| Buy toner or buy a new printer? |
 |
 |
 |
| Blog |
| Saturday, 06 March 2010 21:46 |
|
I have a Konica Minolta Magicolor 2400W colour laser printer. A machine I have been, generally, quite happy with. It prints extremely quickly in black and white (spec’d at 20 pages per minute) and reasonable colour printing (spec’d at 5 pages per minute). I’ve had it for about 4-1/2 years and printed 8415 pages with it (986 in colour). Since moving to Madrid, it has been acting up a bit. I think something got bent out of alignment because the printer jams a lot more than it used to (and often times they are “fake” paper jams – all I do to “fix” it is open it up, remove everything I can remove, open and close latches, turn what I can turn, then return everything back to normal and it works fine for a few weeks. I am also running out of black toner. The problem is that the toner is extremely expensive: €120 for black and €180 for each of the yellow, magenta and cyan (in Canada, the prices are the same, only in CDN $). I only paid CDN $299 for the printer. I can’t imagine spending almost as much on a toner cartridge as I did for the printer. But, I don’t want to get rid of the printer either, I love the 20 ppm printing speed – it is a no brainer between reading a 100 page document online or printing it out. Another option is to buy a refill kit. I used to refill my inkjet cartridges (TIP: if you refill your own inkjet cartridges, don’t bother with drilling a hole in the top and “injecting” the colour because that is messy. The way I used to do it was to slowly “drip” the ink, using the syringe, onto the ink pad on the bottom of the cartridge. Yes, it takes longer, it can still be messy, but not as messy as the recommended method). |
Advertising
blog links
Random Image
Comments
Is 120 euros that bad for 7000-8000 pages? A couple of cents per page? Then again, I don't print out 100 page documents.
A full cartridge is supposed to last about 4500 pages, So, per page cost isn't too bad - but it is still an awful hit when the time comes. Although, I felt better today looking at the cost of inkjet cartridges (good grief over 50 euros per cartidge - for a few hundred pages - ugh!).
That's kind of infantile, though.
I do that mentally with driving now, though....the idea that a given trip, no matter how small, will cost x based on typical cost per km and then decide if it's worth it (or whether it'd be better to just have whatever I need sent through the mail, if it's a shopping trip). The costs are somewhat more important now because I'm on a 13-year-old car and each km brings me closer to having to buy a new car... which is similar to the toner shock :) But it means that the cost is maybe double if the roads are wet/salty because of the rust risk.
Neurotic?
Most of those I've had have been very unreliable.
My present HP Photosmart C4580 has been a disaster.
Can't trust it. Behaves unpredictable. In absolutly all manners.