There is a new site where you can see which cartridges will match your printer. just select your brand, then your type of machine, then your model number and voila! there is what you need. There is also a search box to find your model. Quite nifty and I like it! Permanent Link |  Del.icio.us
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A customer called today to find out a price for a new Samsung CLP-510 fuser unit for his colour laser printer. He was quite disgruntled, he told me he wasn’t happy with his Samsung CLP-510 as he had only used two black toners and the toner was no good, it wasn’t fusing to the page properly and the printouts were flaking toner. He needed a replacement fuser (he said!) to make the toner fuse to the paper properly. A lightglobe lit up in my head and I asked if he was using refilled toner. He said yes. So, obviously, his problem was easy to fix. Sent out a genuine Samsung toner to him and next day he was calling again to thank us for fixing his problem and saving him heartache, money and time trying to get his printer fixed! Avoid refilled toner like the plague. Permanent Link | Del.icio.us
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It’s true! Toshiba released an erasable toner in December 2003. The toner can be used to print on paper which after use can then be treated to be made blank again. Toshiba’s eBlue toner is blue colour to distinguish it from normal toner. Toshiba also released a pen and marker which can also be erased with the special heat treatment. Obviously it hasn’t been a big hit as there is but one reference to it on the web. At a price of around $120 for 1 toner, PLUS $420 for the special photoconductor unit to go with it, PLUS $1.80 for each special marker pen (how many would you need in an office?) PLUS an undisclosed price for the special machine to erase the toner, you would have be the totally dedicated greenie to use the system! More details here. Permanent Link | Del.icio.us
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My first printer was a Canon BJC-600. What a beautiful machine! Around the same time I also bought an Olivetti JP-150WS. This was a black only ink printer, very compact and neat! Permanent Link | Del.icio.us
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It’s a common phrase: Printers are sold cheap because the manufacturers will make money from you when you buy the cartridges. But is it true? Not really. Genuine ink and toner is more expensive than copies for the simple reason that it is genuine. What does this mean? Companies that sell copy inks can cut corners to make inferior ink or toner so they can sell it at a discount compared to genuine. The non-genuine manufacturers also do not need to pay for innovation in the printer market. Companies such as Hewlett Packard, Epson, Canon and Lexmark spend millions of dollars a year researching inks, printheads and cartridges. Of course, if printers and inks were so profitable, we would be seeing a lot more companies trying to get in on the supposedly lucrative printer and toner and ink cartridge manufacturing, but that is not the case. Permanent Link | Del.icio.us
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A customer called us last week to find out if we could take a look at their old Canon Laser Fax Machine. It’s a beautiful machine, probably cost about $5,000 when it was new about 15 years ago, but they were having problems with all received pages not being printed as well as toner being dropped all over the page. The toner was an easy problem to fix - the wiper blade in the cartridge had aged and just wasn’t working - but before they forked out for a new toner it would be better to fix the receiving problem first. Suggested they install a new phone cord from the wall to the machine , but that wasn’t it. They called Canon’s tech department who basically said it was probably the main board but the machine was too old to fix as they didn’t carry the parts anymore. The upshot is, the customer needs a new fax machine, and it will probably costs just a tenth of the price of their old one! If you have an old fax machine that needs repairing, check and make sure it can still be fixed. Permanent Link | Del.icio.us
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Do you think it would be easy to refill colour toners for a colour laser? Most people do! There are, however, several hurdles to overcome. First, think about plain black printing. If a page is printed in black, it doesn’t matter if it is comes out dark grey, jet black, or any shade in between. Our brain still sees it as “black”. Consider now colour printing. You can tell if something about the colour in a colour picture is not quite right. If the colour looks washed out, or too rich, or too yellow or blue, we can always tell. The human eye is particularly sensitive to different colours - in fact the human eye can distinguish between tens of thousands of different hues. That’s why our printer monitors have moved on from 256 colours to 32 million colours! So, the first hurdle to overcome when trying to refill color toner is to match exactly the colour that the genuine manufacturer has. Not easy at all, as they have spent millions of dollars developing that toner for that machine and have stringent steps in their manufacturing plant to ensure there are no variations from batch to batch, and that the last cartridge to come out of the plant is exactly the same colour as the first. The companies that try to copy the genuine toner haven’t got a hope of matching the original manufacturers toner colour as the formula is patented and a closely guarded secret. If the colour of the refill toner isn’t going to match, the colours are going to be wacky! The next point is the density of the toner. Did you know that genuine toner is ground up more finely? If you could look at toner under a microscope, the original genuine toner granules look small and spherical, whereas refill toner looks large, chunky and uneven. This affects the way toner is laid onto a page - genuine toner is laid on evenly and looks sharp and refill color toner looks fuzzy and there is some ‘bleed’ evident under a loupe. This also affects how adjoining colours look, not to mention extra wear and tear on printer components such as drums and fuser units. If you want clear, sharp prints from your colour laser make sure you use genuine toner cartridges. If the colours on your printouts look strange or washed out, check to see that someone hasn’t refilled the toners with non-genuine toner or that generic toners haven’t been used. Permanent Link | Del.icio.us
