OT question re printer ink

Andy, to tell the truth, I've only used them for the past year or so.

I'm not using archival quality paper, so archival quality ink probably doesn't have much impact. In that year I have not noticed any fading soever but it's not as if I have been doing "A" - "B" tests. Most stuff I print either hits the mailbox right away or, if for future reference, gets tossed in a 3-ring binder.

If I think I'll need to preserve a photo, I scan it and write it to CD.

Bill

This is an interesting thread.

Everyone has to make their own decision about refilling. I have been refilling my printer ink cartrages since 1992. I was printing a church newsletter that went into 3 churches and out to a mailing list.

I chose a HP 500 for my printer because the cartrages could be refilled. that printer used a black cartrage, and if you wanted color then you substituted a color cartrage in place of the black. I refilled only the black.

I did not buy refill kits, for there was virtually none at that time, but rather I found a place where I could buy the ink in bulk, with the smallest container being 4.5 oz of ink, then cam 18 oz and gal size. those same size bottles of ink is still being sold by them today. A very good quality ink, which has only been improved over the years. I started with a small bottle and quickly graduated to the gal of ink size.

The man who owns and operates that company will bend over backwards to help you with any print refill problems, giving full instructions for how to refill any make of ink cartrage. He will take the time to talk to you, and not just taking an order. He also provides any thing needed at a price which is so much lower than any refill kit on the market today.

My first HP 500, I could refill the cartrage between 15 to 30 times before failure of the cartrage which has the print head built into every cartrage. I do not remember how many times that I refilled, but I was using a gal of ink every 8 to 12 months. I calculated that in the first 5 years of my refilling, that I saved in excess of $55,000 in print cartrage cost. I wore out three of those printers.

Then I bought three of newer HP printer which had the black and color cartrage side by side, but it was a piece of junk. Most of the color cartrages would not last long enough to even use up the ink in it, before there was a print head failure. And the black cartrages, I could at the best get 2-3 refills before a print head failure. That cost so much money for me that I junked them and bought the Canon S600 printers, two of them, which had 4 cartrages, a black and three colors, all held liquid ink, and those cartrages were each refilled several hundred times without having any failure. The printers themselves failed the print head first, as the print head was seperate from the ink cartrage. Many days I printed enough to refill the cartrages ever couple of hours. I wore those printers out and upgraded to new printers. My refill cost was less than one cent a refill at that time.

Now I have the Canon IP4200. This printer does have a memory of the cartrages, and knows when you put in a refilled cartrage, then after some dire warning of how you will now probably blow up the world or something like that, will then allow you to continue printing forever with refilled cartrages. It just will, for a punishment, stop telling you when an ink cartrage is going empty, so you have to look from time to time. Now I have not counted how many times that I have refilled the cartrages for these printers, but I know that it is aproaching close to 100 at this time with out a failure. Now my refill cost is higher because I buy smaller quanities of ink, but still is only a couple of cents per black cartrage and the color cartrages use less ink so each refill there cost less.

I have three of these printers that I feed. One is for my printing, one is for my wife's printing, and one is a new in the box backup which I bought for the ink cartrages that came with it. that gives me a spare set of ink cartrages that I can just swap out when in the middle of a print job.

Note that it was cheaper to buy a new complete printer on Ebay than it was to buy even one conplete set of ink cartrages for it. And that also gives me a spare print head for the price, and a new printer if one of ours fails for any reason.

If you are really thinking of the possibility of refilling your ink cartrages, regardless of brand, then try giving a call to

V-Tech Inc. (215) 362 - 3300 or write to snipped-for-privacy@comcast.net

With your questions. Then you can decide if you want to refill or not.

And yes!! not all inks are the same, and not all inks will work in all brands of cartrages. That has always been the problem with those refill kits being sold in the stores, they use only one type of ink, and many times it clogs up your print head because it is the wrong ink for your printer. And even between the same brand of printers, there are different inks, where the ink will work in one model but not in another model of the same printer make. That is why you need to talk to an expert in inks who can supply you with the correct ink that will work in your printer.

Have Fun Zap

if you are printing as much as you describe, you would save $$ using a laser printer - faster, cheaper, and better - particularly when 20 ppm laser printers cost $100 or less used. Why have you elected to stay with ink jets?

Amen. If somebody is buying black inkjet ink by the gallon they're using the wrong tool for the job.

