Tue Sep 08, 2015 2:51 am by Neilau
Bubble jet ink is one of the most expensive substances, per gram, on earth.
That’s why you can buy a printer for, well, under $50. It is the “Gillette” principle of marketing. Mr. Gillette was supposed to have said “ give the razors away and charge like a wounded bull for the blades” – paraphrasing.
The scam has a number of features. A new printer has only “sample” size cartridges. After a couple of pages you have to go out and spend about $100 for a full set of cartridges.
Every time you turn your printer on and every few minutes while it is on, it performs a head clean. This involves squirting a small amount of ink into a felt pad. So, if you leave your printer on and don’t print anything, you will be out of ink in a couple of weeks. Only turn the printer on when you are going to use it.
The cartridge will register as empty even when there are a few cc’s of ink left.
The scam continues. After a certain number of pages the printer will “brick” itself. It is possible to reset it but is a pain and most people will just by a new one. Why not, they are cheap enough? Right??
But wait, there’s more. If you have a multifunction unit, all other functions, like faxing and copying will stop if you have ONE empty ink cartridge.
One solution is to get a laser printer – if you don’t need colour. You will still get a “sample” ink cartridge but new ones are relative cheap and will last for over a thousand pages. You CAN get these cartridges refilled.
As I don’t need to print out as much as I used to, I use my 10” tablet for reading articles that I download and use a pen to hand write any correspondences. That’s suits my situation and I realize it is not suitable for many circumstances. I have one of the first lasers (about 25 years old) that I use occasionally and it still works!!!
Clark's Law (Arthur C)
For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert.