed me and my cheap ink-jet was the periodic "head cleaning" and dried inks. We used our ink-jet so little that we wasted more ink cleaning the heads (both routine automatic cleanings and manual cleanings due to clogged, dried ink heads) that we burned through expensive ink much faster than this article suggests. We still always had smeared or skipped streaks on printed pages. For this reason, I finally bought a $100 Brother B&W laser printer. No more wasted ink cartridges. The $47 toner cartridges should print 2600 monochrome pages. Go laser!

[JDW]

I absolutely concur with joekewe. It's foolish to waste money on inkjets when you have the low cost option to buy a laser. I am speaking of B&W lasers which are cheap. Color lasers are available, but honestly, if I need a color print of say a photo, I would do better to order it from Apple or somewhere else online. This is the best way to balance great quality with a very low price.

By the way, I would like to mourn the quality of B&W lasers we have today versus what Apple produced in the 1990's. If I compare the "graphics" quality of my BROTHER MFC-7840W which I purchase a couple years ago, to Apples 16/600PS which came out in 1994, the Apple LaserWriter wins hands down. It's no contents at all. That remains true even though my BROTHER laser has an excellent PostScript emulator in it. In comparison to the 16/600PS, the BROTHER print sucks. If the 16/600 weren't so old, I'd opt to get one of those instead. I just don't understand why its so hard to find a decent B&W PS laser printer these days, akin to the LaserWriter series. Maybe Apple needs to get back in the printer business. Everyone else is doing a very lackluster job.

For now though, despite my peeve about inferior quality to LaserWriters, laser printers are your best option right now. Inkjets were designed to drain your wallet dry.

[MtnMikeBalljqov]

Good article, but they overlook one critical thing that other commenters have already mentioned. Inkjet ink dries out. We had a $100 canon pixma, very similar to the "cheap" printer in this article. From the very beginning I was very impressed with the printer. It was fantastic at printing and scanning wirelessly to our Mac and Windows computers.

The problem is we didn't print very often. Once every month or two we would go to print something. The printer was out of ink. I would think to myselff, "All the ink is brand new. I've only printed 5 pages. What gives?" then I would remember that was a month or two ago and I had not printed since then. I would go buy all new ink again, print the few pages I needed and then do the whole thing over again in another month. Needless to say this was incredibly expensive, much higher costs per page than the estimates above.

Now we don't have a printer. The iPad has allowed us to go completely paperless. Otherwise we would have a laser printer right now.

[redgeminipa]

Gary, on 04 May 2012 - 03:53 PM, said:

The issue of using Tri-color cartridges vs individual cartridges is not always staight forward either. If printing graphics of pictures that predominate in one of the colors, then yes you will run out of that color first leaving a lot of ink remaining in a tri color cartridge. If you print a variety of pictures and there is not a predominant color use, say green for landscapes or pictures of trees etc., then you will tend to run out of all of the colors equally. I used to work with a third party company for HP in amrketing, and HP did studies that showed that if people pritned a variety of different type of pictures their tri color cartridges ran out equally or close to equally jsut like the individual color cartridges. I have a HP MFP 8200 series printer which has cartridges like the 8600 and when i run out of color all three of the cartridges tend to be close to empty.

Not necessarily... I had an HP (I forget the model) that used 6 weird/bulky-style cartridges. I never print any particular type of document, but that printer always used yellow faster than any other color. I believe someone at Best Buy told me if I'm printing a lot of pictures, I need to buy an extra yellow (what he was told buy another customer with the same printer). After printing a couple hundred 4" x 6" pictures of random things/people, it did use twice the amount of yellow. This didn't only apply to pictures.

My Canon MX870 seems to be more even with usage. Even with the Canon, if I'd replace all at the same time, one of the colors would always run out faster than the rest. The job determines which color. It's never the same. It's enough of a difference that if it were a tricolor cartridge, there'd always be wasted ink.

The Epson WorkForce 600 I had was the worst. If one color ran out, it would completely stop printing until it was replaced. It wouldn't even allow me to print in grayscale. My former HP nor this Canon does that, allowing me to squeeze out a couple more pages before I have to replace the one that ran out.

