How To Buy A Printer That Won’t Break The Bank
By Alexis Allen
OK I confess I’ve bought at least 10 inkjet printers
in the last 5 years and finally found one that I
really like. I’m not going to mention the brand here
but I will tell you what the must have features are
for me.
After years of refilling HP-like inkjet cartridges
where the Cyan, Magenta and Yellow tanks were all
mixed together in one unit I decided to buy a
printer that allowed you to change each color tank
individually. Although a minor change this affected
how much it cost to print a colored output page in a
huge degree. I never liked the concept of having all
of the colors in one cartridge to start with. Every
time I went to replace an empty cartridge I wondered
how much ink was left in the other two colored ink
tanks. If you didn’t notice they were always a dark
color making it impossible to tell how much was
actually in the tank.
My new unit seems to use the Yellow cartridge (black
aside) more than any other color which makes me
curse the days where I envisioned myself throwing
money in the toilet by only using half of the
colored ink in a multi color ink jet cartridge. This
backs up my initial thought process and confirmed
all suspicions.
Since I’m a small business owner and penny pinching
is always a must, I continuously test how much
mileage that I get out of a cartridge. As you well
know the little pop up window tells you when your
cartridge is running low and it seems like it’s
there to annoy you and serves no other purpose.
Being the cheapo that I am I decided to ignore the
warnings and bells and whistles that normally go off
and run a cartridge to the end of its tank.
It was tense, a sense of childlike mischief came
across my mental state. I was actually defying the
printing gods by defying their warnings of certain
doom, nefariously clicking the cancel on every
warning message. Surely something spectacular would
happen at the end of the life of this inkjet
cartridge! I had gotten about a thousand messages
warning me of the peril that was coming my way. I
envisioned scenes from nuclear war footage and big
things happening like the printer exploding or
perhaps the printer cartridge police showing up at
my house and arresting me for such gross disrespect
for printer law. Whatever happened this would be
BIG!
Well after running the cartridge for about a month I
got a harmless message that the cartridge was now
out. No big light show, no explosion no nothing,
what a disappointment! Anyway, I installed a new
cartridge, realigned the thing using the printing
utility and was up and running in about five
minutes.
The point of the whole ordeal was to figure out how
many more print jobs that I could do without
changing the ink. Thus, saving me some extra cash.
Well a month of printing is nothing to scoff at and
it ended up saving me around $5.00 by using the
cartridge down to the last drop.
Will it work on your printer? I don’t know.. But you
should check out the manual for your printer to
ensure that you won’t damage it by running the
cartridge dry.
But friend I choose to live life on the edge. =)
Alexis Allen is a self-described consumer advocate
in the Home Electronics Industry. You can check out
her latest articles on the cost of printing at
www.cheap-toner-cartridges.com
Article Source:
EzineArticles.com
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