What's wrong with this picture?

[Perd Hapley]

If you still need new ink, see if there is a Cartridge World store in your area.  They sell refills more cheaplier than you can buy new.  'Course you can probably do that online, too.

But I must say I really hated them at first.  They're logo has some star or something, that always made me think they sold, ya know, the really fun kind of cartridges.  Every time I saw one of their stores, I'd get all happy, then let-down.    

[K Frame]

Kodak makes a series of printers with refills that cost 20 bucks. 

Kodak is, I think, the ONLY company that has rejected the "printer as loss leader, ink is the major profit center" model.

I read an article about that last year or the year before. It's a pity that more people don't realize it when they buy a Dell or Epsom printer for $25 and the damned ink cartridges come to over $100.

[K Frame]

" more cheaplier"

More cheaplier?

God I hate you.

[Perd Hapley]

And I hate you more hatelier. 

[zahc]

Around here Walgreens will refill inkjet cartridges, except Canon, at a modest savings. Canon sucks for drivers anyway so I'll never buy a Canon again, considering how trouble-free my HP has been. It's an all-in-one and cost $20 new from walmart on sale. I think walgreens charges $10 for black and $15 for color.

[Gewehr98]

Regarding "starter" ink cartridges...

Many newer, home-sized laser printers also ship with a "starter" toner cartridge.

Both my Samsung ML-1430 and Lexmark E120 had them. 

They're smaller, and hold only a fraction of the toner that the normal toner cartridges for those machines contain.

Nothing says durability and cheap cost-per-page than the Sherman tank of a printer that is my HP LaserJet 4.  I sometimes wish I hadn't sold my backup LaserJet 4.   

Which reminds me, I have 3 each Tektronix Phaser 780 Tabloid professional grade color lasers here, one in the office and two in the garage.  The Spousal unit says I don't need all three, and the city will charge me $15.00 each just to move them to the curb.  Let me see how the garage units survived the cold temps, and I'll probably be putting a "Free to a Good Home" ad up soon...

[cassandra and sara's daddy]

refill your cartridges
its a couple bucks a pop

[Balog]

Wish you were closer to me G98, that sounds like a heck of a nice printer.

[AZRedhawk44]

Regarding "starter" ink cartridges...

Many newer, home-sized laser printers also ship with a "starter" toner cartridge.

Both my Samsung ML-1430 and Lexmark E120 had them. 

They're smaller, and hold only a fraction of the toner that the normal toner cartridges for those machines normally have.

Nothing says durability and cheap cost-per-page than the Sherman tank of a printer that is my HP LaserJet 4.  I sometimes wish I hadn't sold my backup LaserJet 4.   

Which reminds me, I have 3 each Tektronix Phaser 780 Tabloid professional grade color lasers here, one in the office and two in the garage.  The Spousal unit says I don't need all three, and the city will charge me $15.00 each just to move them to the curb.  Let me see how the garage units survived the cold temps, and I'll probably be putting a "Free to a Good Home" ad up soon...

Aren't those a special funky thermal wax?  I used to have several Tektronix 870's that were definitely wax printers.  Ambitious users would unplug them and try to move them, then realize they were HOT and jostle them setting them back down.  It wouldn't print then.  Duh... you spilled hot wax all over the innards.  Gotta let them cool before moving and allow the wax to congeal again.

[bk425]

Laserwriter IIg Ethernet printers with the Canon engines will also work forever. Staples even still has toner for them, and they're almost twenty years old! (Plus the toner refills are like $20)...and yes, they support PostScript. It's why they were insanely expensive when introduced.
...