On Feb 1, 11:39 pm, "William Noble" wrote:

You ask why? This is the reason why.

I ask you to keep in mind that the cost of a toner cartage is Not the only cost of printing. From time to time you will also have to replace the Drum, so the cost of the drum has to be calculated into the actual cost of printing a page. So a used laser printer can be expected to need the Drum replaced now, not later. That is one reason they get sold. Those drums are expensive. The other reason they are sold is because they are causing more troubles for the owner than he wants, so he buys a new one and passes on to you all of his troubles.

However, if you are only printing a hundred pages a year, go for it. But if you are going 5,000 pages a year or more, every penny saved adds up to dollars in your pocket.

And I offer for your consideration the following answer which I gave to another man not long ago who was comparing cost against cost. You would be surprised at how many commercial printing companies are using inkjet printers. Not with replaceable ink cartridges, but with continuous ink feed to the special modified cartages. This keeps their printers running continuous for 6 to 8 hours a day. They never run out of ink in the middle of a print job.

Besides the black printing, many pages also require some color printing on the page also. And when you start buying color toner cartages, you had better have lots of money to spend.

And I doubt seriously if you will come anywhere near the number of pages printed per toner cartage as they advertise. See below as for why. ______________________

Yes I see that the cost of Laser Toner has come down a whole lot since I had a Laser printer. That is for the Black only. The color toner is still way up there. I looked up some printers and toner cartages in the Office Depot catalog.

I will tell you a little secret though, about their claims of how many pages that you can print with one of their toner cartages. Their count is based upon what they call a standard business letter, which has very little actual witting on it. The average printing you see on a normal page letter that you or I would write as a letter to someone has considerably more letters and words printed on it than that "Standard" page. So you will not get anything near what they claim that they do.

I give you the following as examples. The first is from Hewlett- Packard, but look out for what they are saying. They are indicating that you can completely fill a page with printing which IS NOT a standard business page. On the one hand they tell you that their toner cartages will print X number of Standard Business pages per cartage. Period.

The following was given in answer to some school district where the cost of printing school pages, per page, was high. Whoever gave this answer figured it just as you, and many others do. However the amount of the page being printed in a Standard Business letter comes no where near to what is claimed here. See below for two examples of what a standard Business letter consist of, and compare it to the claim of virtually filling in a solid block of text on a page of being 6.5 inches across by 9 inches high. ___________________

Toner Usage (What is said here is False, a standard business letter is not what is claimed here. - Jack)

The Hewlett-Packard LaserJet 4000TN is a laser printer. Instead of the typical home printer which sprays fine ink dots on the paper, the

4000TN uses a laser and the same electrostatic principles as photocopiers. The 4000TN uses the HP model number C8061X toner cartridge. This cartridge is a professional-volume cartridge, which retails for $127.00 and has a page yield of 10,000. The ten thousand- page figure is based on each page consisting of a standard business letter.

Hence, the average toner cost per page is $127 divided by ten thousand. This results in a figure of 1.27 cents per page. This result is further substantiated by the published results of Hewlett-Packard's own calculations on per page printing costs. A standard business letter from which the aforementioned ten-thousand page figure is derived, consists of 56 lines at the nominal Times New Roman font, with the font size being 10 point. With standard one-inch margins, this equates to 6.5 inches across for most lines. Thus, a standard business letter can be defined as approximately 364 inches of horizontal text. Measurement of the source review template paper shows it to have 34.625 inches of horizontal text. The lower text amount causes the source review template paper to cost 1.27*34.625/364, or

0.1208 cents per page. Thusly, thirty source review templates consume only 3.624 cents worth of toner cartridge.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

And from Xerox, Now here is what a standard Business letter consist of. the part printed is only the black text. Note how little black is laid down on the paper compared to all the white space. The color at the side and the top line, is Pre printed on a printing press, consider that area as part of the white unprinted area.. You see that this comes no where near what is claimed above.

(picture of page would have been printed here, but cannot be shown in this group.)

And the following is also shown, and is being taught as being a typical standard business letter. Again note the small area actually covered with the black ink as compared to the total white space on the page. The center block in a red box is the actual area where text will go, the margins, and the total of the black box is the whole sheet.

The standard Business letter to which all the printer manufactures refers is as you see in the letter above and in this letter. So double the amount of text and use twice the amount of ink, resulting in printing only 1/2 of the claimed number of pages.

