By Frank Bolsom

If you’ve bought ink for your printer lately, you know how expensive it can be. Have you ever wondered whether the printer companies are really printer companies, or are they ink companies?

If you look at the prices, you’ll probably find the same thing as I have – they’re really ink companies selling the printers as a way to get you “hooked” on their supply of ink. It’s a lot like the way drug dealers work if you think about it – give people a free taste to get them hooked for life.

Printer ink is one of the most expensive liquids on the planet, if you calculate how much you spend versus how much you get. And every time a new model of printer is released, the cartridges seem to contain less and less ink.

This is why it’s important to do your homework before you buy a printer. Check the cost of the ink versus how much you get in the cartridge. You’ll be surprised at how much of a difference in the actual volume of ink you’ll see from one brand to another. The cartridges may be about the same price, but you’ll see twice as much ink in some brands than others.

Unfortunately, not all manufacturers print the actual volume of their cartridges on the box (Epson in particular doesn’t). In these cases, you’ll have to do a little research first.

If you check one of the aftermarket ink suppliers like 4inkjets.com, they sell their own generic versions of most types of cartridges. They normally state the volume of ink in these cartridges, so you can use that information to determine what is in the original brand as well.

Use this information as part of your decision making process. Don’t just go for the latest model from brand X because the prints look nice. Compare the print quality versus the cost of ink do make sure you get the best deal possible in the long run.

Are you fed up with spending a fortune on replacement printer ink cartridges? If you’re buying the original brand of ink for your printer, or you’re buying it at your local computer shop, you may be spending 3 or 4 times as much as you need to. Find out more about how you can save money on your printer ink on the Inketeria website, where we offer helpful tips and tricks for saving money as well as reviews of the best printer ink suppliers. Visit http://www.inketeria.com for more information.

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By Mark Vander Ploeg

Computer and technology products continue to improve, and color printers are no different. If you liked the printer your friend bought last week, just wait. You’ll be able to get one better and cheaper next week.

So, if you’re in the market for a new home or small office printer what should you get, ink-jet or laser? My short answer – laser. Let me explain.

When black ink-jet printers first came out you had to pay somewhere in the neighborhood of $500. You could get a replacement ink cartridge for 20 bucks and you’re good to go. Or, you could buy an ink refill kit and refill your cartridge for a fraction of the cost of a new cartridge. Well, those days are long gone. Now you pay twenty bucks for the printer and $500 for the ink! Well, not quite, but it seems that way.

I’ve worked on printers with a single color cartridge and with one cartridge for each of the three standard colors and either way, you end up paying a lot for ink. So what do a lot of people do to save money on ink? They use their printer as little as possible. While this may seem like a reasonable solution it creates another problem; the ink dries up. Then when you go to print it’s all streaky because the ink has dried up and clogged the microscopic jets. So what to do now? You run your printer through the cleaning process, which, unfortunately, USES A TON OF INK!

Here’s the answer, buy ink cartridges on sale and stock up. Oops, wrong answer. Ink cartridges have an expiration date and usually don’t work after that date.

How about refilling? Most cartridges today use some kind of “smart” technology that knows when it’s empty and won’t work when refilled – plus it can be a real mess.

The reason most ink-jet printers are so inexpensive today is that printer manufactures use the same business model as cell phone companies, that is, give away the phone (printer) and make the profit by regularly selling minutes (cartridges). Add to that the natural trend of computer products getting cheaper and the fact that today’s printers are really cheaply made (notice I didn’t say “inexpensive,” I said “cheap”) and you’ll see $29 ink-jet printers all the time.

But don’t think you can just buy a new printer whenever your ink runs out, because most printers are sold with “starter” cartridges which are less than 50% full.

So, what about color laser printers? Color laser printers have been around for quite a few years now, costing about ten grand and weighing 100 pounds when the first came out. Now you can get one for under $300 that weighs less than 40 pounds. So obviously it costs more to purchase a laser printer than an ink-jet printer, BUT, the cost per page is much less with laser and the hassle is greatly reduced as well.

So, for routine small office and home use these days, I recommend color laser printers.

Saving money when buying quality computer equipment requires research. Mark has more articles about computer problems and solutions on his website.

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By Christy Berger

Dell inkjet printer ink cartridges and dell laser toner cartridges are fantastic products to use to make the most of your inkjet or laser printers. But not everyone is techno-savvy. To get a grip on installing printer software and setting up the hardware, we’ve compiled some of the most common questions regarding printers and will provide some simple answers to help you get printing.

Where can I find drivers to download for my printer?

Your best bet is to go to the Dell website and search for the driver you need. However, there are many websites devoted just to printer drivers and helping people find the driver they need for their make and model of printer.

Will Dell inkjet printer ink cartridges for one model of printer work in another model?

Do I need to buy Dell inkjet printer ink cartridges for my Dell printer?

Yes! Printer ink cartridges differ from brand to brand making it so you can’t really use another brand’s cartridges in your Dell printer. Remanufactured cartridges and refill kits are a good way to side step this, however.

Unfortunately, many Dell printers have specific ink cartridge requirements, making it so you have to purchase the ink made for your printer model.

We know that finding the answers to your most pertinent printer questions can be difficult. If you can’t find what you’re looking for here, try doing a simple web search for your query. A good website to visit is Yahoo Answers. Go ahead and search the Dell Printer Model or Inkjet Cartridge model on Yahoo Answers Website.