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Had a customer ring today looking for a cartridge for her HP Laserjet. She said she wasn’t interested in a genuine cartridge, but wanted a remanufactured one. I explained we only sold genuine cartridges, and asked if there was a particular reason why she specifically wanted a remanufactured cartridge. “Because they are cheaper” she replied. I asked her if I could give her a price for a new genuine HP cartridge anyway and she said OK. I gave her the price and she asked if I was kidding. Puzzled, I said no, why? She said she paid $15 more for a remanufactured one! This didn’t surprise me much. Since early 2005 genuine toner cartridge prices have dropped substantially, whereas remanufacturers costs just keep going up. Toner remanufacturers are in a squeeze, having to pay more for an ever shrinking worldwide supply of cores (empty toner cartridges), higher costs to match the technologically superior modern toners, plus higher labour costs. Take into account the number of warranty returns of remanufactured toner cartridges (with some remanufacturers having failure rates of around 15% on some cartridges) and it’s a hard business to stay successful in. When you need new toner for your printer, bear in mind that for a remanfactured toner cartridge to give the same quality as a genuine toner cartridge, it would need to cost the same or more! Permanent Link | Del.icio.us
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There are 2 possible causes for your printhead on your ink printer to dry out (this is not to be confused with blocked nozzles in the printhead). Number one is not using your printer frequently enough! Try and use your printer at least once a week. Print out at least a couple of lines of text in both black and colour to keep the ink flowing through and the nozzles ‘moist’. Number two reason is using incorrect ink. Some refill and generic inks are not formulated correctly and do not contain the special ingredients needed to stop ink drying in the nozzles in too short a time. Genuine brand name inks contain thinners, lubricants and solvents to prevent the ink drying up in the nozzles too quickly. Once on paper, these thinners, lubricants and solvents dry up quickly without affecting the print. If you are having problems and suspect it may be caused by the ink, buy a set of genuine cartridges and install them in your printer. Clearing blocked print nozzles will be covered another time. Permanent Link | Del.icio.us
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Is this familiar to you? Do you think Epson is trying to rip you off? The answer is no - Epson are actually saving you money! How does that work you ask? It’s simple really. First, let’s have a look at ink counting via software and hardware. Most Epson cartridges contain a smart chip which measures how much ink is used up in the cartridge. Old type ink measuring systems just counted how many pages were printed and multiplied that by the ‘average’ amount of ink used by the ‘average’ user to print an ‘average’ page - no wonder they were hopelessly inaccurate. The Epson chips accurately measure how much ink is passed through the nozzles. So why, if it is so accurate, would there be a bit of ink left in the cartridge but the printer refuses to print and won’t let you use up the last bit of ink?? Most HP and Lexmark ink printers use cartridges with a built in printhead, so if you run the cartridge dry and damage the printhead, it’s not a problem because when you install a new cartridge you will also install a new printhead. However, Epson’s printheads are fixed in the machine, and Epson’s piezo-electric printhead will suffer damage if allowed to run dry. There is also the possibility of air bubbles being trapped in the nozzles which may be impossible to shift no matter how many head cleaning cycles you run through. So, Epson add a little extra ink above the stated volume of the cartridge to act as a safety reserve. The printheads are in no danger of burning out or getting air locked. Basically, Epson has given you some ink for free to protect your printer. Beware of override software which allows the last of the ink to be used up, as well as refill or generic cartridges which may possibly run dry. A new Epson printhead is not a cheap thing to buy or install, and by just staying calm and understanding the reason for the bit of ink left over in the cartridge will save you lots of printing problems and frustration in the future! Permanent Link | Del.icio.us
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Not real fast printing, but it used individual ink cartridges which was quite fantastic at the time (around 1994). It printed full colour at 360 x 360 dpi, at the time we thought fantastic quality! I paid alot for it, around $1200 new from memory. After a few years of faithful use all the warning lights started to flash one day, after much angst I found out the printhead was dead. I called Canon but they had run out of printheads but they directed me to Apple who sold a rebadged version of the BJC-600 (Apple StyleWriter) and still had parts. They quoted (gulp!) $500 for a new printhead. Of course by then new inkjet printers of much better quality were selling for around $250 so the Canon got put in the garage to collect dust! Years later a visitor saw it and after I explained the problem with it they asked if they could have it. Of course I agreed! Not sure if they ever got it going or not.
Printed about 3 pages per minute at 300 x 300 dpi. It was marketed as near laser quality (believe it or not). When you printed a page you could see jaggy edges on text and pictures! It was quite cool because the printhead and ink cartridge were seperate, so ink cartridges were just 7 or 8 dollars each, but the printhead needed replacing every 10 ink cartridges. After a year or two we upgraded to an HP Laserjet 4M.