Format guidelines

Your letter should follow a standard business letter format, such as the following. Use white or ivory stationery, and sign your letter in blue or black ink.

Your Return Address Community, Province Postal Code

Date

Employer's Name Position Title Company Name Street Address or Box Number Community, Province Postal Code

Dear Ms. (or Mr.) Employer's Name: (If you are unable to get a contact name, the salutation line may be left out)

Tell the reader which job you are interested in and why. Let the reader know that you are familiar with the company and its operations, but get right to the point.

Point out any key experience (including volunteer or school experience) that qualifies you for the position. Keep your paragraphs short.

State that a resumé or application form is enclosed, request an interview and/or specify a date when you will call to follow up.

Sincerely,

(Sign your name)

Your Name

Encl.

On my ink cartages which they claimed would do 2000 pages, I actually got , by counting every page printed, about 800 pages printed till the cartage was empty. Out of ink. That was for my newsletter which printed considerably more per page than the standard business letter they based it upon. You see, the more that you print on a page, the more surface that you actually cover on the sheet of paper, the more ink that you will use. Obvious? Not really, for most never really get into it, or give it any thought. How heavy or dark you make your printing makes a big difference also. Which font you use makes a difference also, many times greatly. A courier font will use much less ink than will something like this Times New Times Roman font.

(This next paragraph was originally printed in Courier style to show the difference. Since it cannot be shown here, take this paragraph to your word processor and convert it to Courier style text to see the difference.)

This is Courier style text, note that the letters are very much thinner and so uses less actual ink, or toner, the letters are also spread out more which again results in less ink being used on a page.

Well, I do not count pages any more. And I do not think that you need to count pages printed by your toner cartage either. But what I would suggest is that depending on what you are printing, that you figure only being able to print from 1000 to 1200 pages per toner cartage which claims 3600 pages. If you get more than that, then so much the better. As it is, at those prices quoted by you, you will not have any problem at all. And refilling your own is the way to go. Most people are not into that. If you do much printing, then the cost savings is well worth it.

I will suggest though, that if you do decide to buy yourself a color Laser printer, that you consider this, I saw color laser printers as low as $400 with a low dot per inch print pattern, and color toner cartages (new) at about $116 each. So I would suggest that if you go that route, that the first time that you need another color toner cartage, and knowing that all the other toner cartages would also be about to run out, that you think of buying another printer of the same make and type instead. The reasoning goes like this, If you buy the printer with toner cartages for around $400 and a complete set of toner Cartages, black and color, cost almost that price, that you are better off to buy an entire new printer and keep the old toner cartages to be refilled and swapped out the next time. (There is nothing like running out of ink in the middle of a print job. ) I did that with both my laser printer and our ink jet printers, Right after buying two new printers, one for me and one for my wife, It was cheaper to buy another complete printer than it was to buy another set of ink cartages to aid in refilling, giving spares to pop in when needed, (who wants to refill anything when in your good clothes?) in fact it was cheaper to buy the entire package than it was to replace the ink cartages. For that gave me an entirely new printer in the box, stored away for the day when my printer fails, and a new head waiting for the failure of one of mine. That part alone is worth more than half the price of the printer if I had to replace it. In your case the new printer of the same model would also give you a new drum.

Choose the printer that you like. Refilling is not for everyone. And the cost of printing is usually much higher per page than you think it is. That is why print shops charge so much per page. Their profit per page is not as high as you may think it is.

Zap

On most laser printers the drum is in the cartridge and when you replace the cartridge you replace the drum.

Yep, which is why most businesses use laser printers for any job than doesn't require an inkjet.

Not surprised at all. But I would be very surprised if very many of them were using them for production runs of a single document in black or spot color, which is the use that you described.

About ten percent more than for black, if that, on most color lasers. And the usage is generally lower.

Depends on what you're printing.

IF you are refilling your own ink jet cartriges, wouldn't it be sensible to compare the price of laser priners using refilled cartriges? It looks like you have an anlysis carefully tuned to support the conclusion you want - but you know what? It doesn't matter, this is not my problem, I was just curious and you have answered the question - thanks.

now back to wood turning

You ask why? This is the reason why.

SNIP-------------

New business model? Gillette was doing this with their razors about 1900.