I am in the market for a new HP printer. My question is this: Why do some printers only have 2 cartriges, one has all three colors in it while other printers will have 3 seperate ones for the three colors. Which is the way to go? Am looking at a HP 4622
Check ink prices before you settle on a printer. It can make a big difference on the lifetime cost of the printer.
This. They could probably give the printers away, and still make a healthy profit on the ink. My printer uses 9 colors, and one day last month, I ran out of 6 in the same day. I’d never buy a printer that uses multi-colored ink in one cartridge, because when you run out of one color, you have to replace all the others that aren’t depleted.
Unless you need very good tone resolution (registration?), I think that 4 carts should be fine - black, magenta, yellow and cyan.
Printers like this however come in 2 flavors. They can have the print heads built into the carts or the carts will mount into a carriage that has the print head.
Although going with the the former type will be more expensive when you go to change carts, it has the advantage of giving you a fresh print head each time. I had to get rid of an old Canon printer because it had a single printhead that got irreversibly clogged and was too expensive to replace.
As long as you’re in the market though, look at color laser all-in-ones. Some, like Samsung and Brother are pretty reliable and can be had for around $200. For around $400, you will get full office functionality including multiple trays, full duplex printing, wi-fi, and so on.
Before you buy, check if there are third party refillable cartridges available for the printer you like - it cuts the cost of ink by a factor of 20 or more.
HI- I used an issue of Consumers Report mag. to choose one, they listed print/ink cost. It was all over the board in costs but, as above, for more separate ink cart. better! It was for one of my teens in college so it was <cost over >photo quality.
How can one do that without knowing the expected output from each cartridge?
You should consider a laser-printer based AIO like the HP Laserjet Pro 100. They’re rather more expensive ab initio, but the running costs are rather less and they don’t have the problem of ink cartridges drying out.
You should also be sure to set the default to grayscale rather than colour. If you print a plain text B&W document with the setting at colour, the printer will use ink from the colour cartridges which works out more expensive.
Only use the colour setting when you really want it.
I just bought an Epson XP 600 and lurve the hell out of it, after buying HP for my last two or three AIO printers.
As mentioned, definitely the most cost saving feature is to make sure you buy a model with separate cmyk cartridges. The Epson model I bought comes with a double size black, and also a separate richer black for photo prints, which is nice.
some all-in-ones won’t do anything (including scan or fax [if it has that]) if it senses needing ink. some might not print black (even if full) if any color is out. you won’t find this info in the marketing materials only though asking questions and reading forums.
laser units might be better for cost (lifetime) and quality.
The really compact or entry-level colour lasers were not any cheaper, per page, than inkjets last time I looked, despite common wisdom saying laser printers are cheaper.
I have a Samsung CLX-3175FN and I think it’s just about perfect. It’s very compact and will still print even when the toner carts are low… Carts aren’t that expensive. I think I paid between $35 and 50 each (generic), but you’d have to check that.
My only complaints are that it only has a single tray so I can’t easily print envelopes and there’s no duplex printing.
They’re much cheaper for occasional use. Inkjets have to keep the nozzles clear so every so often they go through a cleaning cycle which uses up - and thus wastes - some ink. No such problem with laser printers.
I second this - last year right after Christmas (2011) I got a Brother color laser printer with wi-fi on sale for $80 and it is fantastic. I have no idea how much it’s going to cost when we finally have to replace the toner but it’s been over a year and its still making great color and b&w prints. It’s just a printer though - it doesn’t have the scan/copy abilities of an all-in-one.
Yeah - I think small lasers probably win if there are long idle times - but for a daily-use printer, a small entry-level desktop laser printer like this one works out the same per-page cost as an inkjet - mostly due to the small capacity of the toner cartridges for such a small device.
The cheapest option is to get refillable inkjet carts or a CISS (if you can get a good one). The ink I refill the cartridges for my Epson costs about 1/25th the price of buying prefilled - that’s cheaper than a laser.
Oops - there was supposed to be a link to an example not-very-frugal small laser - this is the one I had in mind.
You can tell from the price point that this one is heading towards the same pricing model as inkjets - cheap unit, expensive consumables.
Yes. I would note that these low-cost laser printers don’t give results as good as inkjets when printing photos.
Also, be aware that the printer makers have gotten wise to the refilling thing and now have chips in their cartridges so that the carts actually have to be either reprogrammed or re-chipped.
You might have to do a little digging through tech specs, but the standard seems to be number of pages at 5% coverage. So if an inkjet cartridge is $25/300 pages, then you can compare that to the $30/500 pages one.
Of course, these numbers don’t always say much about actual coverage. My color laser says 2500 pages per cartridge at 5% coverage, which means my prints must be closer to 25% average to explain the actual printing I get out of it*. Still, you should be safe in assuming that the 2500-page cartridge gets 60% more pages than the 1500-page cartridge, even if your real page counts are more like 500 and 300.
*5% coverage is a pretty good estimate for text-only with typical margins. Photos have much higher ink density.