Printers

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Buying a Printer

April 2008. It had to happen. Someone offering a FREE colour laser printer as long as you buy some toner ! www.ijtdirect.co.uk are offering and HP 2600N delivered if you buy two sets of toners for a total of £299. On the net this printer is priced from £150 to £250 (!) Other free printers are offered by the same company.

n.b. If you have lots of empty Hewlett Packard, Xerox or Lexmark ink cartridges you can get as much as £3.50 each for them by contacting Cartex at http://www.cartex.co.uk/cgi-bin/empty_inkjet_cartridges.asp or see prices at http://www.empty-inkjet-cartridges.com/prices_paid.asp. This is not a 'click through'.

Computer Active did a lab study which showed that the cost of ownership of some inkjet printers over an 18 month period can be as high as £1,775! This was based on printing 30 colour pages a week, using original cartridges - but excluding the cost of paper.

It is difficult to advise what printer you should get because, as with computers, it depends on what you wish to do with it. Things to take into account are speed of output, whether you need quality colour, the location and - almost most of all - the cost per page. More about this at the end of this article.....However, I have recently been investigating economy printers and I find that Canon, like most of the other manufacturers have gone down the road of restricting the use of clone cartridges (and charging a lot for their own). It is now more difficult to find a printer that uses clones. I like my HP printer but, on cost grounds, it loses out. It cost about the same to buy some printers as it does to replace a couple of my HP cartridges. I tend to refill them, get refills or shop around on the net.

Printers change even faster than computers, so any reference to a specific model would be out of date before I uploaded this to the site

GENERAL

The most popular printers, by far, are Colour Inkjets. They all produce excellent correspondence quality these days and the speed of the slowest is adequate for home use. You should never trust the manufacturer's claimed speeds as they probably refer to a lightly printed page in Draft Mode. More of this later. But it is certainly possible for the faster inkjets to keep up with what laser printers do. One £70 Epson claims to produce a business letter in 1.6 seconds (that is an incredible 37 pages per minute) That said, mono laser printers are now down to the price of the inkjets (well under £100 - see below). So, why not buy a laser ? Generally their cost per copy is much lower but apart from more expensive colour ones (now down in price) they only print in black or grey. But, personally I have a cheap laser for mono (and waterproof) printing and an inkjet for colour.

So it is very important to make comparisons before buying. But there is no general rule even for one manufacturer's products. In one old test the Canon S830D cost nearly 10p per page for colour. The Canon S530D cost only 3.5p. The HP Deskjet cost over 15p in colour (but a lot less if you refill)

Watch out for how much ink there is in cartridges. Older printers used to use cartridges with up to 40 millilitres of ink. These days you can buy a printer which uses HP cartridges which contain as little as 5 ml of ink ! (e.g. Types 342 and 110) According to my conversion tables that is a metric teaspoonful. If you sneezed it would disappear ! And they cost £16 each (Viking). If you don't believe me study the Viking catalogue. The average older HP cartridge (e.g type 57a) is around 17 ml, so the variation is astonishing. Look out for the double pack offers. But watch out for the economy sizes e.g. Type 57GE LC (light capacity) has only one quarter the volume of ink.

For cheaper original HP cartridges try www.choicestationery.co.uk or www.cartridgemonkey.com or do like a friend did and get them on Ebay. These were a 'Buy now' advert and they worked out at around £7 less than you would pay in a shop (for colour - type 57a)

Mono Laser Printers If your requirement is for black and grey printing only you would do well to consider a mono laser printer. Cost per copy varies between 1.13ppp (Brother HL-1430), Minolta Pagepro 1300W (1.83ppp) to 3.35ppp (HP Laserjet 1010) My own laser is a Samsung ML 1510, which runs fast and is very good for a bargain price of £57, delivered. Text is perfectly formed, if a little light but mono photos are only just passable with slight banding. It runs at a genuine 14 pages a minute and is even refillable from a toner bottle making its cost a mere 0.3p per page !

