How to Buy an Inkjet Printer

Buying a good inkjet printer is not rocket science but nor is it a trivial matter. Most people get burned by a couple of inkjets that they thought were great deals before learning their lesson.

In buying an inkjet printer, you must consider three factors:

1. Print Quality
2. Printing Speed
3. Cost of replacement cartridges

Print quality is measured in dots per inch (DPI), which is the number of dots the printer needs to print side-by-side to print a one inch long line. The higher the number of dots, the better the print quality. But you don’t always need a very high print quality unless you print pictures and photographs. For normal small-business printing, a medium quality printer is usually sufficient.

But there is more to print quality than just DPI. The quality of ink that the printer uses also matters. If a printer needs a separate set of ink cartridges for "photo quality" prints, its regular cartridges are filled with inferior quality ink. You would do well to avoid such printers. Therefore, it is also a good idea to go to Staples or CompUSA and try printing a picture on plain paper with the printer you are considering. Most "samples" that you see are printed on very high quality photo paper, not on copy paper you use in your day-to-day printing. You can only judge the print quality by looking at a print on regular paper — you will catch poor quality right away if the ink smears or if the edges are blurred.

Print speed is expressed in pages per minute (PPM). For most people, print speed is rather moot. Unless you print mass-mailings on a regular basis or are running a printing press in disguise, the difference between 5 pages a minute and 20 pages a minute hardly matters. In selecting a printer for normal small-business printing needs, printer speed should not be the deciding factor.

Cost of replacement ink cartridges is the most relevant factor in choosing an inkjet printer. The business model of printer manufacturers is counterintuitive. They sell you a printer for very little, perhaps at a loss, and then fleece you for the rest of the printer’s life by selling you replacement ink cartridges at exorbitant prices. In fact, it is not unusual to find a printer on sale at Staples or CompUSA, for a price that is less than the combined price of black and color ink replacement cartridges (Just yesterday I saw a news item about Kodak planning to sell a new series of low cost printers for which replacement ink cartridges will be priced at $10. I can’t wait to lay my hands on one of those printers).

Buying OEM ink cartridges is almost always the most expensive option. But there are three ways to save money on replacement cartridges:

1. Buy compatible replacement cartridges
2. Buy refurbished cartridges
3. Refill cartridges yourself

Compatible replacement cartridges are made by outfits other than the manufacturer of the printer. They are invariably cheaper than OEM cartridges. If you buy them at a reputable store, they are as good as the originals. You don’t get compatible cartridges for all printers, however. Some manufacturers such as HP and Lexmark have patents on the design of some of their cartridges so that other manufacturers can’t make them.

But you can usually buy refurbished cartridges for printers that don’t have compatible cartridges. Refurbished cartridges are once-empty cartridges that have been refilled with ink. If you ever wondered why some shops buy empty ink cartridges, you have your answer. You also know now why they only accept HP and Lexmark cartridges.

If you are somewhat of a handyman, refilling cartridges yourself is the cheapest option. Refilling some cartridges is very easy, while refilling others requires surgical precision. Therefore, it is not the right option for all printers. Conceptually, refilling a cartridge is quite simple. The cartridge is, after all, a tank. You have to drill a hole through it, pour ink through the hole, and then seal the hole. That’s it. But in practice, it may not be so simple. How successful you will be in refilling cartridges depends on the design of your printer and printer cartridges.

To begin with, you have to find replacement ink for your printer. All ink is not the same. Unless you have degree in printer ink technology (if there is such a thing at all), the easiest way to buy the right kind of ink is by checking what is available for your printer model. Sites such as http://www.jettecrefill.com will sell you refill kits with the appropriate kind of ink for your printer.

The next hurdle is drilling a hole in the cartridge. Most kits come with a drill-bit that has a little handle at one end. The instructions are to drill a 2 mm hole at a specific location on the cartridge with this drill bit. This exercise is as frustrating as trying to make a hole in a stone wall with a pencil. You need nothing short of a power drill with a 2 mm drill-bit to drill holes in printer cartridges. If you can’t tell a drill from a screwdriver, you are better off buying a replacement cartridge off the shelf.

Some printers have individual cartridges for the ink of each color. These are the easiest to work with. Some others have a single cartridge for all three colored inks and a separate one for black ink. These are somewhat difficult to work with because drilling holes through the 3-in-1 cartridge requires a great deal of precision. You also have to be very careful while injecting ink in the cartridges because you have to deal with three open tanks at the same time.

You can seal most cartridges with tape after refilling, but some cartridges have fill holes on the side! Not only is it difficult to drill holes through such cartridges, you also have to plug those holes with rubber plugs that always seem to be either too big or too small to plug the hole. If ink leaks through the holes, your printer will be ruined.

As if these problems were not enough, printer manufacturers pose a few more. Deliberately. Some manufacturers, notably Canon, have a chip attached to the cartridge that communicates with the printer. This chip is responsible for the "ink empty" messages you get on your computer. Even if you refill a cartridge that has such a chip, the chip still believes that the cartridge is empty. To get around this problem, their refill kit will either include a "chip resetter" or advise you to buy one separately. Naturally, this pushes up the cost of the refill.

If you decide that refilling cartridges not your cup of tea, there is another ink cartridge idiosyncrasy that you should be aware of. Most printers have print heads in the printer. But some, notably from HP and Lexmark, have the print heads on the cartridge. The design of these cartridges is patented, so you won’t get compatible cartridges for them. The chip and patent push up the cost of not only the OEM cartridge, but also of refurbished cartridges.

Until a couple of years ago, I would normally throw away a printer and buy the cheapest one on sale at CompUSA. It was cheaper than buying the replacement ink cartridges. But it was a pain to reinstall drivers and get used to the peculiarities of the new printer every few days. Then I found an ideal printer for my purposes — Brother 420CN. It is networkable. It doesn’t smear ink. The print quality is good for printing text, which is mostly what I do. It may even be printing good pictures — I haven’t checked. I don’t know its speed in PPM, but it hasn’t slowed me down yet. It has separate cartridges for the ink of each color. The cartridges don’t have a chip, a print head, or any other manufacturer induced headache. Their fill hole is at the top and can be sealed easily with scotch tape. Ink refill kits are easily available for it and cost in the neighborhood of $10. And as a bonus, the cartridges are really big — I only need to refill them about half as often as other cartridges.

The moral of the story is this: Don’t look at the printer; look at the ink cartridge.

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