Color printers

A little while back my aging Brother all-in-one began showing it's age by the deteriorating quality of the pages it was able to spit out for me. I've replaced the drum several times, and it seems like each successive one lasted a shorter and shorter period of time. The the error light saying "replace the drum" never goes out even with a new drum, so I guess it was trying to tell me something.

So I figured it was time to replace the thing. With that in mind, I felt that maybe a color printer would be the ticket. Just so happens that Sam's Club had a special sale on a nice HP Photosmart all-in-one, so I brought it home and set it up. In typical Hewlett-Packard fashion, the software install seemed to take forever to do, and must have loaded every possible option that the world has ever seen for a device like this. But it does work, so what the heck. Color prints look gorgeous, and regular printed pages look excellent.

But one little snag that I discovered.... Every year I have to make up ID and name labels to go on the deli cups for the baby corn snakes I sell. I use the clear plastic labels for this, and the ones for the inkjet style printers have a SERIOUS flaw, which I discovered after accidentally picking up a pack of INK JET labels instead of LASER labels. The coating on the plastic dissolves in water. And easily so. A wet thumb on the label and the coating comes RIGHT OFF! So if you get that label wet, not only will that coating come off, but so will the printing on it. And quite honestly, when cleaning the deli cups and maintaining the babies in them, it is VERY common to have your hands wet, and therefor run the risk of losing the info on those labels. BTW, those labels are listed as envelope return labels. Why in the world anyone would use a label like that where getting it wet would LOSE the address on it is beyond me....

So just for that one task I need done every year, I needed another printing solution. I was prepared to take the HP back and get a laser printer, but all of the all-in-ones I looked at (in color anyway) were HUGE and HEAVY. Far too big and bulky for the only place I have allocated for it in my den. So I decided on a compromise. I saw a couple of Okidata color printers (they aren't exactly "lasers" as they use some sort of LED or such along with a fuser to imprint the image on the paper), that demonstated excellent print quality and impressive specs on speed of printing. The smaller model (C3400n) would fit nicely on the desk in my den, and I could keep the much smaller HP as well for everything BUT that label printing I needed. Even with both of them, the price was actually cheaper than a color laser all-in-one anyway.

So over the last week or three, I do printouts from the internet and such, and now they come out in color.. And it dawned on me that probably pretty shortly, color printers will completely replace monochrome printers, much as color monitors has crushed the monochromes. Heck, I think you would even have a tough time FINDING a monochrome flat screen display these days, much less a MONITOR. So certainly printers appear to be going the same route......

But wait a minute... There is a major fly (more like a Boeing 707) in the ointment here.

I decided I should get extra toner cartridges for the Okidata printer, since I would hate to run out 3am in the morning sometime, and began to price them online. Now the Okidata takes four (4) cartridges. Black, cyan, magenta, and yellow. For the color cartridges (2000 sheet) we're talking roughly $80 per cartridge, with the black one weighing in slightly cheaper at $50. So when it comes time to replace all those cartridges, it will cost me $290.

Well hold the phone here! The entire printer ITSELF (admittedly with smaller capacity toner cartridges in it) only cost me $300 with rebates and such! But wait, there's more! After 15,000 pages, I will need to replace the drums. Yes, I said drumS Each toner cartridge has it's own drum which are roughly $50 each. So upon the time that I need to replace ALL toner cartridges and ALL drums, that event will wind up costing me $490! For a $300 printer? Well honestly, it would be MUCH cheaper to just toss the printer in the trashcan and buy a new one.

So yeah, that little wrinkle could certainly put a damper on a lot of people making the jump to the color printout world, I guess. I sure made me stop and pause for a while.... But I came up with a solution, I think. When I bought the printer, I bought a three year replacement guarantee with it. So in three years or 15,000 copies, whichever comes first, I will simply take the printer back to the store for a replacement. The warranty DOES say it warrants against wear and tear, so this would certainly fall within that scope of coverage.

But all in all, you do have to wonder about the pricing of those consumables for the printers. Certainly it is easy to figure out how the printer manufacturers really intend to make their money. Sell the printers dirt cheap, and then sock it to them with the supplies..... Well yeah, a $300 COLOR LASER printer DOES sound REAL cheap, doesn't it? Gotcha!!

So yes, color printing has gotten a lot cheaper and much more affordable. At the beginning, anyway............

LOL. Rich, that has been the MO of printer maufacturers forever. It's more obvious in color, but it's always been the case. Look at the cost of replacing ink for your Photosmart compared to cost of the unit. If you're doing a fair bit of printing you will easily go through more in ink than the unit cost. For many of the inkjets that print in color that's especially true if they don't have a separate B/W mode with separate cartridges.

I have an older Xerox color laser. By older I mean about three years. It is heavy and slow compared to what's out there now, but it does the job. It's getting near drum replacement time so I am planning to purchase a newer model (not necessarily Xerox) when the toner on hand runs out. It won't cost much more than toner would.

At G7 Productivity they give you a small color inkjet free with a $50 purchase but you have to buy ink for it.