Frank’s ink cartridge, toner cartridge, printer & photo paper news!

Some people like all-in-ones. You know, multifunction centres, or printers with additional functions like scanning, copying, faxing and/or coffee making (just kidding about the coffee making). The best advantages with these is that they take up less room than 3 or 4 machines, and also they are way cheaper than buying each machine seperately. Naturally, while cramming everything into one machine the manufacturers have to compromise on the quality of each component, but then again if you are thinking of buying an all-in-one you will, for example, should only be using the scanner infrequently. Or, if you need to do dozens of copies a day you will find these all-in-ones way too slow (and you will use a lot of ink!). If you don’t mind the limitations of all-in-ones or multifunctions, they are cheap to buy, economical to run (if used wisely - see ink and toner saving tips), and don’t take up much room at all.

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What a nightmare these cartridges have been. We have been waiting for 3 months for a delivery from IBM for these. They are not to be found anywhere in Australia, apart from 5 we received from one of our partner companies yesterday (we only have 2 left!). I feel so sorry for people who have these printers, unless you can get cartridges you can’t use your printer! Of course, these aren’t the only ones in short supply. Waste toner bottles for the Samsung CLP500 printer? Forget it. Retailers (including us) waited 2 months for delivery from Samsung and what they supplied barely covered the backorders from customers, and now we are waiting for more. Panasonic toners for the KX-CL500 are just impossible to get. We have customers calling us and nearly begging us for these cartridges. Why can’t the companies get the supply right? We don’t know! If we call the company and ask, nobody at their Head Offices know what’s going on either! Obviously some companies need a long hard critical look at their supply chains.

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This morning we received a bulletin from HP introducing the new HP Color Laserjet 2600N. Our first impressions are favourable - small footprint, good looking printer, comes with full consumables - but probably the best feature is out of the box networking. This printer is so cheap too, the marketing department says we will be selling it for around $700 Australian inc GST (RRP is $878.90). Some people though may get annoyed with the slow printing speed for black copies - just 8 pages for minute. Colour pages print at 8ppm as well. We get our shipment from HP tomorrow so we will be taking one out of the box to see what they look like ‘in the flesh’. Shouldn’t be too long before there will be a review or ten posted up on the internet, click here for a Google search on 2600n reviews.

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One of the easiest ways to make your ink or toner cartridge print more is to use draft mode for printing. Draft printing is suitable for non-essential or not so important printouts. The quality of draft mode printouts vary between printers - some look not that different to normal mode while others are either very dotty or quite faint. Some of our customers get double the number of pages out of a cartridge using draft mode! The printer I use at home, a Lexmark Optra S, is set on ‘light’ mode and the prints come out just as well as in ‘normal’ mode (i.e. indistinguishable unless you use a loupe). To set your printer on ‘light’, ‘draft’, ‘toner saver’ or ‘ink saver’, check the options on your printer driver, or, if your printer has a console menu you may find it there. If in doubt, do a Google search with your printer name & the words ‘draft mode’.

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Had an interesting phone call from a customer today who was looking for a black cartridge for her HP Business Inkjet 1200. It was a bit confusing at first as she said she had been in contact with HP, who had told her that the cartridges for this machine had been discontinued. I was quite surprised as these are a fairly new machine. When I looked up XRG the cartridges she required were the No. 11 printhead and the No. 10 ink cartridge. I told the customer that she needed a printhead and an ink cartridge, but she told me that was incorrect, as the cartridge she was holding in her hand (which she had taken out of the machine) was an all-in-one ink and printhead. It turns out that the cartridge that came with the machine when new was a C4840A cartridge. This is indeed a combined printhead/ink cartridge. The combined cartridge is a ’starter’ cartridge, and holds only 26.5ml of ink. The No. 10 replacement cartridge holds 69ml of ink - quite a difference! This is just part of the trend of manufacturers to include only low capacity ’starter’ cartridges with their machines when new. It’s a great way for the manufacturers to get printers to us cheaper, but as this customers confusion showed, it should be made clear that they are only ’starter’ cartridges and a different code number should be used for re-ordering supplies.

