Deskjet turns 20: HP celebrates two decades of robbing you blind
By Paul Miller 
posted February 28th 2008 4:28PM
posted February 28th 2008 4:28PM
posted February 28th 2008 4:28PM
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Hah! That's a DeskWriter, not a DeskJet, in the picture. A short lived product for the Apple Macintosh from the late 80's.
instead of buying new cartridges, i just buy new printers with pack-in cartridges.
The trouble with it is :
a) you are creating more electronic trash.
b) first ink included with a new printer is half charged (or even worst).
Do what I did... Screw Canon, Epson, and HP!
I voted with my pocketbook and purchased the new EasyShare 5500 All-in-One. The black ink cartridge is $9.99 MSRP! The colour ink cartridge is $14.99 MSRP! You can find a bag bundle that contains one of each of these for less than $22! This printer is so worth the investment IMO! No more expensive inks!
http://www.kodak.com/eknec/PageQuerier.jhtml?pq-path=9/11921/10580/10581&pq-locale=en_US&pq-locale=en_US&_requestid=9976
You are welcome! :)
I bought an HP deskjet in 2003 for $50. I still haven't used all the ink in the black cartridge (or any cartridge). Who prints at home? Print at work, man.
My first printer was a Canon BJ300. Took tractor paper (a plus back then) and non-printhead ink meant it was cheaper... until HP ubiquity made the Canon carts impossible to get, so I switched to a HP DJ550c.
I now like the few-years-old Canons that use BJC3 series carts. The heads are 'permanent' but removable and serviceable (and replaceable if need be), and good 3rd party ink is $1.25/ea.
One of the things that made early HP inkjets good was that they all used the same green top (and later blue) carts. At one point that universality made prices start to drop... then I bet HP realized this and started going to a buncha different cart models and jacking up the prices.
I used to be a big fan of HP, but I recently had to call service on a 4-month old LaserJet, and the support was awful. I have had better on the phone and in online chat (I got to use both) with Dell. Worst support experience ever.
Bah whatever. Once again Engadget is all talk...all the time. I do HP, Lexmark, and Canon printer repairs all the way down to their inkjets. (Thankfully not every often since its a colossal PITA and usually cheaper to just buy a new inkjet...usually.)
HP makes the best damn hardware on the market, with only a few notable exceptions in their inkjet line. (Not all just a few exceptions.) The problem isn't with their hardware or their ink its their horrid drivers. The default install is something like 200MB with all kinds of added shit bundled in with 20MB of drivers and utils. Thank God for WinRAR and extracting that crap.
I had that Deskwriter in the picture.
$699, and worth every penny at the time when your other options were the Imagewriter II (slow and loud), or the Laserwriter (expensive)
Ink cartridges were good for several hundred pages and could easily be refilled (unlike HP's carts today)
Used HP for over 10 years, but their ridiculous cartridges (in price an design) and crappy software finally turned me away. Tried Epson: better carts but wasted too much ink.
Then I saw a Canon MP970. Found an all-in-one that game me everything I needed in one device including networking and direct CD printing (modded the firmware to Europe to unlock it - google it). The quality is unmatched IMHO. too bad they decided to go with these new PITA chipped carts. Cost more to get them re-filled/replaced, but so far the cost per page is much better then the Epson.
Epson Lx-810....no contest
What bothers me about HP is the fact they need to come up with a new model every 5 or 6 days it seems. They seem no different than the the other. On the plus side, the HP Laserjet I was given has been a flawless performer. Just need some more toner.
However, on a newer HP deskjet I have, shared via network via SAMBA wont let me install the drivers without seeing it. It can't see it due to samba oddities. Argh.
When is a start up going to finally come up with a new technology to replace inkjet???
I am sick of the absurdly high prices of ink carts and the problems with print heads.
Canon spare parts supplier want about AU$186 for a replacement print head for a i965, but I can get a i4500 brand new for only AU$143.
Then they go and start chipping their carts, tossers...
I just bought a lexmark for $20 only to find out the replacement ink cost $32. My mom bought a HP just because the ink was cheaper.
