Printer question

Hey computer guys. Where is a good forum where I can get some hits on printer questions? I posted the following on the dpreview site, printer forum but don't get a lot of hits on printer questions I have posted there before. Of course feel free to chime in and post responses yourself on the questions I have asked.

My i960 is about to run out on ALL of it's ink and rather the replace for $60-70 bucks or so I am wondering if there are better alternatives now in a new printer.

What I like about the i960:

-Speed of Operation
-pretty decent photo quality at least compared to others at the time of purchase.

What I don't like about the i960:

-Eats ink like a hummer eats gas!
-Heads seem to clog fairly easily particularly when not used much although thus far have always been able to clear using the clean function of the print utility.
-Not known for lightfastness.
-Poor grayish text although this is to be expected in a photo printer.

What I would like in a replacement.

-Costs $150 or less, would pay a little more if really worth it.
-better lightfastness
-better quality if possible
-more economical in ink usage.
-Speed is not terrible important, above mentioned desires are more important.

Epson seems to have the first ColorFast pigments (as opposed to inks).

With the new ColorFast™ Ink technology, EPSON is once again setting the standards of professional ink jet printing. ColorFast™ technology is based on a resin Micro-Encapsulation of the pigments, which are microscopically small and harmonized in terms of size and shape - as soon as the ink particles come into contact with print media they are fixed onto it as a result of the polymerization of the resin.

The result is high abrasion resistance, high chroma, wide colour gamut and ultra high light-fastness of up to 200† years, [font=&quot]indoors, when used with particular specific EPSON media.[/font]

Click to expand...

However, between the Wal-Mart's, Costco's, and others offering $0.17-$25 per 4"x6" print services (with 1-hour pickup or free USPS shipping), doing color printing at home is probably going to cost you a lot more and give you poor results.

-Bill

PS: Also do a search for "Continuous Ink System", CIS, and/or Continuous Inking System. Everyone in Taipei Taiwan seemed to have these external ink feed systems installed on their printers when I was there a few months ago... It is a very handy way to bypass the need to spend huge amounts of money to buy new print cartridges.

You will find links like this for commercially manufactured external Ink Jet feed systems. And, you will also find home made versions too.

The newer printers are installing a chip that counts the amount of ink used--and prevents you from refilling using the standard ink refill kits. Printer manufacturer's are, typically selling the printers at or below manufacturing cost... Whereas the new print cartridges are selling the ink its equivalent weight in GOLD--in some cases).

You can find a simple device that can reset the counter back to zero--But, you will have to research to see which printers have the chip, and how easy it would be to bypass (if present) if you were going to use a CIS system.

I chose to purchase a laser printer instead because I was constantly running out of ink (of course, one color only in a multi-color print cartridge) when only printing a relatively small number of pages... A good Laser Printer should give you at 5,000 prints (at 5% coverage). Of course, printing color photos just sucks down the ink.

The refill kit worked OK on my old Canon Jet printer--but the external tanks seem to be the answer to give you a cheap and convenient way to finally get satisfaction with the typical ink-jet type printer.

I have not tried any of these CIS systems--but with the price of OEM cartridges, it hardly seems that you can lose to try it.



One last printer to look at is a new HP (don't know the model) which contains 4 colors (3 colors + black) for color printing. It looks slow (4 ppm?), but it may offer a better printing experience (if you don't need 7 process color prints).

-BB

You could try the forums over at forums.Anandtech.com

It is a fairly small community with +125,000 users registered, rather active folks, right now there are 575 users logged in.

There's one thing you can lose - maximum quality and color reproduction. This probably isn't an issue if you are just printing photos for yourself, but if you are doing color-sensitive work with sRGB color management, you're probably better off using the original inks. I've seen some awesome results out of Canon's i9950 printers using the original cartridges and TBH I wouldn't trust some of the stuff I do to third party inks. As always, it depends on what you're doing and how critical it is.

I have to second the cannon recomendation. Got tired of the Epson plugging up from infrequent use. Bought a Canon I850 for the same price as a new printhead. Mine's worked well since we got it. Wife uses it daily.

I wish it had a network interface so I did not have to tie it to a print server.


Daniel