In college I caught a falling newspaper and ran it one summer converting it from the optical typesetter that the colleges printing program was deciding to not replace to a couple Macintosh SE's and a laserwriter for paste up. Not that new fangled laserwriter II by golly, we bought the ram and installed it -after- the $2,000 printer arrived (iirc that was the price after the 30% educational discount). My children are now in a play at that college and I walked up to the papers office to see that that laserwriter is still in use.
Things really don't have to fall apart. We just make them that way. -Boyd

[Gewehr98]

They're damned nice printers, and heavy as hell. I won't, and cannot, ship them.  My office specimen has the optional 3-drawer paper magazine underneath, so it's an even bigger space hog.

I bought them for pre-production proofs, before they head off to the big offset printers. The two backup units came from a graphics company near Lambeau Field who upgraded to newer versions of the same.  It cost me more in fuel to drive up and back to retrieve them than my $50.00 winning bid on eBay.

Each is capable of full tabloid photo quality, Pantone corrected, and makes all the prints glossy regardless of paper quality.

Nope, the Phaser 780 uses powdered toner cylinders/cartridges. I don't know what a Phaser 870 looks like, maybe it does something different. The wax/gloss layer comes from the separate fuser roll. Toner cartridges aren't really that expensive, either.  They sit in something that looks like a revolver cylinder, real easy to check toner levels, fuser remaining, toner waste cartridge status, everything via either the front panel or the internal HTTP website accessed through the LAN.  They all have hard drives for buffering large print jobs and storing fonts, etc.

[Harold Tuttle]

laser FTW here

I have a 4mp HP that does postscript

one of my pastimes is pushing printer engines into processing mega postscript scaled files

I have output 50, 11x17s and taped up long banners for gun rallies

We had those wax keyed crayon tektronix at NGM
they needed a substantial table or the print head would shake the poor stand to oblivion



at work we have these huge 8150 series HPs that barf to reams of text when ever i print any photoshop to it

if i save the photoshops files as PDF & print those it renders fine

I suspect a postscript emulation that is not real PS

it doesn't matter how I encode the file
binary/asci or jpg any PS file barfs to 12 characters of text on a zillion pages

[Harold Tuttle]

Wax On, Wax Off

As a solid-ink (also known as wax-jet or phase-change) printer, the Phaser 8400 works something like an offset printing press, or a cross between an ink-jet and a laser. Its yellow, cyan, magenta, and black ink come not in liquid or powdered (toner) form, but in waxy chunks or small cubes -- actually, not cubes but four slightly different, drop-in shapes, carved toddler-toy-fashion to fit into the proper slots underneath the hood of the printer.

Accustomed to conventional ink and toner cartridges, we were slightly unnerved that the Phaser's front-panel LCD and software driver don't offer an ink-remaining gauge (though the former does display a low-ink warning); instead, you simply lift the hood and look. You can top off or add ink anytime -- such as before starting a big print job, with no more wondering whether an installed cartridge will go the distance. And compared to the usual rigmarole of throwing away or recycling consumable cartridges and waste tanks, the 8400 is a friend to the environment, with one small, plug-in "maintenance kit" or imaging-drum lubricator to replace every 10,000 pages (the $100 standard kit) or 30,000 pages (an optional $150 kit), plus a waste tray to empty and replace periodically.

According to Xerox, printing some 6,800 pages takes six sticks apiece of the four colors, with a total ink cost of $700 -- by our rough calculation, something like 10.8 cents per page, somewhat more costly than most color lasers but thriftier than desktop inkjets.

Inside the printer, the stubby crayons are melted -- drawing, speaking of environmental impact, up to 1,500 watts, though Xerox says the printer averages less than a fifth of that -- into an ink reservoir. A 1,236-nozzle, 600 by 600 dpi printhead sprays the ink onto a heated, rotating drum, which transfers the image to paper in one pass (versus the four passes of most low-priced color lasers). The ink almost instantly solidifies again on the page, with no inkjet-style seeping or blotting on plain paper, and won't smear if swiped by a damp finger -- though it can scratch off if rubbed with a fingernail.

[Manedwolf]

Those are neat. They smell like crayons left in the sun.

[roo_ster]

Those are neat. They smell like crayons left in the sun.

