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Need a deal on a printer that prints pretty good, and has cheap cartridges

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jabroni1m

Member
Joined
May 1, 2002
The cartridges for my printer are 40 dollars or so and I want cheap cartridges, bt a fairly good printer, preferably under 150. Links would be good too.:D Thanks.
 
Canon. I can't say enough good things about my (now older) S400. It cost me about $80 at Best Buy a year+ ago, and the cartrdiges I get online cost me $30 for ALL 4!! They're not the official Canon cartidges, but work well just the same.

This is not a bad inkjet for the cost and availability of third party/generic cartridges. Prints most photos rather well... but if you want professional quality, you really need to go with a laser jet. Sounds to me like you're looking to save a few $$ like me, so the inkjet should suffice.
 
Printers have vastly improved over the last 5 years. Even "cheap" printers are doing an adequate job.

I have had 3 different Canon's up untill a year ago when I got an HP. The HP has been terrific. Yes the carts are somewhat expensive, but they are filled with more ink. (Some of the cheap HP's carts are cheap too, but carts are small)

One of the complaints I had with Canon was I was always running out of ink. The carts were small. So in the long run, it was not cheaper to replace, cause I would use 2 to 3 carts for the Canon for everyone I use of the HP.

So in your search, keep that in mind, and look for a printer that has a cart with a lot of ink. You will be happier in the long run.

PS.

My brother bought a "cheap" printer, only to find out the print carts werealmost as much as the printer!!:eek:
 
jabroni1m said:
Well what about going lazer?
Expensive outlay but the toner should last for a long time. And expensive to replace. Some people do tha math and say laser is cheaper.

I would stay away from the lowend crap printers. They usually have expensive carts. And I forget which manufacturer uses a counter to'finish' carts. So no refilling.
 
What I've noticed is sometimes Office Depot or Office Max kind of stores have a good sale on these things. Like $40-50 for a Epson 700 series or C60 or low end HP. However, the easiest ones to refill yourself are usually Canon. The HP and Epson usually have on/off chips on the cartridges that can prevent you from refilling. You can of course buy compatible cartidges too.
 
My 2 cents..................

About a year ago I was the guy who did this for my company. The only answer I can give you is there is NO cheap printer to own. Your best bet is to aim for hte most reliable printer you can buy for your money. Most businesses use HP because it is easier to service and the ink is competitively priced. It you look you can get 2-paks for about $40 and you will get a decent page yield on them. I personally have plenty of horror stories about cannon, epson and lexmark printers.

Remember that once you buy a printer to stretch your ink use lower quality settings when you can get by with them and make them the default to save ink. Rarely will you absolutely need to print at the highest quality settings.
 
Lexmark makes a decent laser printer, and for the cheap cost their inkjets suffice for novice users. Lexmark's cartridges are overpriced (if purchased at best buy), and I don't know if they can be found cheaper online (never looked).

Canon's cartridges are not small but I did notice that it used a lot of ink to create the image/text (soaks the paper in some cases). Think it's more of an efficiency thing rather than reservoir size. Having seperate black, yellow, magenta, and cyan helps offset the frustration of having to replace the entire color cartridge just because you got done running multiple sky diving photos and only ran out of blue (while the red/yellow were only half used) :p
 
Thanks for everyones input. Right now I have a HP officejet v40 and it works great, but goes through ink in less than 250 sheets. I go through both the color and black withing 500 easily. I will look into which one last the longest. I was thinking mabye just sticking with my all in one beings everyone knows HP are pretty good. But I will continue looking for others.
 
josephtischer said:
...Your best bet is to aim for hte most reliable printer you can buy for your money...
I agree 100%. If you want to do black & white only, I would recommend laser over inkjet. My experience is that laser cartidges cost more, but are more cost-effective in the long run because they last a lot longer than inkjet cartridges. I have a Brother HL1240 laser, which cost about $300 and is super fast. I recommend the Brother printers. My neighbor just got a Brother HL1440 from Office Depot (B&W, 14ppm). After rebates and a sales price, he is getting it for ~$220, which is a smoking deal. The carts are supposed to last for 2000 pages (I think).
 
As you may already know HP catridges cost a pretty buck. Ive checked plenty of online sites that claim to have a 30-75% discount form the original cartridges and every single time HP is not one of the manufacturers suport.
I would highly reccomend staying away from HP. Ive heard a few good stories about Epson and have seen some of the printer qualities. Depending on which they have a nice print and cheap cartridges.
I just looked at Bensbargains.net and they have a real cheap printer (espson) from Compgeeks for 14$. Dont know about the quality though.

For a different alternative frys also has some epson printers for cheap as well.
http://newspaperads.mercurynews.com/categories.asp?refid=&sesid=538642049&cid=49&pg=8
check it out
 
trdsw20 said:
As you may already know HP catridges cost a pretty buck...
There are 2 classes of laser cartridges for my Brother laser. I usually get the cheaper one, which is $50 without rebates and other nice deals from Office Depot. With rebates and such, the cost ends up around $30 or so. I typically use my laser 2-3 times a week for small jobs, and occasionally for larger ones. In the 2 years that I've had my printer, I have only had to replace the cartidge once. It's really cost effective.
 
I got a couple of things to add. First off, lasers are almost always cheaper per page and faster than ink-jets, but they are only black and white--unless you have about $800 to spend on a color laser--and I don't know how much extra consummables would be for a color laser.

As far as ink-jets go--I believe that Epson printers produce the absoule BEST quality photos of all ink-jets out there. However, their B/W text printing is somewhat fuzzy.

HP has the best B/W text printing, but doesn't do photos nearly as well as Epson.

However, to be honest, the print quality of ALL ink-jets are getting to the point where it's hard to discern any differences unless you are looking at results side by side.

But THIS is the kicker for me: Canon has the second best photo printing (next to Epson) and its text is almost as good as HP's AND Canon is going to be the ONLY manufacturer that is NOT going to be putting those stupid "status chips" into each of their cartridges. Canon's cost per page is already cheaper than everyone else's and because they have no chips, it is possible to refill their cartridges with little hassle if you need to save even more money. I was just reading where one of the printer manufacturers just successfully sued a cartridge re-manufacturer using the DMCA for putting clone chips in their remanufactured/refilled cartridges. You see, when you empty an OEM cartridge with a chip and refill it, it still wont work because the chip will tell the printer that it is still empty. With a clone chip, it can tell the printer that it is full again. It's another razor/blade analogy--sell the printer cheap and make megabucks in recurring revenue on the cartridges. So my choice would be the best Canon ink-jet I could afford.
 
Yeah, the old Canon S-400 or S-40 (forget what specific model). Is something I use sometimes and to refill the separate color cartridges you just inject the ink in with a syrine and that's it. You could just buy a large bottle of each color and have a couple years worth of ink.

The new HP 5550 has excellent print quality, noticeably better than Epson C60. The cheap Epson and HP have good print quality too, but are a lot slower.
 
I would like to add somthing.

The reason HP's cartridges are more expensive than everyone elses is you get a NEW printer head with each cartridge.
Those $20-50 printers have a built in printer head and if it gets clogged up bad enough you just throw away the printer.
 
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