Jun 22
Jun 03
We will be adjusting our store hours in an effort to better serve our customers. The new hours are:
Monday - Friday 9am-6pm
Saturday 10am-5pm
The new hours will take effect this Saturday, June 7th.
Apr 24
What is a reuse group?
It’s not a charity or a business: It’s an idea that perfectly good used stuff deserves a home other than the landfill. Instead of throwing out things like furniture, dishes, bikes, and electronics, people in a reuse group give these items away for free to other people in their community who can use them. Find a local reuse group.
Apr 21
Tomorrow, April 22nd, is Earth Day. In celebration, the San Diego PC Clubs are hosting an electronics recycling drive. Take any unwanted electronics (TVs, computers, printers, etc.) to your local store between 10 a.m. and 7 p.m. You can read more about it here.
Apr 01
You can now support our local schools whenever you make a purchase at Cartridge World San Diego.
We will donate 5% of your purchase to the San Diego school of your choice. The next time you make a purchase, make sure we register you as a customer then let us know which school you’d like to support. Every month a check will be sent to them. We’ll be tracking the donations in the store.
Mar 14
We are making a few changes in the store.
In case you haven’t come by lately, we’re changing the space allocations in the front part of our store. We’ve moved the counter forward, which means you don’t have to walk 30 feet for service and we have a whole lot more room to work in. Our redesign isn’t complete yet, but all the work ahead is on our side of the counter, so you shouldn’t be inconvenienced by that at all.
The other big change is our switch over to a new and better POS (point of sale) register system. This is a major change for us, the software on this system is completely different from our old, Windows 98 based system. We face a steep learning curve, and while we’ve made every effort to educate ourselves on this new system before implementing it, we couldn’t anticipate every possible glitch. As a result we’re learning on the job.
After a week or so we all should be much more proficient with the new register than we are right now. We do apologize for any inconvenience or delay we might cause you as we figure out our new setup. In the end we’ll be able to provide more services to you with this system than we were able to before.
For instance, if you’d like to be included on the mailing list for our monthly newsletter just let us know via email or the next time you stop by the store. We can create a customer profile that includes your email address. Be assured, our customer information goes no further than our own store. We do not share customer information with anyone, not a third party or even Cartridge World USA. It resides solely on our own hard drive. I have been involved with internet security for several years, and I would not assure you of your information’s security if we could not provide it.
I think you’ll enjoy our newsletter. Every month I share changes at CWSanDiego, new cartridges we can fill, I try to find new and interesting stories about printers and printing. Frequently I include tips and tricks you can use to make your home or office printing more economical and efficient and some months you’ll find a coupon for additional savings. Best of all, each issue offers the option to opt-out of future deliveries. We will never spam those who prefer to no longer receive our newsletter.
We agreed on a new look for this website as well. As long as we’re upgrading, let’s do it right. Let us know what you think. Constructive feedback is always welcome.
Feb 06
GreenPrint’s patent-pending software is a simple idea, but it solves a problem nearly everyone can relate to: The ubiquitous wasted page. This is the page with just a URL, banner ad, legal disclaimer, etc. These wasted pages occur many times a day littering homes and offices around the world and wasting money, trees, and time.
After installation you will notice that you have a new printer called GreenPrint, this will automatically become the default printer. To use GreenPrint simply print the document as usual using GreenPrint as your printer. If for any reason you want to bypass the GreenPrint filter, and print directly to the printer, you can simply select your desired printer in the application from which you are printing.
You can create a PDF file of the document simply by clicking on the PDF button on the GreenPrint Toolbar.
GreenPrint requires the Microsoft .NET 2.0 Framework, which can be downloaded from Microsoft.
The average user will save about $90 a year in paper and ink. Save paper, save ink, save a whole lot more.
In an effort to end wasteful printing worldwide, GreenPrint World is available at no cost to home users around the globe. With widespread use we will save over 100 million trees and reduce greenhouse gasses by over 300 million tons.
You can upgrade to the faster, advertising- free GreenPrint Home Premium for only $35.00.
Learn more and download the free version of this utility here.
