What is the incentive to get replacment ink when i can buy a new printer cheaper?

[Mondo]

I got a Canon Pixma i4200 last year in the M&S sale for £35. Now to get new ink for the lot it'll be about £45 (5 inks at £9 each). Now I saw in Jessops today you can get a Canon Pixma MP210 for £60 with £20 cashback bringing it to £40 for a new printer/scanner.

Apart from saving the environment....there is no practical reasons to get new ink instead of a new printer. Is the MP210 a better photo printer? or am I nuts in thinking getting a new printer instead of new ink?

[Feek]

In my experience, the cheap printers like this are pretty crap quality. I'm still using a Canon i865 that I bought a good few years ago and the quality is far better than the current cheap printers. A guy at work was proudly showing off some pictures he'd printed on a £40 printer and they were terrible quality, the colours were weak, there was banding, they were just awful.

For a few years we've joked and said that it'll soon be cheaper to buy a replacement printer than a set of inks and it looks as though that time has arrived.

What would I do?

I don't know.

Sounds like a get-out, but I hate the way that quality is being sacrificed for price these days. I don't know your specific printer but in my experience, one gets what one pays for.

So I can't really help, I'm just ranting so I'll sharrup now!

[Mondo]

Technically the Pixma 4200 should be a better printer, at full price it's about £100 when new, I also have a £300 HP A3 printer too, but that's also out of ink and £50 to get replacements, which was part of the reason last year i got the Canon, and the i4200 also prints on cds, and it is a proper photo printer where i think the MP210 is a bog standard A4 printer and not a photo printer.

At least that is what i am guessing but I also use the i4200 to print CVs and letters at the moment mostly so it makes more sense financially to get the printer than ink as there wouldn't be much difference in printing texts.

[karbon]

the ink that ships with printers tends to be between 20 and 30% of the volume of a retail cartridge.

[Joe 90]

don't get a new printer... the ink in the box isn't full.

go to a decent place to get your ink like me

http://www.ukdvdr.co.uk/shop/Canon-C...ges-c-259.html

last time i got my new cartridges i paid under £5 inc del for like 3 black ones

[Wossi]

I've got an all in one Epson at home and the ink costs about £5/6 form Epson direct and lasts a while.

[Zirax]

Just wondering but would a photo printer be of higher quality than a colour laser printer? If so I have seen colour printers for ~120. Then by going to one of those cartridge refill places its bargain tastic

[Joe 90]

don't even bother with refills tbh... just go to ukdvdr and get a whole new cartridge for ~£1

[Zirax]

Originally Posted by Lozza

Have you seen the cost of toners for cheap laser printers?

Seems to me that you buy a cheap printer and they make the money on expensive consumables. Buy a decently priced but not cheap printer and the consumables are far more bareable

Yep they do make their money on the cartridges, but for this reason I was suggesting the cartridge refill places. Ie you open up the container, pour more toner in and away you go at a fraction of the price

[Dr. Z]

I sell printers all day - the cartridges in the box are identical to the ones you'd pull from a replacement down to the item numbers and whatnot these days. Not true for Lasers though.

If you have a printer that takes individual ink tanks its not worth the hassle to refill the tanks. They dont use the same type of ink any more(dye vs pigment) and as a result the print heads ultimately fail. I speak to more people with dead Epson machines that have refilled than those that use the standard ink. I guess the saving paid for the new machine though.

Colour laser printers rule for business graphics (on suitable paper) but are really crap for photos. I guess that the colour laser you have seen is the small Samsung unit? Quite nice but you pay for the size with the toner size (they are absolutely tiny) and the reliability isnt too hot.

The old style colour lasers were better for reliability but not for speed, noise or power consumption.

Something like an HP K550 or K5400 is the best of both worlds, the on-cost is more like a laser but with the colour print quality of an inkjet. On decent paper the text quality is almost laserlike too. 60ml ink cart (88XL) is about £29 in our place and compares favourably to a modern HP laser toner cart (12A) for yeild per £.