Photo printer cartridges

[Rick Potter]

My wife works at a church pre school, and takes a lot of pictures of the kids. She prints them out for display, and to give to the parents, with a Hewlett Packard Photo Smart. This is the one that cost's about $175. The ink cartridges are about $25-30 each, and she has to change it every hundred photos or so.

Has anyone used one of those ink refilling stores? Results? It would save the school some money. There is a store that recently opened near her work, but we have not tried it because of bad results with a home refilling kit.

Thanks,

Rick Potter

[Joe Pelonio]

I tried it, not worth the trouble, I got all kinds of error messages. I think HP has spent a lot of time and money to make people use their cartridges. For non-photo simple printing I bought a $49 Canon that uses $7 cartridges. Next time you buy a printer I suggest noting the best ones for print quality, then compare cartridge prices as the next consideration. It's pretty ridiculous to pay 1/4 the price of a printer for an ink cartridge.

[Matt Meiser]

That's why we bought a Kodak for our new printer. Ink is significantly cheaper. Quality seems excellent to me.

Or, compare cost wise to sending them to something like Snapfish, Walgreens, etc.

[Gene Howe]

I've heard that Yemen has some great prices on ink cartridges.
Seriously, Matt has a great idea.

[Roger Newby]

+1 on the Kodak. We changed about a years ago because of the price of ink.
Had an HP that cost 60 bucks to refill when the cartridges needed replaced. The Kodak runs less than 1/2 that and we are happy with print results.

[Dave Lehnert]

I looked at a Kodak but did not seem to get very good reviews.

If times allows it is way cheaper to take them to the store and print out.

[Tim Morton]

The one advantage that HP has, is that the print head is in the cartridge...so each time you change the cartridge its like having a new printer.

[Jim Tobias]

Rick,
I ordered from these folks: Prices below and have been using them about a month with no problems.
Jim

https://www.4inkjets.com


Items Ordered Qty Price
REMANC6656 Reman HP 56 Black Ink cartridge 1 $12.99
REMANC6657 Reman HP 57 Tri Color Ink cartridge 1 $19.99
REMANC6658 Reman HP 58 Photo Ink cartridge 1 $18.99

[Rick Potter]

Thanks guys,

I will check into the other brands next time.

Jim, I tried them, but they don't have a our model number listed. Thanks.

Rick Potter

[Rick Davidson]

We had a HP photosmart and a Sony dye impression photo printer. Both cost way to much for refills. We now just e-mail all our pics to Walgreens and go pick them up an hr later. Way cheaper and I feel like good quality. Also might be worth checking into, you could talk to the store manager and see if the school could get a discount.

[Curt Harms]

Ebay item # 380130846735. I'm using these in an HP photosmart 7460 and so far so good. The only problem I had was I didn't replace them all at the same time and got a cartridge error. When i replaced them all and reset, it works as advertised. There are designed-to-be-refilled cartridges for other makes & models as well.

[Bryan Morgan]

Printer manufacturers don't care about selling you a printer, they make money off the ink. I believe its about $4000 a gallon these days.

You might look into getting a printer that is capable of accepting a bulk ink system (the printers don't have to be the big expensive models, they make bulk ink kits for many small printers). At home I have a little $50 6 color Canon that is capable of using a bulk ink system. Basically, instead of using tiny little ink cartridges you use tubes that go to bottles. Its not as messy or intimidating as it sounds. We use giant versions of these at work all the time (60" - 100" wide massive ink jets).

The thing is, with these third party inks, they may not be formulated to work correctly with the print heads. If your printer has replaceable heads, you may find yourself replacing those more often. If you can't replace the heads, you may wind up replacing the whole printer. Some hp models have the heads right on the ink cartridge so its fairly convenient. All printers today have more "nozzles" than the resolution of the printer. These are "extra" to make up for any clogged or broken "nozzles". There are a finite amount of nozzles, of course.

With our big machines, we tried using third party inks (this stuff is all very expensive) and the quality was not as good and heads and head cleaner systems would wear out too fast.

Also, depending on the model, hp "expires" ink cartridges. The ones we have in our big machines actually have a chip that keeps the manufacture date. Some just use drop counters. When the time runs out, the printer stops, even if its still half full. You can get programmers or wipers to reset this chip.

[Pat Germain]

I am of the opinion that all inkjet cartridges are a scam. As suggested, if you want to print photos, take the files to Target, Walgreens, Costco, etc. The print quality is far superior to an inkjet printer at a tiny fraction of the cost.

What really frosts my jammies is even if I don't use those inkjet cartridges they dry out and stop working. Grrrrr...

My advice is to buy a B&W laser printer for the home and use retail stores for color printing.

[Bryan Morgan]

I am of the opinion that all inkjet cartridges are a scam. As suggested, if you want to print photos, take the files to Target, Walgreens, Costco, etc. The print quality is far superior to an inkjet printer at a tiny fraction of the cost.

What really frosts my jammies is even if I don't use those inkjet cartridges they dry out and stop working. Grrrrr...

My advice is to buy a B&W laser printer for the home and use retail stores for color printing.

Thats a good point too. Also, ink jet ink does not last too long unless properly laminated with special laminate. We use "UV" stable pigment inks and not only do they not look as nice dye based inks, they don't last too long in the sunlight. The dye based inks fade pretty quick. There is "archival" ink but it also fades. They all fade over time. If you can get your digital prints on actual photo paper (they expose the paper with digitally controlled RGB lasers and then process it normally) you will be better off. We had a small machine by Fujitsu that did this. Now we have a big Cymbolic Sciences machine to do this (you think ink is expensive, try replacing a blue laser at $15,000 ! )

[Chris Kennedy]

The one advantage that HP has, is that the print head is in the cartridge...so each time you change the cartridge its like having a new printer.

This is why I went with HP eventually. I didn't print very often at home, and after having two print heads clogged up with dried ink, it made sense to go with the HP.

On the other hand, if you use your printer on a regular basis, you could go with a less expensive option.

Cheers,

Chris