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#1: What printer? Author: TurboZed, Location: Midlands, UK

Posted: Mon Feb 25, 2008 11:50 am
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Hi!
At the moment I have an Epson D92 printer thats driving me potty mainly because it consumes ink like its going out of fashion. I'll quite happily take it outside and and take an axe to it! Before today I had never heard of CIS, and reading on here it seems to be only used on epson and cannon printers?
I would really like to know what printer to buy (new or secondhand but must be cheap!) and what CIS system to buy to go with it thats going to be idiot proof , as I'm not very technically minded!
Thanks for your time,
Jim

#2: Re: What printer? Author: Martin, Location: South Yorkshire, UK

Posted: Mon Feb 25, 2008 12:27 pm
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TurboZed wrote:
Hi!
At the moment I have an Epson D92 printer thats driving me potty mainly because it consumes ink like its going out of fashion. I'll quite happily take it outside and and take an axe to it!

A few people have done that and found it to be very satisfying.. I've been tempted myself in truth Wink

Quote:
Before today I had never heard of CIS, and reading on here it seems to be only used on epson and cannon printers?

Actually you can get or build CIS kits for pretty much any inkjet printer you want so long as you know how. Most of the CIS kits out on places like eBay are chinese clone kits being resold by companies with varying degrees of skill, knowledge and support. Sadly many fall into the "total joke" category with a small selection actually having a clue.

Thinking about it though, HP have had a small selection of printers that are essentially CIS equipped with printers like the 1100, K550 and more recently the L7000 series and K5400's...

Personally I love the Canon printers but fitting a CIS in these is a royal pain in the patookis and there's so many things that can go wrong you probably don't want to go there. Epsons are where I cut my teeth but having looked at the spec for your D92 any ideas I had of bothering with a CIS for this promptly bit the bullet.. It's a heap of ****. Also most Epsons now use a new cartridge/chip design which is causing problems for CIS auto-reset chip designers.

Quote:
I would really like to know what printer to buy (new or secondhand but must be cheap!) and what CIS system to buy to go with it thats going to be idiot proof , as I'm not very technically minded!

Given you've had a D92 I'd hazzard a guess that you're not really worrying too much about photo quality prints in which case my suggestion would be to go with a K5400 and then get your CIS from www.inkpouch.com. Now I know you'll probably see the price for the kit and go "How MUCH?!!!" but having experienced some very, VERY cr*p CIS kits from eBay I have to say this is a much more elegant solution and it uses the actual HP system instead of trying to bypass it.

I've created something similar for my own needs (I supply and maintain kits for a number of schools) and it does work very nicely.

Hope that gives you some food for thought and definitely get a few opinions because mine is somewhat biased Very Happy

#3: Author: TurboZed, Location: Midlands, UK

Posted: Mon Feb 25, 2008 2:48 pm
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Hi Martin
Thanks for the quick reply.
Perhaps I should tell you what I'm using the printer for. I make specialist software addons purely to be sold to raise money for charity, and print the cd lables and the DVD box inserts. The quality is not that important. I used to use an aincient Epson 640 which although was very slow, was very cheap to run, but ink became a PITA to get hold of, and eventually the printhead gave up the ghost. I bought the D92 to replace it because it was cheap as chips and the old 640 had given years of trouble free service, but has turned out to be a rubbish buy, not only does it cost a fortune to run, but the print quality is also very poor.
I suppose if you could recommend any printer that would be cheap to run and be reliable that would a great help. I suppose I print about 1000 DVD inserts and CD lables a year, usually in batches of a 100. A friend recommended a Brother DCP 115C, and sure enough the ink cartridges appear to be cheap, but I carn't find one for sale at the moment.
Thanks for your help.
Jim

#4: Author: Martin, Location: South Yorkshire, UK

Posted: Mon Feb 25, 2008 2:59 pm
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TurboZed wrote:
Perhaps I should tell you what I'm using the printer for. I make specialist software addons purely to be sold to raise money for charity, and print the cd lables and the DVD box inserts. The quality is not that important. I used to use an aincient Epson 640 which although was very slow, was very cheap to run, but ink became a PITA to get hold of, and eventually the printhead gave up the ghost. I bought the D92 to replace it because it was cheap as chips and the old 640 had given years of trouble free service, but has turned out to be a rubbish buy, not only does it cost a fortune to run, but the print quality is also very poor.

