You may be able to buy a surprisingly affordable printer at your local office supply store, but don’t start celebrating just yet. The printer companies make their biggest bucks on ink.

Over the life of your printer, you’ll probably pay more than 500% of the total price of the printer itself on ink refill cartridges. At $30, a 42ml cartridge of black printer ink comes out to 71 cents per ml. On the other hand, the Red Cross charges $200 for 500 ml of blood, which comes out to about 40 cents per ml. (Source)

A tip o’ the hat to Mike, our weekends sales associate, for passing this along.

With the arrival of higher temperatures comes a potential issue for those who buy ink cartridges and leave them in their cars while they continue shopping or stop for a bite to eat on the way home.

On a day when the temperature outside is 86 degrees, the temperature inside a car can quickly reach 135 or even 150 degrees! When ink is heated it expands. If you let an ink cartridge heat up to the point the ink expands you’ll get home to find that you have a sealed plastic bag full of loose ink with a cartridge floating around in it.

To prevent this, after purchase keep the cartridge in as cool and shady place as possible. The best possible situation would be to wait until you’re all done with your other stops and buy the cartridge when you’re ready to head home. That minimizes the amount of time the cartridge is subjected to the heat.

So remember, a hot car is no place for a pet, a child or a freshly filled ink cartridge.

(Heat does not affect laser cartridges the same way. Toner is a powder and not subject to expansion from heat. We still advise, though, that all cartridges be kept in the dark and as cool as possible until you’re ready to install them in your printer.)

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We cannot yet get the XL versions of these.

Our pricing is:

HP 920 black $12.99

HP 920 color $7.99 each

HP 564 black $8.99 (this is the slim black cartridge next to the colors in the image)

HP 564 color $7.99 each

Pricing for refilled cartridges in this series is:

• PG-210 blk  $11.99
• CL-211 color  $14.99
• PG-210XL  $14.99
• CL-211XL  $18.99

At present we have a couple of cores on-hand that we were able to resuscitate, but most of those we had collected have sat empty too long for us to reuse. We would encourage you to bring in your freshly emptied cartridges for us to refill. You may have to wait 10-15 minutes but you’re more likely to get a cartridge that works. Eventually we’ll build up a backstock of these and have them available for purchase in quantity.

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Honestly, we haven’t had an opinion to offer. We don’t refill Kodak cartridges due to their already low price and none of our customers own a Kodak printer or we could ask them for their impressions.

In the April edition of PCWorld magazine there is an article concerning challenges being made by other printer manufacturers to Kodak’s claims that consumers can “save on average $110 per year on ink” with a Kodak printer.

According to HP and an independent consulting firm, consumers would have to print four pages per day to save that much money with a Kodak printer–far more than most home users actually do. Last year HP lodged a grievance against the Kodak ads. In December, the Federal Trade Commission ruled that Kodak could continue the advertising campaign if it slightly changed the wording. As a result, Kodak’s revised ad copy now reads: “Save on average $110 per year on ink based on just four pages per day.”

Even with the tweaked text, however, Kodak’s claims are still beguiling to consumers–according to HP, at least. “The average user in the United States prints about half of what Kodak is using as the basis for their cost-savings claim,” says Andy Binder, HP Inkjet & Web Solutions marketing director.

According to Lyra senior analyst Andrew Lippman, Kodak’s cost-savings claims are far-fetched.

In fact, few consumers would ever achieve the promised cost savings. “You have to be printing 1500 pages per year–well above average for most people–to get the $110 savings that Kodak claims,” Lippman says.

Kodak points out that its revised ads are essentially the same these days, albeit with a minor rewrite. “It’s not anything different than consumers have always heard for the last three years,” says Paula Balik, worldwide communications line manager for Kodak inkjets. The only FTC-mandated change that Kodak had to make, Balik says, was to move “four pages per day,” previously buried in the ads’ footnotes, closer to the headline.

PCWorld seems to dispute Kodak’s claims as well.

According to Senior Editor Melissa Riofrio, who oversees printer testing for PCWorld, Kodak’s inks may be cheaper than those of competitors, but the print quality on plain paper is not as good. On photo paper, the quality is excellent, but the money you save on ink is eaten up by the cost of photo paper.

As for the printers themselves, HP was at the bottom of the list among printer makers in our 2010 Reliability and Service survey; Kodak finished slightly higher. We asked our readers, among other questions, whether their printer had problems upon arrival, how satisfied they were overall with the device’s reliability, and how well the company solved any problems that cropped up. Kodak printer owners said that they had good experiences with the company’s tech support, but they gave the printers poor marks for reliability. HP received five below-average ratings–two in reliability, three in service categories.

The portion of the article that caught my eye though is the description of a problem we have highlighted many times, the high cost of OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) ink cartridges.

Perhaps Kodak’s biggest offense, at least from its competitors’ perspective, is its willingness to call attention to the high cost of printer ink, the industry’s cash cow. “[Printer vendors] charge quite a bit for the ink, and discount the printer hardware,” says Lippman.

The practice, in fact, has led to outrageous situations in which consumers could save money by buying a new printer rather than replacement ink for their current model. Last December, PCWorld contributor Ian Paul spotted a Deskjet D1660 inkjet model for just $30 on HP’s shopping site. The printer came bundled with a black cartridge and a tricolor cartridge offering 200 and 150 pages of output, respectively. In contrast, the replacement-ink pack, which promised a slightly higher yield (165 pages) for the color cartridge, cost $32–two bucks more than the printer itself.