Colour Laser printers are getting cheaper - Samsung now do one for £150 + vat (www.computacenter.co.uk). But, before you run out and get one, bear in mind that replenishing the four toners will cost you over £120 and will only last for 1500 copies each. Even disregarding the drum, which lasts 45,000 copies, I reckon that makes it around 16p a copy. That is 1500 copies of pure black, pure yellow, pure magenta and pure cyan. So perhaps with a mixture you get a lot more ? Just check ! Most suppliers also do high capacity toners that will go for 4500 copies each but they are likely to be around £80 each. Maybe they have all caught on to the fact that the real money is in INK !

Clone Cartridges ? : It is no use saving on cheaper cartridges if the result is poor. I have usually found the quality of photo printing satisfactory with clone cartridges. In the case of one Computer Shopper article the results for some of the clones were encouraging, being judged equal to or better than the originals.

Epson were not going to miss out for ever on this market so their current printers use a cartridge which includes a 'chip'. These are more expensive still but the 'clone' makers soon caught on and imitated this technique - at a cost. But Epson are trying to prevent their cartridges being copied. So, you would be lucky to find an Epson printer that doesn't use 'chipped' cartridges. The old 400, 600, C20 and C46 ranges used non chipped ones and were cheaper to run. N.B. Jettec, one of the refill companies says "Some Epson cartridges have a memory device which stores the ink level. You will need to purchase a Jettec chip resetter to reset the ink level before you can re-use (refill) the cartridge" Both Epson and HP printers may show the ink level as empty even after you have replaced the cartridge with a new 'clone'.

n.b. You can buy Epson Inkjet Cartridges from www.eezytrade.co.uk and get great personal service.

Hewlett Packard Cartridges (and Xerox/Lexmark) not only contain the ink but also the print head and some electrical contacts. These cartridges are patented, though you can get 'remanufactured' ones - even in Tesco. Some do refills, which are a little cheaper and you can do this yourself (which saves a lot). It is a messy job and there is a limit to how many times you can refill before the print head becomes inaccurate. But you may feel it is worthwhile with a pair of HP cartridges costing as much as £44. Most Lexmark cartridges are in the same price bracket. Some Canon printers use four or more cartridges, each costing in the region of £9 (about half of this for clones). Some printers use even more cartridges whilst others use specific 'photo' cartridges.

Often people are sold on the issue of DPI (dots per inch). But, surprisingly, although older Hewlett Packard printers only claimed 600 dpi, (as against many claiming 1200 dpi or more) the technology appeared to give good results. What is more they managed to produce them on plain or matte paper, whereas my experience with older Epsons has been that I would only use gloss paper to print a decent photo.

Speed. Printing speeds vary enormously. You should take the advertiser's claims with a large pinch of salt. ALL quoted speeds are based on DRAFT mode. With some printers this can be quite faint and is certainly no use for photographs. That said it is quite a good idea to set your printer to draft mode for day to day work. In addition to making your cartridges last twice as long you will find the pages arrive much quicker. You can always change back to a higher quality for an individual job. HP printout tends to smudge until you have allowed the print to dry for at least a couple of minutes. But for standard correspondence an HP printer looks pretty good in Draft mode - and smudges less. Change the 'default' mode via Start, Settings, Printers, Properties rather than when printing an individual file (which will just revert to the previous settings next time)