Oct 26
The fax feature in my HP Officejet 7410 works with the phone jack
I initially plugged it into, but when I moved the printer to a
different phone jack, it kept insisting the phone was off-hook. My
temporary solution was to move the Officejet back to the original
position, but I’d rather have it in the second location. Do you have
any idea what the problem might be at the second jack and how to fix it?
Charles Nilsson
The most likely explanation is that you’re using a standard
telephone cable. The solution is to replace it with the one HP
provided, or get a new one with the right cabling. Not so incidentally,
the same issue can crop up with other AIOs designed for worldwide use,
and it’s caused by having to accommodate different phone systems.
The RJ-11 connector has six pins. In standard phone cables, the
middle four-pins 2, 3, 4, and 5-are connected, with 3 on one side
connected to 4 on the other, and 2 on one side connected to 5 on the
other. In the U.S., a jack wired for one phone line will use pins 3 and
4. If there’s a second line, it will use pins 2 and 5. The phone cable
that comes with the 7410 for use in the U.S. uses only pins 3 and 4 on
both sides. To accommodate European phone systems, the fax circuit
inside the AIO needs to connect pins 3 and 4 to pins 2 and 5. If you
use a standard four-wire cable on a two-line jack in the U.S., this
shorts the phone lines and creates problems. The fix is to use a cable
that connects only pins 3 and 4.
(More tips from PC Magazine)
Jul 19
The price tag on any given printer really tells only half the story. Many times the cheapest printer for sale isn’t necessarily the cheapest printer to own. And what’s the most affordable printer for you in particular? Depending on how many pages you print and how much it costs to print each page, a high-priced printer with expensive cartridges could be a lot cheaper to own in the long run than a less-expensive printer with low-cost cartridges. Coming up with that long-run cost for comparison isn’t always easy, but that is exactly what we did recently in PC Magazine Labs with some of the leading printers on the market. And the results were surprising.
Before you can calculate the real cost of a printer, you need to know the cost per page. To get it, you need two numbers for each cartridge: the yield (how many pages the cartridge can print) and the price. But until recently, there’s been no good way to find out the yield.
Printer manufacturers will tell you the yield they’ve found and, usually, the estimated cost per page. But printing different images, manipulating driver settings, or changing how you determine that a cartridge has reached the end of its life can all alter the yield you come up with. Without knowing if different manufacturers’ tests are comparable, you have to take the claims with a proverbial grain of salt.
What’s been sorely needed is a standard for yield testing. The good news is that there finally is one-for documents at least. (The standard for photos is still under construction.)
In theory, yield claims based on the ISO/IEC standard should be fully comparable, regardless of the manufacturer. But there’s always the possibility that different manufacturers have come up with different interpretations for how to run the tests, particularly with such a newly minted standard.
It’s easy to read more into the yield numbers determined by the ISO/IEC standard than they actually mean. The first thing you need to know is that they don’t represent a guaranteed number of pages you’ll get from every individual cartridge-not even if you’re printing only the set of pages defined by the standard. Basically, the stated yield is a statistical prediction that if you pick a cartridge at random and follow the procedures in the ISO/IEC standard, you’ll get at least that number of pages more than 90 percent of the time.
To calculate the yield for what the ISO/IEC standard calls a primary cartridge-black or tricolor, for example-you start with the individual results from a minimum of nine cartridges. More precisely, you need results from a minimum of three sets of three cartridges tested on each of three printers, to take variations among both individual printers and cartridges into account. (The standard defines a different approach for what it calls supplementary cartridges, such as light cyan or light magenta, but for our purposes that’s an unnecessary complication.)
You have to run the results through basic statistical formulas to determine what’s called the “90 percent lower confidence bound.” That number gets reported as the yield.
Knowing the cost per page for the printers you’re considering lets you compare running costs, but it doesn’t tell you which printer will be less expensive over its lifetime. For that, you have to calculate the total cost of printing, which means you have to make predictions about how much you’ll print and how long you’ll own the printer. If you know how much you print now, it shouldn’t be hard to make reasonably accurate predictions, based on how many monochrome pages and how many color pages you currently print per month.