The conclusion of the article relates how Kodak is following the same practice as every other printer manufacturer, raising cartridge prices while at the same time reducing the volume of ink in the cartridge.

Since entering the consumer printer market in 2007, Kodak has undercut the competition on ink costs. The company’s advantage may be shrinking, however, as it recently raised the prices for its new line of cartridges.

But the change isn’t all that obvious to consumers. The company’s new 10B black cartridge, for instance, costs the same as its predecessor ($10) yet contains less ink. And the new 10C cartridge is $3 more than the $15 tank it replaces, but one Kodak ad implies that consumers are getting a better deal than before: “Now prints 10% more pages,” the text reads. The ugly truth? “The 10C color cartridge has a 9 percent higher cost per page, and the 10B black cartridge has a 25 percent higher cost per page” than the cartridges they replace, Lyra’s Lippman says.

Even so, despite the cost increases on the new cartridges, Kodak remains the low-price leader. “There’s no debate that Kodak’s ink is cheaper on average,” Lippman adds. “The debate is over how much you can potentially save.”

(Source-PCWorld)

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InkCartridges

Cartridge World San Diego is now able to refill and re-chip the HP 80 wide format ink cartridges.

There are three color cartridges and one black cartridge, each rated at a yield of 4,400 pages. These retail new for $154 at Staples. Buy them from Cartridge World and  save $60 on each cartridge. Our price for the HP 80 will be $93.99 per cartridge.

We use only uses premium inks developed by Cartridge World for each specific printer model. Our chips are provided by trusted vendors. Every Cartridge World refilled and remanufactured cartridge is fully guaranteed to perform to your satisfaction.

Since this is the first time we’ve been able to refill these HP 80s, we do not have a backstock of empty cartridges. If you have an HP wide format printer and need HP 80 cartridges refilled, please bring your empty cartridges with you. We don’t have any to do up ahead of time, and since this is a rarely requested cartridge, we most likely will not keep refilled cartridges on-hand.

Different types of inkjet printers form their droplets of ink in different ways. There are two main inkjet technologies currently used by printer manufacturers:

• Thermal bubble – Used by manufacturers such as Canon and Hewlett Packard, this method is commonly referred to as bubble jet. In a thermal inkjet printer, tiny resistors create heat, and this heat vaporizes ink to create a bubble. As the bubble expands, some of the ink is pushed out of a nozzle onto the paper. When the bubble “pops” (collapses), a vacuum is created. This pulls more ink into the print head from the cartridge. A typical bubble jet print head has 300 or 600 tiny nozzles, and all of them can fire a droplet simultaneously.
• Piezoelectric – Patented by Epson, this technology uses piezo crystals. A crystal is located at the back of the ink reservoir of each nozzle.

  

  Image via Wikipedia

  The crystal receives a tiny electric charge that causes it to vibrate. When the crystal vibrates inward, it forces a tiny amount of ink out of the nozzle. When it vibrates out, it pulls some more ink into the reservoir to replace the ink sprayed out.(Source-HowStuffWorks)

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Both Dell and Lexmark offer laser and inkjet printers that take cartridges marked “Return Program”. Other manufacturers may soon follow in their footsteps.

What does this mean to you? What is this “Return Program” anyway?

The cartridge return program allows you to buy standard fill cartridges at a reduced price with the provision you return the cartridges to the printer manufacturer when they’re empty. You are usually supplied a postage-free envelope to return the cartridges in.

When you purchase these cartridges, similar to buying software with its Terms of Agreement, you are entering into a legally binding agreement with the developer/manufacturer. Because of this, our lawyers have advised us not to refill “Return Program” cartridges.

There are, however, alternatives. The manufacturers offer identical non-return program cartridges, usually designated with an “A” after the cartridge number (e.g. Lexmark 15 return program & 15a non-return program), that we can legally refill. Since Lexmark is selling their new printers without ink cartridges included, be sure you’re buying the “A” version of the cartridge and not the Return Program version. Then, when the ink in those is exhausted, we’ll be able to refill them for you at a savings of up to 50%.

It all depends on what sort of printing you do the most. Let’s break it down this way:

Inkjet printer

Epson Stylus Pro 4800

Pro…

• Best for printing photographs
• Best for printing CD/DVD labels on disks
• Most affordable way to print color for the average home office/small office (SOHO) and home user
• Less expensive printers on the market, often free with a new computer
• Affordable multi-function printers (all-in-one printers)

Con…

• Most expensive cost-per-page printing solution
• Must be used at least every 2 weeks to prevent printhead drying
• Inkjet printers are not designed to be repaired
• Leaking ink can permanently stain many materials

Laserjet printer

Pro…

• Lower cost-per-page than inkjets
• Doesn’t have to be used frequently to avoid printhead drying (no printhead!)
• Average 2000 pages per cartridge as opposed to less than 200 for an inkjet cartridge
• Generally faster printing speed, less setup time
• Usually has drivers for Windows, Mac and Linux

Con…

Samsung ML-1710

• Higher initial cost for printer and supplies
• Color laser printers are generally still too expensive for the average SOHO user
• Personal laser printers rarely offer duplexing or other advanced features
• All-in-one laser printers are still quite expensive

Just as when you consider buying a new computer or even a new car, how you intend to use it should be your primary consideration. If you think you might someday want to print photos or holiday cards, you need an inkjet printer. If all you plan to do is print out forms or receipts, consider a laserjet. If you need an all-in-one machine (printer, copier, fax and scanner) you should buy an inkjet printer.