Printers using ink cartridges take your money in more ways than one. Some manufacturers even separate their ink into regular black, and photograph black. But even if you print in greyscale, it will use your color inks and your photograph black to print in black in white. Also ink cartridges are chipped to read empty even when their contents still contain ~20% of their ink. After which the printer will refuse to print.
Do yourselves the favor of investing in laser now. Toner will get you more pages per dollar in the long run, hands down.
and if i get rejected I'm burning the paper and I'm burning the ashes again
Though they are more expensive up front, you will save a lot of money in the long run on ink. Laser toner can handle 2500-4000 pages before you need to replace it (around $0.02 per page), while inkjet cartridges can print only 200-400 pages before needing to be replaced ($0.11-$0.22 per page). That’s between 5x and 10x the cost per page in ink.
Why YSK: There are some threads on reddit recently about inkjet printer cartridges and how they are very expensive. The below methods will help save cost of printing and owning an inkjet printer.
There are 2 methods I know of, both require buying ink bottles for your respective cartridge model. For HP, You can buy official HP ink (GT52 for colors, GT53XL for b/w) which are quite affordable.
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The simple method involves using a syringe and injecting the cartridge with ink in the right hole, dabbing out the excess and let it sit for about 10 minutes.
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The slightly more difficult one is by using something called as Ciss kit. This is like an IV infusion with saline bottle. The kit comes with inktanks with tubes that you need to plug into the cartridge.
You can google both approaches and there are YouTube videos as well.
You need to know that a standard cartridge will not last for more than ~1000 pages. You cannot indefinitely use a single cartridge, so with either method, you will need to buy new cartridge after a limit.
Some printer models apparently won't allow you to reuse a cartridge if it detects to be empty. So re-fill before it's fully empty.
You may need to buy an additional tool called a cartridge suction tool. It's a small plastic contraption with a a slightly large syringe and is used to remove any air gaps and also helps in unblocking cartridges that were not used in a while.
While laser printers may seem like a nobrainer, they are bit more expensive. A basic hp inkjet printer is quite cheap in comparison and can print in color. With a bit of elbow grease, an inkjet printer can be very affordable.
Hope this helps!
I want to make cool designs on T shirts for personal use, not to sell, that look like NASA or gaming shirts that you'd see at Target or Spencer's or hot topic. I hate spending 20-60$ a shirt though.
I have a cricut cutting machine and vinyl. I don't have an inkjet printer but want to get one. But before I do want to make sure I'll even need it
Here's an example of the kind of shirt I want to make.
I don't know if my cutting machine can make something so complex.
About 18 months ago I got a laser printer after the scanning bed on my inkjet printer broke. I heard all about how expensive inkjets are over time, and how the manufacturers do stupid stuff like prevent you from scanning a document when your printer is "low on ink".
So now the printer is finally warning me the sample toner tanks that came with the printer are low. Going online to buy refills I was shocked to see that to refill every color it's almost $300 USD. What gives?
Printer: Epson Expression Photo xp970
I have had this Epson printer for several months now, and I am still struggling with tweaking my color management settings/ understanding what color settings I should be using in order to get more accurate colors. I use a Mac and I primarily use Photoshop for printing. For color management I have been trying to go through photoshop instead of the epson color management since I tend to get even less accurate colors when I let my printer manage the colors. Photoshop seems to have more advanced settings and I have gotten more accurate prints, however this doesn't happen with everything that I print. Sometimes I will try to tweak the setting and I end up having a print that is wayyy off from what I want. I understand that there will be a slight difference in the color from my screen to what is printed, however sometimes a print is very off and sometimes I have gotten a more accurate print using the same exact color management settings. Even when I'm using the print proof setting to see how the colors should shift when it's on paper, and the print still comes out inconsistent. I have used up so much paper through the trial and error of trying to get the right color settings.
During my googlings, from what I understand, it seems that I may have to turn off my epson's color management through the printer's property settings. When I go to print on photoshop, it also gives me a little warning symbol telling me "remember to disable the printer's color management in the print settings dialog box." The Epson website also says that there is a "no color adjustment" option however I don't see anything like that in my printer settings. When I open my printer settings I just see the queue and supply levels I don't have any options for color settings.
I'm not sure what to do for it, since I'm still new to using an inkjet printer. Is disabling the printer's color management is what I even have to do, or is it something in the photoshop print settings that I am messing up?
What's a good and reliable Inkjet printer I can get for my homelab
Criteria
- RJ45 port -doesnt require an app or account to setup and activate
- Support for different OS and mobile devices and -decentIsh PPM
I'm looking for an affordable printer to print my transparencies. Hit me up with your suggestion
I have 2 inkjet printers sitting around gathering dust. My family kept bugging me to get one running to print documents and stuff now that everything is done online. I found compatible ink for one of the two (Epson Stylus SX100) locally and I went to town.
To my surprise and horror, the one I got the inks for, leaked in storage. I cleaned it up as much as possible on the outside and then I cleaned the printhead. To cut a long story short, it recognizes only 2 of the 4 cartridges. The other two just... don't exist in its dumb head. I tested the old ones, thinking they would be recognized, but running low, but those don't get recognized either.
So I assume something got damaged from the ink spilling... But what? What would cause that error? The printhead at the bottom or the connectors on the back?
Looking for a good multi-color inkjet printer for personal use after designing graphic prints in various photoshop and other Adobe applications. Hopefully something that's not $700 or more, because it will be used once every couple months for personal use to print out the prints for expositions
Hi, I was considering installing Mint on our family PC just tested our home inkjet printer, an Epson L385 Series Inkjet, while checking the PC on a live USB. I tried printing an image through xviewer (the default cinnamon image viewer), and it managed to recognize the printer and give output, except instead of an image it's a weird CUPS error text block.
%!
/cups_handleerror {
$error /newerror false put
(:PostScript error in ") print cups_query_keyword print (":) print
$error /errorname get 128 string cvs print
(; offending command:) print $error /command get 128 string cvs print (
) print flush
} bind def
error dict /timeout {} put
/cups_query_keyword (?Unknown) def
So I assumed it was some form of driver error and got them from the epson website. I downloaded the epson-inkjet-printer-escpr deb package and then installed it, and tried printing the imageonce again. Now the error didn't happen, but instead it gave me a blank page. I wanted to see if it was just an error with the image viewer so I tried printing a webpage in firefox (which usually works on windows). It also printed the same blank page, with some random "#", "$" and "?" symbols on the left with nothing else. No text, no images, no colour.
I tried installing all the possible drivers listed on the epson website and it simply didn't cooperate (it does work on windows tho, except the driver requires a tray icon to manage the printing on its own rather than letting the system's printing manager take care of that, maybe that's why it didn't work on linux cos they didn't provide any "application frontend" for the printer). That's the only roadblock keeping me from switching that PC over to Linux cos we mainly use it for typing and printing spreadsheets for our shop's customer orders. I can easily format them in LibreOffice but if the print doesn't work then there's no use.
So...if anybody here owns an Epson L385 series printer, please tell me how you managed to get it working. I don't think trying different distros are a solution cos I also tried the same thing in Ubuntu and the same problem occurred there as well.
So I watched this Austin McConnell video on how ink jet printers use cyan ink even when set to black and white on purpose to get you to buy more ink. Is there any third-party drivers or software to override this??
