Printer problems

[avram]

Y’know what’s kinda annoying? The item on the left is a Canon printer, a model I own, the Canon S330. The item on the right is a digital camera I don’t own, the Canon S330.



Because there just aren’t enough possible combinations of letters and numbers for Canon to come up with different naming schemes for their different product lines.

Also what’s annoying is that I use the printer very rarely, yet it seems as if it’s running out of ink after two or three pages. Probably the print head’s getting gummed up with crusty ink. There are cleaner heads you can buy, but Canon doesn’t (as far as I can tell) make one, and I can’t find them listed on Amazon. In fact, all the listings I see are from companies low enough on the food chain that my rip-off sense is tingling.

Which has me thinking about buying a new printer. Something that can print on 3x5 index cards would be nice. But the printer market has turned really weird compared to what it was like when my sense of what printers ought to do was being formed, back in the ’80s and early ’90s. Back then, printers were mostly aimed at printing business documents (or zines, or RPG character sheets) on paper. Now they seem mostly aimed at printing photos for the home market. And it’s hard to find one that doesn’t have a copier and scanner bundled in.

And speaking of scanners, hot damn, 4800 dpi! I may need to get one of these babies.

Comments

[jl8e]

I think the printer manufacturers broke my brain when I heard about some printer recently where replacing all the ink cartridges costs more than the printer did.

I know somebody who was recently investigating printers that could print to index cards without breaking. Will try to point him over here.

[zrealm.livejournal.com]

After printing thousands and thousands of index cards for various purposes (and killing 7 or 8 printers in the process), I think we decided the Canon ip4200 was the best way to go for a pretty cheap printer that does it. Our current one has lasted about 4000 cards and is holding up pretty well.

The biggest downsides are that it has a gagillion ink carts (5 of them to be exact, although photo black, which is, oddly the one labeled BK not the one labeled PHBK...) and that the paper tray isn't great (we use straight-through feed from the top pretty much 100% of the time.

It even has a duplexer for 8.5x11 sheets (doesn't work with Index cards - we tried!).

Retail is about 100 bucks including a set of ink carts (but not a cable of course, noone includes cables with printers anymore). The US version doesn't support printing on CD-roms, but I think some of the international ones do.

[avram]

Thanks! Merlin Mann went on a quest last year for a good index card printer, and settled on the Canon Pixma iP3000, which I don't think is being made anymore.

Unfortunately, I see that Canon has gone to a chipped cartridge system in its most recent printers, to defeat ink refills.

[avram]

That was probably Lexmark; I think they take a loss on the printers, but the ink cartridges for the model I had were like $35. First time I had to replace them I figured out that I could buy a new printer for less than the cost of two sets of Lexmark cartridges. Which is how I got the Canon S330.

They also include a computer chip in the cartridges to defeat copycats from undercutting them. The software on the chip is copyrighted, and when another company figured out how to spoof the software, Lexmark sued them for violation of the DMCA. Lexmark lost the case, and appealed all the up to the Supreme Court, which declined to hear them. So maybe I can rescue that old Lexmark from Chris's place and feed it cheap knock-off cartridges.