What happened to the wonderful memjet tech announced circa 2005 or so? I'm sure it wasn't vaporware, since we all see the videos. It's as if no printing manuf. wants to license it. http://www.memjet.com/pages.aspx?id=technology
Supposed to be alot cheaper than current tech, but just doesn't seem to be picking up popularity for some reason.
I'm still on my Lexmark X5150 and I'd really like to upgrade soon. But horror stories of HP building 'expiration' dates into cartidges and Canon and Epson printers clogging up after a few years of use (I've actually SEEN this) and of course ink costing as much as the printer in 2 months, I'm a bit paranoid to just jump into buying one...sure they're only like $100 bucks but still. Come on memjet....
Ehh, circa 2007*. It was announced around march of 2007 I think, not 2005.
Epsons are the best, cheap but good quality ink all the way, i as a student used my £30 printer and spent about £35 in ink in total throughout my entire final year and trust me, that was a lot of printing, i would need a mortgage had i bought a HP with there £30 a pop half filled cartidges!
I picked up an Oki Data color laser about three years ago for $250. The cartridges are still 70% full after printing 600 sheets!
HP must be furious that Kodak has pissed on their turf. The Kodak printer was a little more expensive but it only costs $25 to refill the printer. HP's been getting away with murder for too long. I've had my Kodak Easyshare 5300 printer since Christmas and I'm still printing using the original print cartridges - I've been printing a lot of photos too. Kodak's line of ink jet printers are absolutely amazing when it comes to cost per print. They say you can print twice as much for the same price and so far, I believe it. The quality of it's print outs is outstanding as well. I surprised more people aren't talking about it here.
Don't like the "give away the razor; make money on the razor blades" business model used for inkjet printers. Plus, the technology is poor because of clogged jets due to long term disuse.
Don't like the current laser jets, because a perfectly good print engine is tossed out after the toner dust is gone.
Some dual purpose, business copier/printers deliver toner to the print engine with replaceable bottles. A consumer version of this would be terrific, because it would be economical and keep us from tossing out perfectly good print engines.
For those of you wondering how to purchase hard-tofind ink cartridges for old HP printers, HP provides a supplies shopping site called SureSupply. You can get there by clicking "Shop for Supplies" on this website -
https://www.hp.com/go/suresupply
Direct URL -
https://h30042.www3.hp.com/SureSupply/.
At work, we have an old HP Deskjet 1600C. It doesn't get used much.
If you guys don't want to waste money, I suggest you buy a printer that uses a different cartridge for each color (cmyk lc lm). The printers that have all those colors in one cartridge will cost you the most in the long run because certain colors are needed and used more so they run out faster than other colors.
Typically yellow is needed the most, magenta second, then cyan, light magenta, light cyan and then black (Which is used the least and last the longest). If you don't buy a printer that uses 1 cartridge per color you have to replace the whole thing when one color runs out even when all the other colors are at pretty high levels. Printers that use multi-colors in a single cartridge are typically cheaper for this reason.
With the printhead argument there are 2 types used in consumer desktop inkjet printers. HP uses thermal printheads which use heat to push ink droplets out, the heat wears out the printheads pretty fast and need to replaced more often to maintain the quality. That is why on hp deskjets the printheads are built into the cartridge. The other type of printhead is Piezo printheads which Epson uses, uses electricity to push ink droplets out. These last quite a long time due to less wear on the head.
I own 6 HP Designjet 5500's 60" large format printers which is pretty much the same technology in the DeskJet printers but at a larger scale. The ink cartridges cost $199 each x 6 colors for 600ml and printheads last about 3 cartridges and cost about $75 each color to replace. I also have 16 foot Vutek and a 72" roland which both use piezo printheads that cost about $700-$1200 each to replace but last until there is physical damage or short circuit to them ( I've put literally a few hundred GALLONS of ink through them with no problem). Ink costs on these printers run about $150 per liter albeit it being a different type of ink.
When it comes to large format printers, the cost difference between the 2 types of printers are substantial. HP printers have the best quality and are much cheaper (around $19,000) , but ink costs are higher and media cost is also higher since the ink it uses requires coated media (i.e. photopaper). The 16 foot vutek I have cost about half a mil, and the roland which is more comparable to the HP's I have is about $35,000 but ink and media is about 1/3 the cost if I were to print the same thing.