Computer Active has done useful surveys of cheaper printers. The speed of output varied incredibly for printing a full A4 colour photo with one taking 19 minutes to print it, whilst other cheap printers took only 4 minutes. Costs per copy (using original cartridges) varied from 6p to 10p and black prints cost around 2p to 3p. A later issue did an in-depth study on cost and concluded that the amazing thing was that the costs per copy were as follows Mono : Canon i560 9.10p, HP 5150 10.05p, Epson C44UX 15.57p and the daddy of them all Lexmark Z605 23.32 pence per copy ! The Brother HL 1430 Laser won hands down on mono print at just over a penny a copy. So, if you do a lot of black printing get a mono laser . If you include printer depreciation the cost of inkjet color printing is even more frightening ranging with the HP at 26p per page to and astounding 74p for the Lexmark. The reason for this was that, although the printer cost a mere £40 - or is given away with a computer - it only managed 31 pages of colour per cartridge (a third of what the HP achieved) and each replacement cost £23. To all these prices you must add the cost of paper. Glossy can be from 25p per sheet upwards (but try Aldi) and to get anywhere near the weight of the paper used by the pros you need to look for at least 275gsm on the box. This could cost you £1 a sheet ! So, if you want cheap (and high quality) prints of your photos, I suggest that you take or them to a professional photoprinter. Take your disk or memory card to Boots and get 28 enprints for £4.99 and if you get 50 done it is no more expensive (£5.00). Saves a lot of hassle. You can always enlarge the favourite ones later. Doing it yourself might be convenient but it is certainly not economical. The alternative is to have a useful viewer (e.g. XP's Picture Viewer in slideshow mode or Picasa2) on your computer and display them there full screen. Or send them to friends with an email (or CD) or display them on a photo website such as Kodak. That way you wont notice them yawn !

Another type of printer is the Printer/Scanner/Copier/Fax machine combo. If you are need more than one of these functions (or just ned the desk space) it may pay to look at these, which can be as a little as £45 or less these days (Canon, Lexmark/HP) For a little more you can find them with memory card slots, so you can stick your camera memory card in. Useful.

You may have noticed that some printers and cameras are described as having 'Pictbridge' capability. This means that you can connect the camera directly to the printer, see a display of a picture on the printer and print it without the need to start your computer.

And if you are undecided and want to see how well Canon printers work you can send a photo to http://www.yourprint.canon-europe.com/index.html and they will send you the result. Can't be bad!

Location : You need a printer that will fit in with your work area. Many printers have a paper feed at the back and feed out at the front. It is surprising how much room this takes up and if you use a workstation type desk this style may not be convenient. A Hewlett Packard printer (or most lasers) feeds paper in from the front and back out to the front and is more suitable in cramped situations or in cupboards, on shelves or some workstations.

A word about connections. Older printers were designed to connect via the 25 pin parallel port at the back of your computer but these days almost all may have a connection to the half-inch USB type port that all recent PC's have. There is no great advantage in one or the other. But they rarely supply a cable with either type so you have to be prepared to buy this extra. The prices charged for cables by the average 'box shifter' are very high. As much as £14 for what would be £2 or less at a computer fair.

One problem people mention is that, if they wish to stop the print run part way through this can be difficult. Normally, printing is sent to your computer and then on to the printer. You will notice a delay whilst the computer 'thinks' about it. And the slower the computer (and more complex the page) the longer it will think. But, if you then go to stop the print run by switching off the printer or for some other reason the printing is interrupted e.g paper jam, when you switch the printer on (or free the paper jam) the computer keeps on sending information along the cable. It may even turn the printing into 'garbage' and may print a couple of lines of this on each page. You should be able to clear the printing by going to a printer icon on the bottom line. The software varies but you should be able to Cancel the print from there. Unfortunately, this does not always work and there is always a delay. If that does not work you may have to turn the PC and printer off. Even this does not always clear the print 'buffer/queue' held by the computer. Try leaving the computer off for a little while before switching it on again. It is quite important to clear (cancel) any unprinted items as you may find thart you cannot print anything until you do. But, if you get through a load of paper and ink during this exercise, all I can say is - you are not alone !

