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[Field Marshal Dr. Opti]

I recently purchased a brand new  Dell V305 printer/scanner for the princely sum of £35. It's performance is excellent apart from one aspect. For some unknown reason it will not allow me to refill the ink cartridges with my own ink.....which I have always been able to previously do.

Are printer manufactures getting wise to this?......

Needless to say new ink cartridges are extremely expensive for this printer......

[CaptainZok]

Have you had a mooch round ebay?
I've just got a new canon printer which takes chipped cartridges and managed to find a set of special cartridges which reset when refilled and the printer power cycled.

[Olympia5776]

Common practice unfortunatley .
Bought a Lexmark wifi printer recently to replace a Dell that was just too expensive to run.
The Lexmark unit has proven to be more expensive whether it is printing on OEM cartridges or AN Others off E bay . The printer cost a paltry £65 (delivered ) to buy and the 4 cartridges required cost about £40 to replace and last no time at all.
Both can be filled by the likes of " Cartridge World " but the irritating warning box will often come up stating reserves are low, they will print but experience has shown that they don't last as long as the initial cartridges and the print quality is reduced.
I also have a large professional HP printer that was bought for the business & cost nearly £600 about 6 years ago . It has printed countless docs and many photos and is still on the original cartridges , so it can be done by the manufacturers.
I'm going to fit a wifi conversion to the HP and bin the Lexmark , Dell and another two that are up in the loft ........
As my old Dad used to say " you buy cheap , you buy twice ".

[henryd]

I bought a Kodak easy share wireless jobby, both inks cost £17.00 from tesco , good yield as well

[Omega32E]

This may work

http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/peripherals/w/printers/article-on-refilling-dell-ink-cartridges.aspx

This as well as keeping two empty cartridges, when the printer runs out of ink first replace with a empty cartridge switch the printer on then off and replace with second empty cartridge do the same again switch the printer on and off now replace with your refilled cartridge with should now work. This happens because most printers will only remember the last two cartridges

[Kevin Wood]

Printers are a total con.

I have an old Epson with a CIS but It's getting to the point where you're better off with a cr@ppy old monochrome printer for letters, etc. and use one of the many cheap online photo places for anything colour, IMHO.

[Ken T]

There are often ways of reprogramming the carts to get the printer to accept them refilled, and reset counts.. Our Xerox phaser 6100 laser counts the number of prints and after 7000 or 3000 pages says cartridge is empty when its actually not. It is actually a badge engineered Samsung CPL-510, however it doesn't accept samsung carts, cause of data stored in a little memory chip on each cart. However a clever chap put out a simple design to reprogram the eprom in the cart, so I can reset the count or reprogram cheaper samsung carts for it. 

Ken

[TheBoy]

The manufacturers cannot manufacture printers that cheap. They are a loss leader. So they protect the revenue stream via the ink. It would not make any business sense to sell the printer below cost, and then (easily) allow customers to use pattern ink

Its usually done with a chip in each cartridge, which they go to some lengths to encrypt as well. But there are enough people out there to work it out.  Whether its worth the hassle for consumers to DIY it, rather than buy cheap pattern cartridges.....


To get more cost effective ink from the printer manufacturer, you have to spend more on the printer itself - buy a business class printer, whereby the manufacturer can make a margin on the hardware, you'll find the ink is much cheaper.  But only worthwhile if you use it enough - if you only change the cartirdges once a year, thats not cost effective...



Hope that provides backgrounds as to why

[Kevin Wood]

My Dad bought a quite expensive all-singing, all-dancing printer/scanner/copier wireless job a couple of years back. Got fed up with the prices of ink for that so he's gone back to the old cheapy Deskjet he had chucked in the loft.

To his surprise, it works with Windows 7, achieves much better quality printing photos, costs less to run and takes up less desk space. There is a lot of total rubbish being sold these days.

[TheBoy]

My Dad bought a quite expensive all-singing, all-dancing printer/scanner/copier wireless job a couple of years back. Got fed up with the prices of ink for that so he's gone back to the old cheapy Deskjet he had chucked in the loft.

To his surprise, it works with Windows 7, achieves much better quality printing photos, costs less to run and takes up less desk space. There is a lot of total rubbish being sold these days.

All all-in-ones (inkjet based) are universally shite. With the notable exception of a specific Epson, which as of now, despite being 3yrs old, has not been thrown down the stairs....

[Rods2]

I gave up with ink jet printers some time ago, due to the cost of ink and blocked nozzles, needing regular cleaning. For bulk black and white printing I used to use an Epson EPL5700 and when it was past it's best I replaced it, a couple of years ago with an Epson C1100 colour laser. A set of 3rd party cartridges is about £50-60 but will print about 5000 pages.

The printing of photographs is exceptionally good for a colour laser. The printer cost £153 with network interface and prints 25ppm in black and white and 5ppm in colour. The photoconductor needs replacing every 20,000 pages and is quite expensive at over £100. It is also a big very heavy unit, not something you can tuck away on the corner of your desk. The typical cost per page is about 0.5p for black and white and 2p for colour.

In over 25 years of buying Epson and using printers I have never been disappointed with any of them and they have been very reliable, which is more than I can about my experience of HP and Lexmark.

[TheBoy]

In over 25 years of buying Epson and using printers I have never been disappointed with any of them and they have been very reliable, which is more than I can about my experience of HP and Lexmark.

For Lasers, I always tend to go back to HP, been using them since the Laserjet 4P first came out.  I think my mum still uses my old 4P . For inkjets, esp all-in-ones, I quite like Epson. Downside with Epson inkjet devices is blocked nozzles which writes off the printer.

Before that time, I guess we all wanted Epson FX-80s, but cost meant I had a Micro-P one, replaced with a Panasonic 24 pinner when they became all the rage...

[TheBoy]

Interestingly, of all the printers I've owned, inkjet blocking aside, the only 2 I've ever had fail were a HP Deskjet 895Cxi (belt snapped, gutted, I liked that printer - must have had it 6 or 7yrs when it failed) and a HP Laserjet 4000, which didn't survive being thrown down the stairs.

[Taxi_Driver]

Interestingly, of all the printers I've owned, inkjet blocking aside, the only 2 I've ever had fail were a HP Deskjet 895Cxi (belt snapped, gutted, I liked that printer - must have had it 6 or 7yrs when it failed) and a HP Laserjet 4000, which didn't survive being thrown down the stairs.

I had an HP Officejet 870? for years, worked well, until the scanner part went wrong and refused to print because of the scanner fault 

That Laserjet must have made a dent in the floor  ......they were heavy lumps.

I now have a Epson 1400 A3 printer (fitted with a CIS) for photo printing and a Lexmark X4650 wireless all in one for general printing (where the quality doesnt matter)

[Rods2]

In over 25 years of buying Epson and using printers I have never been disappointed with any of them and they have been very reliable, which is more than I can about my experience of HP and Lexmark.

For Lasers, I always tend to go back to HP, been using them since the Laserjet 4P first came out.  I think my mum still uses my old 4P . For inkjets, esp all-in-ones, I quite like Epson. Downside with Epson inkjet devices is blocked nozzles which writes off the printer.

Before that time, I guess we all wanted Epson FX-80s, but cost meant I had a Micro-P one, replaced with a Panasonic 24 pinner when they became all the rage...

I used to have an Epson FX-100 which when it was worn out, I replaced with an LQ1000 24pin dot matrix which I've still got. The 136 columns was better for program printouts.