Or, you can always perform a search on Google or Yahoo. Ask.com is another great place to find categorized results to your searches. Likewise, checking out our very own page on PrintCountry.com for the Dell inkjet printer ink cartridges can be extremely helpful.

With a bit of perseverance, you should be able to find the answers to your printer related questions and more with a just few keystrokes and clicks of the mouse.

A longer version of article found at Dell Inkjet Printer Printing Problems. Main article is Remanufactured Discount Dell Inkjet Printer Ink Cartridges.

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By Tanya Mangano

Buying a personal printer today can make you go crazy in this increasingly crowded market. Prices go from under $100 to over $1,000. You can buy a photo printer, or an all-in-one . ink-jet or laser,

you’ll need to decide on the type of machine you want. a standard ink-jet for photos and a low purchase price, a photo ink jet for great photo quality, a monochrome laser for text-heavy jobs, or a color laser if you need better text and color graphics and your looking to spend around $700 and up to purchase.

good luck on finding your next printer i listed 2 printer’s on here you might like..

It’s the new portable Canon PIXMA iP90v photo printer! The new portable photo printer offers high print quality and speed. What’s unique is its wireless printing capability using Bluetooth technology so mobile business and home users can print from their Bluetooth-enabled notebook.

The printer can also print via IrDA.

The PIXMA iP90v Photo Printer can print color, black & white business documents, charts and graphics as well as photo quality 4″ x 6″, 5″ x 7″, and 8.5″ x 11″ photo prints.

Speed wise, it can pump out 16 pages per minute in black and up to 12 pages per minute in color. Bordless, photo-lab quality 4″ x 6″ prints in 81 seconds.

The Easy Coder PM4i is the first label printer to offer integrated serial, USB and Easy LAN Ethernet interfaces as standard equipment. Optional interfaces include parallel, double serial and industrial, and Easy LAN Wireless.

I Also publish a blog on printer toner and t1 lines

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By Jimi St. Pierre

Although laser printing technology today offers printer speeds in exceeds of 50 pages per minute on general office printers, inkjet printers are now commonplace in small business and home user environments. With improvements in inkjet print speeds, the days are long gone when laser was automatically preferred over inkjet because of speed considerations. But what about print quality? What quality indicators should we look for when deciding between products from competing manufacturers? Or indeed between products offered in differing price ranges from the same manufacturers?

Which Audience?

There are a wide variety of areas of print quality to take into account. For most general office use for internal communication, we might consider absolutely perfect print quality to be unnecessary, but for customer-facing documentation and presentations, this should never be the case. For colour proofing tasks, of course, colour accuracy issues become critical.

The ability to assess professional print quality is something which can be learned from experience, but for most people, the buying of a new printer is not a regular event. Discussing with friends and colleagues is an obvious way to go, but even then it is hard to get a full picture of the choices now available.

Here we list in brief, some factors to consider in terms of print style and expectations, for regular office document productions. Closer inspection of documents which look adequate in principle, reveal distinct differences in print quality in specific areas. These are the areas to focus on when looking at those all-important test sheets.

Black-Only Printing: Office Documents

Text clarity on all print media is the issue first and last with Black-Only printing. Individual printer products differ widely in their control of so called ink splatter . This occurs with the spreading of miniscule droplets of ink, which vary in size between different printer models, from the defined text edges. Such ragged edges are caused primarily, either by alignment issues with the print head, by use of inappropriate print settings for the media used or the media itself.

However, even under expert control, some printers will always offer much-reduced ink splatter than others. In particular, the differences in quality can be most obvious between machines with a fixed print head as part of the machine compared with machines (far more common) with the print head as part of the disposable cartridge. Here users are faced with a choice of cost issues. For example where a damaged print head which is part of the machine will almost inevitably mean a replacement of the printer itself; but on the other hand the disposable head route will increase the cost of consumables.

The other area to look out for is black print density in blocks of print, for example in charts or diagrams. Here, in addition to possible ragged edging, there is a tendency for grey streaking where the block should be uniform density.

Examples of known good performers in these areas are the Canon MP-450 and the Brother DCP-330C.

Colour Printing: Office Documents

As well as variations in ink droplet size, the use of colour inks under-laying the black is a contributing factor to the sharpness of text and lines in colour printers, but a downside can be the presence of colour dots outside of the defined edges, which are a feature of poor cartridge alignment. Good performers here are the Canon MP-450 and the Lexmark P4350.

Colour lines and colour depth are factors which deserve close scrutiny. Look for deep, rich colours. Look also for blocks where banding occurs, where positioning of the print head differs slightly as is passes in each direction.

Colour purity and accuracy need to be carefully considered, if the print output is to engage a buying audience, or when technical requirements (eg in graphic design projects) mean that accurate colour is paramount. Inkjet printers have problems here more than laser printers mainly because of the interface between liquid ink and paper. Much more attention is needed as to the type of media used, for example when coated media might be preferable to plain media,

Printed Page Size

An unexpected and often infuriating aspect of using inkjet printers is the tendency for some models to print a different document size to the size expected. This is not the case with Canon, Brother and Lexmark, but models from some manufacturers can produce documents 4% larger, or even 8% smaller than anticipated. This is certainly something to be aware of when researching the performance areas of any prospective purchase.

Jimi St. Pierre writes for several Office Equipment suppliers and Travel Companies in the UK, including printer supplier Officemagic, BCP Ltd and Country Connect, the latter being a publisher of a daily news feed to the UK travel industry via the Virgin Media Traveleye extranet.

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