Paper. The choice of paper for printing quality photographs is important. Papers vary a great deal in price, thickness, gloss, drying time and the results. I find that HP printers are more tolerant of matt (or even bog standard) papers. With my Epson printing a photo on matt was hopeless. Computer Active did a test and concluded that Epson Premium Glossy was best for Epson. The much cheaper PCline paper from Dixons fared quite well but Kodak Ultra Glossy (even at 87p a sheet) did badly, particularly on landscapes, although I find their ordinary Glossy, which is two sided, is pretty good value. You could even save money by printing both sides for your albums! The Lexmark printer was tolerant of most gloss papers but was best suited to their recommended Ilford manufactured paper. However, Ilford did not do as well with any other printer. Canon printers did best with Canon paper - but at £2 a sheet ! The next best for Canon was PCLine at 20p ! This cheap (thinner) paper also did well on all printers, especially HP. But for weight, the nearest I have found to a professional photo is Fujifilm Premium Glossy, an Instant dry 270gsm paper that is almost like card. Superb. Summing up the best papers are the ones printer manufacturers recommend but for reasonable results and economy pop along to Dixons or PCWorld for PCLine or Kodak Glossy or Aldi, who sell a very good one. Remarkably I picked up a pack of quick drying 220 gsm glossy (Tallon) on a market stall for £1 for 25 sheets. So good I went back for more. Which shows what profit some shops are making.

Problems. All inkjet printers are likely to clog up from time to time, especially if left to dry out for a while. You may not realise this until you print a colour photo and it comes out all blue or orange. Most printer software comes with a test facility to determine which of the colours is not printing correctly. Then there is usually a head cleaning routine.(see your manual) This attempts to suck ink through the jets until they are clean. Sometimes this will work with one cleaning; sometimes you have to do it several times. The procedure is very wasteful of ink, often sucking through all the colours and black and wasting it onto a big piece of blotting paper hidden in the base of the printer. Sometimes it doesn't work at all and you are left with a printer that is, say, only good for printing black. What to do ? I have tried all the possibilities, from dismantling the printer to injecting water through the jets (Epson) to my latest effort with an HP 930C. Nothing would make it print Yellow so, as a photo printer, it was a write off. I drilled a hole in the top of the cartridge (over the yellow compartment), injected a large quantity of yellow ink and, finally, blew down the hole until the ink came out of the jets ! One nice HP930C was saved from the scrap heap.

Tips: To prevent drying out it is as well to use a printer at least once a week. If you buy cartridges in bulk (having remortgaged!) bear in mind that they have around one year shelf life, though keeping them in a fridge is said to increase this.

Tips on refilling. You can buy refill kits for most makes of cartridge. I have tended to use packs fro Inktec for my HP. Be sure to wear rubber or plastic gloves if you want your hands to look decent after. Keep them on until you have completed the job, replaced the cartridge and given it a test. Do the whole job over a sink that can be washed down after. Make sure you know where the refilling holes are. Some cartridges have to be pierced using a supplied augur. Hold each bottle upside down and pierce the cap with the hypodermic needle. Try not to inect air into the cartridge. Most printers have difficulty sucking the first ink through and have various techniques to do this. In the case of HP cartridges you may find a 'cradle' in the refilling kit along with a larger hypodermic tube. This should be connected to the rubber protruding from the bottom of the cradle and the hypo tube used to suck a small amount of ink through. In the case of a triple colour cartridge the combined inks coming through should be almost black. Some pinters may 'chunter' away to themselves for 30 secods when they detect a new cartridge as been loaded, then send out a test sheet. If the first print looks as if any of the inks have failed to come through you may have to try different techniques. Read the manual. Generally, if you click on Start, Printers and right click the printer and then on Properties, you can check if there is a Utility to clean the cartridge and do a test print. Do not be surprised if the ink level shown under Properties is incorrect. It doesn't matter as long as it works. In the case of Canon you may be asked to confirm that a cartridge has been changed. If you are refilling more than one cartridge, stick tape over the top and bottom until you wish to use them.

And finally.... To get a 'professional' opinion as to which printer to buy read the section at the back of each Computer Active called Computeractive Recommends

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