14 Nov 2014

Going backwards?

After many many years of good service our HP "all in one" low cost printer, scanner and copier has finally died: it would probably cost far more to mend than replace.  So, a few days ago I bought the nearest equivalent. It was delivered today. An HP Deskjet 2540, bought as I was so impressed with the original HP machine.

Why is it that things seem to go backwards? OK, the new machine also supports wireless printing, but I found the set-up more difficult and far less intuitive.  The "easy start" guide which was purely diagrammatic was confusing.  Even installing the cartridges seemed more tricky. In one of my 2 laptops the CD failed to read.

They call it progress.

3 comments:

G1KQH said...

I moved away from Inkjet a couple of years ago to a Brother Laser printer. With having a family, I found the high consumption of ink & the cost too high for the replacement cartridges. The Laser just goes on and on and on....... & on..

73 G1KQH

Anonymous said...

The price of ink cartridges is one of those well known large scale scams that run and run. You get the printer for well below cost then pay £15 for 4mL of ink. However laser toner can cost even more, some toners cost £60 for 2,000 sides, a full set for colour is £240 !!!!

To lower the toner cost you need to go to very expensive printers with high capacity toner cartridges but the colour is not great. In our little business we now use a HP X551 which has giant carts and a real 70 pages per min print speed in full colour, it has an A4 wide print head with 42,000 nozzles and uses pigmented inks which last a lot longer than the cheap dye inks used in nearly all other inkjet printers.
The speed allows at least a tenfold increase in output over other inkjets and many lasers whilst having half to a quarter ink/toner cost. The print head is remarkable engineering, it is micromachined using some IC methods, the paper does not contact the print head as it is driven past the stationary head.
Drivers loaded on XP and W7 without any issues at all.

Alan G8LCO

G1KQH said...

Yes that true you think you are getting a bargain of a price with an inkjet for 40 Quid or so, but you pay it back by getting stiched up for the cartridges..

To Inkup my Old Lexmark was around £50 for both cartridges for around 500 sheets.. I think the colour cartidge just evaporated more in the end through lack of use..

Moving over to the Brother I get close on 2000 sheets of B/W basic printing for around £30 for a genuine cartridge..

http://www.ebuyer.com/150071-brother-tn2005-black-toner-cartridge-tn2005

73 Steve