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When printer manufacturers say ‘X cartridge has a page yield of X pages’, how is it worked out? Nearly every cartridge manufacturer (including Canon, HP, Epson and Lexmark) uses an arbitary figure of 5% coverage per page. So how much is that? It’s around one page of normal text with a 2cm margin. That’s why you usually get less pages from a cartridge. If you add bold text, headings, graphics or photos to a page, your page yield is going to decrease. If you are printing full colour photos on an A4 page you are definately not going to get anywhere near the stated page yield from your cartridges! This is also another point to consider with generic cartridges - it is well known that most generic cartridge manufacturers put less ink or toner in their cartridges, making them less of a bargain than they seem. Unfortunately, there is no way of knowing if the generic cartridge you may buy has as much ink or toner as an original cartridge (even if they say they do). Of course, you would have to buy these ‘cheaper’ generic cartridges more often!

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Often we get asked by customers tossing up whether to buy one of two printers “is Printer A better than Printer B?”. The usual answer (if the printers are basically similar - similar dpi, similar print speed, similar price etc.) is for them to compare the cost per page for each printer. For example, the HP Laserjet 1010 and the Lexmark E230.

The HP 1010 uses the Q2612A cartridge (withich contains drum and toner all in one) which costs around $95.00 and prints 2000 pages, giving a cost of 4.75 cents per page.

The Lexmark E230 uses seperate toner and drum cartridges - the drum needs to be changed every 30,000 pages - and toner which yields 2,500 pages. So, the drum costs around $90.00 and the toner costs around $105.00, giving an all up cost of 3.9 cents per page. We work this out by dividing the drum cost by 30,000 pages and the toner cost by 2,500 pages and adding the two figures together.

A difference of 0.8 cents per page may not sound like much, but every 10,000 pages you would be saving $80 - thats nearly a third of the cost of the printer! Next time you are researching printers to buy, make sure you take the cost per page calculation into consideration.

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Last year Epson stopped making their excellent panoramic photo paper leaving a big hole in the market. Now none of the major vendors are supplying photo paper for printing panorama style. But all is not lost! There are still a couple of options for printing panoramic photos:

1) Printing on A4 or A3 photo paper and then trimming to shape; or
2) Printing using an Epson printer that takes roll paper

1) is relatively easy - make your panoramic photo using a series of shots and stitching them together (there is an excellent tutorial on PCWorld’s site), then print onto an A4 or A3 sheet. If your software or printer driver allows it, print along the top or bottom of the page then flip the paper around 180 degrees and print another panoramic photo on the other half of the paper. What you will need is a way to crop the photos after they have been printed - either a steel rule, sharp hobby knife and a steady hand; or a small guillotine or paper trimmer from your local office supply store.

2) requires one of the Epson papers which takes Epson roll paper. Epson roll paper is photo paper on a roll - it comes in various sizes but the one to use for panoramic photos would be part number S041302, Epson’s 100mm x 8 metre Premium Glossy Photo Paper. This will give you panoramic photos roughly the width of a normal photo (and whatever length you want which is within the printer driver’s capabilities). A couple of Epson printers which take the roll paper are the R800 and the R1800.

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We had yet another customer call today asking if we could supply them with a printhead for their nearly new Canon bubblejet. It was the same old story - we always ask what type of ink they are using, and the usual answer is either refilled or ‘no name’ generic ink cartridges. What people don’t realise is that refill and generic inks will clog up the nozzles in their printhead. The reason is that cheap inks are coloured with pigment that is not ground up finely enough so the dye particles slowly but surely get lodged in the fine print nozzles and block them up making the printheads useless. And whereas once upon a time Canon printheads were classed as consumbles and were relatively cheap, they are now classed as spare parts which can only be purchased from Canon’s spare parts dealers (with the associated increase in costs for parts and installation). Printer companies spend millions of dollars a year to formulate inks with just the right properties for a particular printer - inks which won’t clog, or dry too quickly or slowly, won’t dry out in the printhead, will be delivered at just the right rate etc - yet people believe someone in China or elsewhere producing ‘compatible’ inks will produce the same result for a fraction of the cost. The upshot of all this? Yes, you can save a few bucks using non-genuine ink, but be prepared to either throw away your printer when it gets blocked printheads or be prepared to pay a Canon tech big bucks to install a new printhead.

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Well, Epson have released the R1800 printer. Probably the best way to describe it is that is an A3 version of the R800. It uses the same ink as the R800, and like the R800 the media options are great. The R1800 can print with roll paper (great for doing panoramic photos), CD printing, and the ability to print on any recommended paper from A6 to A3+. At a price of over RRP $1375.00 you will wanting to be a professional (or enthusiastic amateur) doing a lot of printing. Epson’s Ultrachrome inks certainly print beautiful quality it has to be said. We are looking forward to seeing more prints from this printer.

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