Printing black only on Canon inkjet

Wes Groleau <groleau+news@freeshell.org> wrote:

> J.J. O'Shea wrote:
> > Why should anyone go to that kind of trouble when there are monochrome
> > lasers available for under US$120? See
>
> Maybe because you can get a decent HP inkjet printer for WAY less
> and pay WAY less for the ink?

Your economics must be different from mine. I saved a nontrivial amount
of money by trashing the HP inkjet my business used to have and
replacing it with a Brother laser. Heck, the inkjet was costing so much
in ink that our predecessors in the business were making bulk copies at
Kinko's instead of printing them on the printer. Our costnumbers worked
out to laser<Kinkos<inkJet. We not only saved a bundle by getting the
laser, we also improved convenience and timeliness. That's because we
can now print out current versions whenever we need something; with the
Kinko's step, our predecessor's often used out-of-date versions until
they used up the last bulk copy run.

--
Richard Maine | Good judgment comes from experience;
email: last name at domain . net | experience comes from bad judgment.
domain: summertriangle | -- Mark Twain

Jolly Roger wrote:
> Have you considered adding a pre-print step to convert the content to
> black & white or grayscale *before* you print it?

Selecting Greyscale mode does that.
Unfortunately, his complaint is that he has a printer
that mixes color ink to do "gray"

--
Wes Groleau

Discipline without Stress, Punishments, or Rewards
http://Ideas.Lang-Learn.us/russell?itemid=431

Richard Maine wrote:
> Your economics must be different from mine. I saved a nontrivial amount
> of money by trashing the HP inkjet my business used to have and
> replacing it with a Brother laser. Heck, the inkjet was costing so much

I've had three HP Deskjets and one Brother scanner/inkjet
since June 2000. The HP that came with the iMac lasted the
longest. The Brother only lasted three refills--the third black
cartridge leaked and gummed up the printer.

Each of them cost $25 to $35 U.S.

Typical refill period for us is about three months.

I looked at several lasers. Some had tempting prices until I saw that
we'd have doubled or tripled our refill costs. (And yes, I _did_ read
how many pages the cartridge claims to support.)

--
Wes Groleau
-----------
I've been framed! ...
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9612.html

Wes Groleau <groleau+news@freeshell.org> wrote:

> I looked at several lasers. Some had tempting prices until I saw that
> we'd have doubled or tripled our refill costs. (And yes, I _did_ read
> how many pages the cartridge claims to support.)

Well, whatever. I see about the same ratio, but the other way around. I
also swear that the toner cartriges seem to last longer than the claims,
while the inks are shorter. At least it seems that way to me. I
regularly get a good 12,000 black pages out of the toner cartriges that
claim 10,000.

I don't understand how you can come up with laser refills costing more
than inkjets. That's the biggest cost advantage of lasers. They tend to
cost more up front, but rapidly make it up in consumable costs. At least
that's what I see and what I thought was "common wisdom".

--
Richard Maine | Good judgment comes from experience;
email: last name at domain . net | experience comes from bad judgment.
domain: summertriangle | -- Mark Twain

In <1ipjbl2.n5y6noibj5x8N%nospam@see.signature>, Richard Maine wrote:

> Wes Groleau <groleau+news@freeshell.org> wrote:

>> Maybe because you can get a decent HP inkjet printer for WAY less
>> and pay WAY less for the ink?

> Your economics must be different from mine. I saved a nontrivial amount
> of money by trashing the HP inkjet my business used to have and
> replacing it with a Brother laser.

Me, too. I find Brother laser printers to be the most affordable choice
for printing monochrome. We have one color inkjet that we only use for
printing final drafts of things that need to be in color (my daughter's
school reports mostly) and still I suspect that I'm paying more for
ink/toner for that per year than on the laser printers.

My big problem with one of the printers (Brother HL-2070N) is that every
time it fires up (or even when it's just standing by) it will draw enough
current to dim the lights in that part of the house. I've put the iMac in
that room on a UPS with automatic voltage regulation.

> Heck, the inkjet was costing so much
> in ink that our predecessors in the business were making bulk copies at
> Kinko's instead of printing them on the printer. Our costnumbers worked
> out to laser<Kinkos<inkJet.

One university that I know of forced computing resources to charge users
more for laser printing than the university copy center charged for
copies, even though the costs were the other way round.

-j

--
Jeffrey Goldberg http://www.goldmark.org/jeff/
I rarely read top-posted, over-quoting or HTML postings.
http://improve-usenet.org/

John E. wrote:

>> "Color ink may be consumed even when printing a
>> black-and-white document or when black-and-white printing is
>> specified."
>
>
> Thanks, Jeff, for quoting that.
>
> The driver for my iP3000 has been printing black-only
> grayscale for quite awhile. I think it's a bug because when
> you select Duplex printing all of a sudden it won't print
> black-only grayscale, and it misses much of the page content
> if the color cartridges are empty (as they have been for quite
> awhile).


The concept of a bug in interesting because I remember somewhere
(can't remember if it was a Canon, Epson, or Apple) that I had a
printer that when it was out of color, it would let you finish
printing in black and white but only for a short while


> I guess I'll just keep using this printer in single-sided mode
> until a good deal comes along on an HP inkjet (Wes G. says HPs
> print black-only grayscale...)


What I did for years was the old "print the odd number pages,
turn the stack over, and then print the even number pages"
technique. This not only got me duplex, but it also ended up with
my sheets all in order


--
Jeff Wiseman
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