I bought ink for my printer today — an Epson Stylus C82.
The ink — one cartridge each of cyan, magenta, yellow, and black — cost me $70 from Office Depot.
The printer, which isn’t even sold by Epson anymore, can be picked up on Amazon starting at $39.
The current comparable printer from Epson — the Stylus C84 — can be picked up on Amazon (complete with ink) for about $84, only about $14 more than what I paid for the ink.
Why even bother buying ink anymore? Seems to me that it’s practically more cost effective to just buy a printer and use it until the ink runs out, junk it, and buy a new one. Go for a printer that’s a little bit cheaper than the C84, and I’d be willing to bet that it is cheaper to treat them as a “disposable” item.
That’s just flat-out ridiculous.
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Even better, you can sell the old printer on EBay and use the proceeds towards buying a replacement! Then you really WOULD be breaking even…
Actually, my boss does something similiar.
Everytime his Lexmark Laser runs out of ink he buys a new printer and either trades or gives away the old one.
The toner comes with a new fuser cost $130, but the printers are $99 at Sam’s Club.
Well, most of the time the ink cartridges that come with inkjet printers are not full cartridges. If you think you are getting as many prints from the first one than from a new one, you might want to check your facts. That would make your ink twice as expensive.
New printers don’t come with a full cartridge of ink anymore. They come with a ‘starter’ cartridge, designed for about 100 sheets, and then, poof, you have to go buy new ink. They got smart.
Anonymous, John — I’d wondered about that, and certainly am not surprised by that. Though it doesn’t make the current situation any easier to deal with…
Maybe go paperless as much as possible? I am a big fan of PDF’ing almost everything I touch or come across and storing everything in an ever-increasing database of stuff.
when i buy my printer i pay $19.95 when the ink runs out i sell the printer for $10.00 and go buy another one.the ink cartridges cost $17 and $28.the way i figure it i save $55.00 every time i buy a new printer no matter how much ink they come with
Okay - why not just NOT BUY A PRINTER THAT USES INK?? Right now, you can get a Zink printer that prints on a specially imprinted paper with heat.
I’m not buying one BECAUSE I’m waiting for the “brain” who thought up the “special paper” to realize he could have just used the “heat” (carefully controlled at a set temperature that won’t actually burn the paper, but just turn it brown, as holding it over a candle and removing it quickly will do) to burn the text onto regular paper. If you can do it with a candle, you can do it with a laser or hot needle in the machine. The manufacturers just have to simplify their thinking. The letters would come out brown (not black) and there would be no color printing, but for most of our basic printing it would work fine with NO INK and NO SPECIAL PAPER.
I suspect the ONLY reason printer manufacturers haven’t come out with this much simpler version of a printer is that it does not allow them to sell you any “supplies” after the printer (unless they are manufacturing regular paper).
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