I know that this is very basic and the puter gurus will say “WELL DUH!”
I never have a need for color copies I would be happy if printers only printed black.
I was at staples lamenting about the very high price of color ink cartridges. A nice young employee said that he had overheard me talking to my wife about the ink. Did I know that they had several black only Printers? Then he showed me several under $60 printers that use toner instead of ink. He also advised me that with a regular cartridge at the rate of about 1 or 2 pages per day it should last at least 5 -10 years before running out. The printer cost me $58.00 on sale with a $10.00 mail in rebate and the extra cartridge cost me $75.00.
This is less than ink has been costing me each year.
If you are printing a bunch of pages all at once this printer is incredibly faster than an inkjet with a page every second blasting out of the thing.
With no waiting time for the ink to dry.
A major bonus is that the toner is powdered plastic and is heat bonded to the paper making it waterproof. If you have printed something and then had something spill on it you will appreciate this feature.
I just wish I had clued in years ago as I have gone thru mondo amounts of ink cartridges. Some expensive ink cartridges have even dried out making them usless. Toner can sit for months and never dry out.
One thing to beware of, Many of these printers use a page count to tell you when its time to change the toner cartridge. Ignore these messages until you start getting bad printed pages. the printer uses a number and not toner level.
And
When you start getting bad pages tap on the cartridge and you should get more toner to fall down giving you more copies with your printer.
When this no longer works then put in a new cartridge.
Computer Wizard…(formally known as “Gnu Bee Flyer”);
I sure wouldn’t say “Well Duh”, I think what you found out and did, was darn smart! In fact, considering YOU did it, it’s BRILLIANT!
But, I digress, sorry.
One thing an owner of a color printer, can also do to save some ink is to go into their printer’s “Printer Options” or “Properties” menu and check the bullet that says “Print in Gray Scale Only”.
This will stop the dispersion of ink, from the color cartridge and print all your papers in black only.
Most people don’t realize, I think, that with most newer style printers, (SOME, not ALL, so don’t anyone yell at me!), even though you chose “Black” as your font color when typing something, the color cartridge STILL adds ink to the black ink to make “true black”, on the printed page.
I’m sure that the black-only printer will fit the bill for some users but I like My Fly Of The Week in full color. Sounds like it might be worth hooking up two printers to your computer. The price is certainly cheap enough, about two ink cartridges—not bad. 8T
Try finding a HP laserjet 6L. They are generally dirt cheap on eBay…Rumor has it they were discontinued by HP as they were too reliable.
I have one, got for nothing, added a 12.00 paper feed repair kit and bought a toner cart. off eBay for about 20.00…have used the orginal toner for the last 5 years and still have the back-up.
I use a Brother laser printer for 99.99% of my printing, and have done so for over 5 years. My first cartridge lasted 3-1/2 years, and I do a fair amount of printing. I also have a large format color printer for when I need to print in color.
If you find an older style laser printer, you can often get a store brand toner refill cartridge for up to half the price of OEM cartridges, and they work just fine. Most of the big box office supply stores now have the after market brands. My 3-1/2 year cartridge came from Office Max, as did the current one, and was half the price of the Brother OEM cartridge.
Happy printing.
Joe
Oh, regarding the HP 6L (and the 5L), they stopped making them because of paper feed problems that they could not engineer out. This is why they offered a free paper feed repair kit, which did not really fix the problem. Being a vertical sheet feed machine, it would feed multiple sheets depending on temperature and humidity levels in the office. I had 10 of them given to me because of this problem, and none of them could be made to work with multiple sheets. Single sheet feeding was fine.
He neglected to mention that the white ink cartridge, which prints the gaps in the letters abdeopq/ABDOPQR, as well as 689 and 0, costs $489 and lasts two weeks.
It’s not the printer where they make the money, it’s the ink cartridges. Which is why I no longer own a printer at all.
Joe you are correct on the paper feed issue BUT the free market prevailed and better rebuild kits are available, much better than what HP provided…those were really no more than a paper wedge.
I installed a kit on mine…I suppose it was a bit of a hassle as it was a complete rebuild kit for the feed system but again for $12.00, I suspect I’ll see another several years of printing at least.
Anyhow, I agree…toner is the way to go, the ink carts are a drag.
Some Office Max stores, not all of them, have the equipment to refill your color ink cartridges and the cost is about 1/2 the cost of a new cartridge. You might want to check your local Office Max…
Many larger cities have places that re-fill and re-sell [u]toner[/u] cartridges for considerably less than new. While they tend to be geared for the business customer, they do offer many different re-filled cartridges, possibly the one that YOUR printer uses.
I dealt with an outfit for years that shipped me re-filled cartridges while I shipped back the empties. Even with the freight it was a substantial savings.
My agency (or at least my Forest) routinely orders recycled toner/ink cartridges for its printers. Speaking from my own experience, this is a waste of taxpayer $. Yes, the cartridges are less expensive, but they routinely fail, and smear, and streak, and… And it doesn’t take much for the time lost in trying to fix it to cost more than the original savings. Come to think of it, we use recycled printers, too.
On the bright side, hemostats off the fishing pack and a dissecting kit make fair to middling paper jam removal tools. And you can wash off toner with sufficient alcohol based hand cleanser.
A drawback to a lot of toner-based printers is that the toner can wear off over the course of several years. If you want to archive, look at an old, traditional dot matrix or LQ (print ball) printer that uses ink. The print on those can last for decades.
Make sure you do NOT get a re-filled cartridge until your warranty is over, a re-filled cartridge will void it LEARNED THE HARD WAY!!
Ed, I have pages printed from my first gov’t laser printer that are over 25 yrs old and they haven’t faded a bit.
I really have to agree with re-cycled toner cartridges, they are more hassle than they’re worth. We tried them for 2 yrs at my Gov’t office and we went back to originals even though it cost more.
One more way to save ink is to, like Flybinder said, go to the properties and in addition to selecting grey scale, select “Draft” under the print quality.
In draft mode, it uses about 1/2 the ink of standard mode. Most of what is printed it just to read it off line or to have a printed copy.
Draft mode is a little lighter so it won’t copy as well and I wouldn’t use it for an official letter etc. but for 90% of my printing, I use draft mode.
It makes the ink go a lot farther.
I have one of the HP all in one printers (printer, fax, copier) and it’s quite a handy little gadget to have in the home / home office.