Well, I'll be dipped in apple butter!

THAT was the reason the old color laser printer smelled like it did in operation.

[Harold Tuttle]

we had roll fed tektronix wax printers for NattyGeo magazine layouts

at christmas time, i would unroll them and make festive holiday garland and wreaths featuring CMYK negative plates of the old output

those roll fed donor printers must be a security nightmare

[Nick1911]

That's a nice printer, Gewehr98.

Let me know when you're looking to get rid of it...  I might be up for a road trip.  I could use something that would do color.

[crt360]

I have had wonderful results with two Samsung desktop laser printers
ML 1710 Laser
SCX-4x21 Laser ("x" is some number)

ML is a printer-only.  Bought for less than $100.  My wife tried to wear it out, replacing the toner 3 or 4 times.  Thousands of pages printed.  Printer is still alive & operable, just needs a new toner, as it has become superfluous since we bought..

SCX-*, which is one of those multi-function jobbies: print, copy, scan, fax.  Bought for less than $200.  Only replaced toner once, so far, but it has been a rock.

Drivers for both are great and they are easy to operate.  Also, they come with linux drivers.

I'll second the Samsungs.  We have several ML-1710s, ML-1740s, and ML-2010s, none of which we paid more than $75 for, and they each have a minimum of 10,000 pages through them with very few problems.  The 17 series had the openable back, which provided great print quality on heavy envelopes and other things that don't like to bend much.  I miss that on the newer ones, but they do have generally excellent quality print and are really fast.  We've got a couple of SCX-4725FN laser all-in-ones, too.  I have one in my office that I use for most of my printing, light copying and scanning.  I really like it.  They're usually around $300, but can occasionally be found for $100 or more off.  I think the last one we got was around $150 after rebate!  Pretty amazing for a network ready, 20+ page per minute printer, copier, scanner, and fax machine.

We used to have mostly HPs, including LJ II & III, but they all died.  We might still have one or two in the storage room, but even if they started working again, I have no use for super-heavy, super-slow printers.  Come to think of it, I still have a Panasonic KX-P4410 laser that I bought in 92 or 93 that still works fine at 4ppm.

I've owned two personal ink-jets.  One was a Lexmark that printed approximately 27 pages before it ran out of ink, and 50 pages before it quit working and I stripped it for parts.  I should have known better, but I picked up an HP all-in-one inkjet which has cost me about a dollar a page to use. 

[lee n. field]

This is precisely why I got an HP laser for $65 after rebates.

I musta missed that.  HP Laserjet P1006, $100.

Came with a "starter cartridge", that was supposed to last 700 pages.  I'm over that now, with now sign of faintness yet.

Sharing across a network is a bit iffy.  It didn't seem to much want to work with the cheap-ass USB print server I borrowed from work, and sharing via Windows/printing via Samba ain't the slickest solution. 

At the same time, more or less, I bought 2 dinky cartridges for my Mom's HP inkjet.  $60 for the pair.

[41magsnub]

Disagree.

HP used to be... until their drivers got clogged with bloatware and their lower end consumer grade lasers moved away from PS/PCL compatibility to proprietary language host-based printing (Mac and Linux incompatibility).

I consider Dells to be the best consumer grade laser printers out there right now.

I agree with the disagree, the low end HP laser printers are horrific.  For many they quit providing just a driver, you have to go through their whole installer process with TSR programs.  The Dells are nice.

Personally I have a 12 year old HP Laserjet 1100 at home that runs like a champ.

[Manedwolf]

I agree with the disagree, the low end HP laser printers are horrific.  For many they quit providing just a driver, you have to go through their whole installer process with TSR programs.  The Dells are nice.

Personally I have a 12 year old HP Laserjet 1100 at home that runs like a champ.

OSX found it and printed to it five minutes after plugging it in. The page went through so fast I thought it had just fed one through blank. It hadn't.

It was $65.