Yeah - the third-party refillable carts typically have a resettable chip in them now with a little button to press, or a pair of terminals that you short together with something metal.
I thought only b/w lasers were supposed to be cheaper. Also - are colour lasers any good at printing photos?
In my experience, not very. Colour lasers are great for graphics with areas of solid uniform colour, but not so good when it comes to gradients and blending.
That’s what I thought, so they’re not really an alternative, even if they’re cheaper.
Of course they’re an alternative: both lasers and inkjets have their own limitations which prospective purchasers must weigh up.
This.
For what it’s worth, we had an HP inkjet all-in-one for a while and it chewed through the ink incredibly fast. We easily spent 3-4 times the purchase price of the thing (which was 130 or so dollars) on ink during the year or two we owned it. Far better to spend 25 for a single cartridge than 60 for a triple cartridge.
Unasked-for commentary follows:
For what it’s worth, I no longer recommend HP, after our experience. We have an old HP inkjet printer (not any kind of combo) that dates to 2001 or earlier and is still running fine. The all-in-one was a problem from day one. The wireless feature worked sporadically at best (it would refuse to wake up, even when we tried setting static IP). Sometimes it would refuse to be found even when we rebooted it. The desktop software was a nightmare - it wouldn’t scan, and all efforts to get the software working failed utterly (there are a few VERY long threads at HP’s forums dealing with how to try to resolve that). The fax feature simply quit working.
After 2 years of misery, we finally bought a laser printer. Considered getting a color laser all-in-one but for the extra money, and the fact that much of what we print color isn’t required, and the much-cheaper toner for a laser, we opted to keep the trusty old 2001-era HP inkjet, and bought a Brother all-in-one.
For 400 dollars - and one new toner cartridge so far at 90ish bucks - it’s served us far better. It has its quirks: took a while to get it to scan from the machine, vs. initiating the scan from the computer, and sometimes it just decides it doesn’t want to talk to the wireless so we have to unplug / replug the router. But in general it’s been a much better choice.
And 400 was more than you might need, printer-wise (I wanted something that could scan duplex, and handle both letter and legal size). An HP-brand would probably have done fine, but I haven’t forgiven them yet :).
In my experience, HP spends the most effort making it hard to use 3rd party inks. Some Canon cartridges are just containers of ink, I’ve never seen a Canon cartridge that needed to be reset, but all HP’s cartridges do.
Heh. In general I HATE printers. I don’t print that much, and when I do, I hate wondering whether the fool printer is going to work, given that it’s been idle for, say, a couple months. I probably ought to just not have one of the damned things, and take anything I want to be printed to FedEx, but that’s just enough inconvenience that I have a printer.
Given this pattern of abuse, I found Epson inkjets especially bad:
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When you turn them on, they have to do this ridiculous dance before they’re ready.
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They are ALWAYS clogged from non-use, forcing you to fiddle around and waste ink to get the two page hardcopy that you want for some reason, before shutting it off again.
Currently I actually have a cheap HP all-in-one (J3680), and it has behaved much better with this pattern of use. As a bonus, it has a scanner which I’ve used occasionally, and, a fax, which I don’t.