Ah, ok, so a reasonable print quality is required then... Well in that regard the K5400 is still a good choice but I wouldn't want to use it for photo printing. Best I can suggest is that you find someone or somewhere that has one and ask them to do a test print so you can get a good idea of quality. Given that the print engine in the K5400 is much the same as the one in my L7680 the quality is pretty reasonable and will be better than your D92 Smile

If you want greater detail then you could opt for a Canon iP4500 (or a refurbished iP4300) which would even allow you to print direct on the CD/DVD's if you had the right media. As I said I'm not really all that fond of the CIS kits for these printers and whilst refilling is an option the problem then is one of the ink monitoring software being turned off as soon as refilling is detected. If I was going to recommend any CIS kit for the Canon pixma it would be from www.inksupply.com as they use the OEM cartridges and have everything you'd need in a kit. They're not cheap as a result but you can easily flog your original OEM carts on ebay for about £40 and make some money back.

I'd offer you a kit I'd put together myself but frankly my kits are rather, erm, shoddy in terms of finish. In terms of future ink refills though you could source them from any image specialists reseller (because you want to keep with the brand used originally) of which I'm one, albeit in a very limited way. There are others in the UK Smile

On the up side I can help you with troubleshooting the Canons if you hit problems as I've learned so much the really hard, tortuous way over the past 2+ years Razz

Quote:
I suppose if you could recommend any printer that would be cheap to run and be reliable that would a great help. I suppose I print about 1000 DVD inserts and CD lables a year, usually in batches of a 100. A friend recommended a Brother DCP 115C, and sure enough the ink cartridges appear to be cheap, but I carn't find one for sale at the moment.

In all honesty, Epsons are out because they tend to clog and will waste a lot of ink... Canons are in the running but you want to thinking about refilling or a CIS if you go that route because the consumables are expensive. The HP K5400 is a definite contender as the consumables are cheap (get high capacity), you can buy 3rd party consumables (be careful which ones you buy!) and they are the fastest of the bunch.

There ya go, plenty to think about Wink

Oh and apologies for the spam filter catching you... somehow your word combination came out with trigger word so I overrode it.

#5: Author: TurboZed, Location: Midlands, UK

Posted: Mon Feb 25, 2008 8:11 pm
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Hi Martin,
Thank you very much for all that info. It sure helps to choose a printer to buy, plus I can have the option of going down the CIS route anytime I feel like it Wink

Cheers
Jim
Edit....
Actually I might take you up on one of your kits at a later date, believe me I couldn't give a monkeys what it looks like!

#6: Author: Martin, Location: South Yorkshire, UK

Posted: Tue Feb 26, 2008 9:26 am
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TurboZed wrote:
Thank you very much for all that info. It sure helps to choose a printer to buy, plus I can have the option of going down the CIS route anytime I feel like it

Yup.. To be fair that option will probably always be open to you, even with the Epsons but because the market just got smaller for 3rd party manufacturers of carts/CIS's in the USA (Legal action by Epson shutdown 3rd party cartridge sellers!) it's going to take longer and probably be seen as a reason not to invest for those in the trade.

Quote:
Edit....
Actually I might take you up on one of your kits at a later date, believe me I couldn't give a monkeys what it looks like!

LOL... Well, I'm still working out the kinks especially in terms of transportation (gotta love the post offices idea of "this way up") but you know where to find me.

#7: Author: TurboZed, Location: Midlands, UK

Posted: Sat Mar 28, 2009 3:14 am
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Hi Martin,
I thought I'd just come back and give you an update of what I have been doing. I ended up buying a reconditioned Brother DCP-135C of peanuts off ebay, sofar (grabs a piece of wood!) its been brilliant! I just carn't believe how much printing one set of cartridges will do, plus I get 12 of any colour combination I want for £16 again off ebay. Its been a boon as the latest computer game addon we have made is selling like hotcakes so the printer has already done about 1200 prints already this year. It was so cheap I bought another of ebay ready to replace it should it fail.
Cheers
Jim

#8: Author: Martin, Location: South Yorkshire, UK

Posted: Sun Mar 29, 2009 12:18 am
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Hey Jim,

Interesting to hear that Brother are a contender... I must admit to eskewing them completely because, well, nobody seems to talk about them at all...

Given that I've got enough on my plate with all the Epson printers I've been bringing in and taking apart I think I'll have to continue to give them a miss but if you ever take a look at the waste ink side of things in those printers I'd love to hear more on how it all works as well as how the issue of resetting the counter is done.

Glad you've got a solution that works for you though...
Smile

Martin

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