I won't buy another printer that uses tricolor cartridges again.

This post has been edited by redgeminipa: 05 May 2012 - 04:34 AM

[KPOM]

If you think it's confusing with ink jets, it can be even more so with consumer-grade laser printers. Again, there is the issue of the capacity of "starter" toner cartridges, and particularly with the Lexmark color laser printers I own, the "cleaning cycles" it goes through each time it goes in and out of sleep mode, but there are times when, because of promotions, it is actually cheaper to buy a brand new printer with full-size toner cartridges for less than the cost of the replacement cartridges. I actually bought two printers once for that very reason, and wound up trading in the unused one after I used up its ink cartridges.

[quizz]

jeez fellas .... what's wrong with all of you ..... the real story is whether cartridges can be refilled not replaced, and secondly whether the printer software makes it easy to designate b/w only in draft format to not only cut costs but increase speed for daily use .... nobody is telling the truth in this stuff .... a printer should be sold with clear indications that it is easy, not so easy, or not possible to refill the ink in that cartridge -- anything less is just robbery by the printer mafias .... thanks but next review please consider doing the whole story !

[Roadtrip]

Should have compared an inexpensive Canon printer to an expensive Canon, NOT HP, printer. Apples to apples....

[palane]

When my wife and I were getting married, we bought an inexpensive Brother laser printer and printed the invitations ourself. It was fun designing everything and saved money. We got a lot of pages out of that printer before it failed. Ironically, it was the USB port that failed. It still worked fine via the parallel port and so I use it at the office on occasion.

In seeing what ink costs have been on our multifunction Canon (MX850), we could have purchased another monochrome laser. I think that's what we'll do going forward. Use the multifunction when we need color printing or some of the other functions; black and white printing on the laser.

BB

[VeryOldMacGuy]

I too have been using cheap laser printers, and for a long time. My favorite is an old HP1200 PostScript printer. I also have an HP 1012, and a Brother. I buy recycled toner cartridges on Amazon for about $15 each, and have only been burned with one bad one, so I'm still way ahead of the game. I have a Canon MX330 for flatbed scanning via Preview and printing the occasional photo. Works for me. YMMV.

[MrBillG59]

I HAVE an Apple LaserWriter 16/600 which I got FREE because my company was throwing them all away to "upgrade" to some sort of HP laser printers. After 15 years (since my company gave it to me), it still works great. I get the toner cartridges off eBay for next to nothing and 1 toner cartridge lasts for 5 years (because I don't print that much). I have the dreaded "can't get the paper all the way to the output tray" problem, but if I give the paper a little tension it works fine and the problem mostly occurs when I try to print labels (and hey the labels are WATERPROOF, try that with your inkjet printer). I've got the rubber roller refurbishment kit, but I've been chicken to fix a great printer that really isn't broken.

I wish I had taken 2 when the offered them to me.

Mr. Bill

[Jasonmwa]

The other "starter" option many makers do us to install a low yield tricolor ONLY. That means any B&W printing uses all colors just to get black. Horrible.

I find the multifunction in many printers the biggest reason for the investment. Perhaps paying more for an all-in-one that has better stats with its copier or fax would be better than focusing only on the printing.

Also, I entertain the thought that if you do a certain kind of printing instead you should invest in a specialized or better suited additional printer. If you print photos regularly (though why not use an online service like Shutterfly or a drugstore kiosk, but I digress) by a photo printer. If you do a lot of mono printing buy a cheap laser printer. I have an HP B210 all-in-one primarily for scanning and app functions (as well for the iPad's AirPrint functionality) and an HP 1012 Laserjet. The 1012 I bought with my first Mac, a graphite G3 iMac, used it to print out three chapter samples of manuscripts to send to publishers for the past ten years and have replaced the toner cartridge only twice. Graphics printed in it are horrible; it's not it's purpose. Text looks wonderful. The B210 will do photos and color as needed and gives me the functionality of updated technology, notably AirPrint (for iPad use at the house), ePrint (printing from anywhere I remember to do it) and built in apps (uploading pics to websites, card reader scanning).

In this day of paperless computing, I think this Article offers great tips for the times you need print.