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

Did you know Lexmark now has twin packs for some of their inks? If you use one of the following printers:

X74
X75
X1140
X1150
X1170
X1185
X2250
Z13
Z23
Z25
Z33
Z35
Z513
Z515
Z603
Z605
Z615

you can buy either a normal use black ink (10N0016) twin pack, moderate use black ink (10N0217) twin pack, a twin pack with a black and a colour (10N0217 & 10N0227) , or a colour ink (10N0227) twin pack.

If you have one of these:

Z55
Z55se
Z65
Z65N
X5150
X6150
X6170

you can buy either a black ink (18L0032) twin pack or a twin pack with a black and a colour (18L0032 & 118L0042).

These twin packs work out way cheaper than buying the cartridges singly, and if you know you are going to use them within, say, a year, you will be saving yourself money and time.

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Three people have been arrested and one charged for selling counterfeit toner cartridges on eBay. The person was charged with attempting to obtain property by deception, obtaining property by deception, and various copyright and trademark infringements. The eBay seller was trying to flog fake Epson toners and when police raided the sellers home there were $130,000 worth of fake cartridges found. The cartridges looked like genuine Epson cartridges and carried the Epson logo. This is not the first time people have been caught selling fake cartridges, one printer company beleives up to 5% of cartridges sold in Australia are counterfeit.

The problem with these cartridges is that people think they are buying Epson quality but receiving substandard product. Fake cartridges may also be ‘underweight’. If you buy cartridges make sure you buy from registered resellers. The company I work for is a registered reseller for Epson, Hewlett Packard, Lexmark, Canon and all other major brands, so our customers always get genuine products with full manufacturers warranty. When buying consumables from suppliers make sure the supplier is a registered reseller, or you may have problems with warranty for your machines if you have been using non-genuine or fake cartridges (even unwittingly).

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Ever wondered what the prices per page are for inkjet photo paper? Choice has an inkjet photo paper cost calculator on their site. Prices shown are manufacturers recommended retail prices which you will easily beat by shopping online (maybe even using some of the photo paper ad links on the right - shameless plug!). Of course, as always, we recommend using the same brand paper as your printer - however Celcast, Ilford and Kodak are also quite good photo papers. Cheaper photo papers may react with the ink and cause rapid fading.

To go to the Choice Magazine calculator, click here.

To see the accompanying article, click here.

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A customer needed cartridges for her HP PSC 1315 printer and said she needed the No. 28 colour (c8728ae or c8728aa) and No. 56 black (c6656ae or c6656aa). Mmmm, we were a little confused as the No. 28 is usually paired with the No. 27 Black cartridge (c8727ae or c8727aa), and the No. 56 Black can go with the No. 57 (c6657ae or c6657aa) and No. 58 cartridges (c6658ae or c6658aa). So, off we went to do a bit of research. HP’s Aussie website couldn’t tell us which cartridges to use, but we eventually found the info on HP’s Ireland website. The 1315 actually uses 5 different ink cartridges (although not all at the same time!). The cartridges are:

HP No. 27 Black Inkjet Print Cartridge (10 ml) 220 pages @ 5% coverage
HP No. 56 Black Inkjet Print Cartridge (19 ml) 450 pages @5% coverage
HP No. 58 Photo Inkjet Print Cartridge (17 ml) 125 photos (10 x 15 cm)
HP No. 28 Tri-colour Inkjet Print Cartridge (8 ml) 190 pages @ 15% coverage
HP No. 57 Tri-colour Inkjet Print Cartridge (17 ml) 400 pages @ 15% coverage

The cartridges can be used in the following combinations:
Black & Colour
or
Colour & Photo

Makes this All-in-One a versatile little machine, and great if you have difficulty getting one type of cartridge - you can always use the other kind!

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We are starting to recommend Kyocera printers to our customers. The new range, consisting of the FS-720, the FS-820 and the FS-920, look quite good. The FS-720 is a USB and Windows only machine - very basic and has a GDI interface so can’t be used with Mac or Linux. The FS-820, also for Windows only, adds a parallel port with the ability to simultaneously use both ports via virtual printers. The FS-920 includes Postcript 3 emulation and is compatible with Linux and Mac OS. These printers are very eco-friendly and very cheap to run.

If you are tossing up between a Kyocera laser printer and another brand, you can use Kyocera’s TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) Calculator tool. You can compare the running costs of most laser printers on the market. A very handy tool!

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If things are getting stressed in the office and we need a bit of a laugh we always head off to Spamusement to cheer ourselves up. We are sometimes in tears of laughter over this site, basically how it works is Steven Franks takes spam email subject lines and draws cartoons about them - the results are usually very very funny. Even the ones about toner (heh heh).

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One of my favourite sites is Wilhelm Imaging Research. Henry Wilhelm has spent many years researching image permanence. Now he almost exclusively focuses on digital image permanence (photos printed on desktop and wide format printers). On his site you will find way too much information on different ways to measure image permanence, but there are several useful sections, especially extracts from popular magazines written so that people like us can understand it. Especially interesting is an extract from PC World which compared brand name inks with no name inks. After extensive testing using his methods, he found the cheap ink printed almost as well as the genuine ink, however the no name ink would have faded after 6 months whereas the Epson ink will last for around 92 years!

Also on the site are the results of tests on many printers, with amazing results. Prints done on the Epson R800 will last up to 400 years! Of course, and this is a point made over and over again on Henry’s site - you will only achieve long lived prints by using the genuine ink and the genuine paper made by the manufacturer of your printer. Think about it when you want to print photos that last.

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