Anyone recommend an economical office printer

[Andrew Martin]

As your printing paper cant you refill your carts if your just using black ?.. its a lot cheaper that way

[Mo Gillis-Coates]

Liam, we have an epson px650, I have it fitted with a continuous ink system… I never need to buy cartridges again. In fact I printed 3000 colour leaflets on it the other day……

In one cartridge of ink there is 8ml … now think of a spoonful of medicine, which is 5ml…… so as you can see it’s not a lot.

It costs me less than £30 to put 100ml in for each colour in my system and thats £30 for all six colours, so £5 each, anyone still using regular cartridges for ink jet printers has got money to burn… we print about 30 invoices a day from ours…. Even if it messed up my printer (which it hasn’t and its been running for 2 years now on the system) it would be cheaper to throw it away and buy a new one than keep paying out for ridiculously expensive cartridges and refils… I have the same system in my large format printer.

I have a friend who does cartridge refils, he charges £12 a cart and makes £11.95p profit on them…… you do the maths lol

[Liam Pattison]

Thanks both for your answers, i never heard of a continuous ink system, so i will google this and look into it. Thanks for your advice.

Liam

[David-Foster-]

Thinking of getting a continuous ink system for my Canon Pixma. Each colour cartridge is £16 with ChromaLife 100 ink 😮

Can you get the kit with similar quality ink? Any recommendations on suppliers please?

[Mo Gillis-Coates]

I used the above mentioned suppliers, never had any problems with the inks at all inkjetrevolution.com

[Andrew Martin]

David… you can get a continuous ink system for your canon pixma here…
http://www.cityinkexpress.co.uk/ciss/ci … n-printers

But the quality of ink may not be up to all that unless you just documents etc.

I myself stick to just refilling carts on my canon pixma MP460 😀

[Lorraine Clinch]

Epson all-in-one here too, with continuos ink systen. set-up purchased from ‘the’ site, and as Mo said, cheap as chips for replacement inks, in fact I filled mine just the other day, first time in about a year.
Two issues, one that the colours are not as good as genuine inks, but more than adequate for general printing, and the other is that every printer I have used them on require some ‘adaption’.

Lorraine

[Martin Pearson]

Lorraine easy to take away your first issue over the inks not being as good as genuine inks. Just buy a higher quality ink like Lyson or similar but then again you will pay more for them so the improvement comes at a price.

Just for run of the mill stuff though any cheap ink will do the job and there are a few places that seem to almost give it away.

Can’t help with your second issue though, for you not to have to adapt the printer it would need to be built by the manufacturer to accept a bulk ink system and that isn’t going to happen while they are making money selling cartridges :lol1: :lol1:

[David-Foster-]

Thanks all, yes Andrew I would prefer quality so refilling them may be a better solution. I know you need to get new chipped empty cartridges and I can get the better ink.

It is for photographs, not the batch printing of 1000’s of leaflets.

[Martin Pearson]

David, you can still get the quality if you use a decent ink, Mo and Lorraine are running cheap as chips ink through their continuous ink systems because that suits their needs but you can run good inks in them and get good results. Yes you pay more for the inks but it’s still a lot cheaper than ink cartridges.

[David Rowland]

Did you say u just wanted a black only printer?

well we had two brother laser cheapos from ebuyer and it really is cheap… i mean practically nothing to run

Colour, different story… we on Xerox contract for office workstation.

[Andrew Martin]

quote David-Foster-:

Thanks all, yes Andrew I would prefer quality so refilling them may be a better solution. I know you need to get new chipped empty cartridges and I can get the better ink.

It is for photographs, not the batch printing of 1000’s of leaflets.

On mine i dont need new chipped carts… there is a key press sequence via the control panel to reset ink levels but it depends on what pixma model you have.

[David-Foster-]

Andrew 😉

[John Maughan]

I have a worked for Canon and had a KM dealership plus and Epson Express centre.

The CISS thing is ok but will eventually mess up the print heads – Buy a cheap model plus a spare and then get the CISS to fit, its usualy cheaper to replace a printer then faff about replacing heads, but they update the printers and ink systems and you end up with a CISS that does not fit the new model printer.

If going for a bigger model machine, buy a KM Bizhub – top notch and the older ones take 3rd party toner without problems – the black toenr for a bizhunC451 is £11.50 trade.

A quick tip is to turn the printer on and leave it on – switching a Epson inkjet on and off makes it do a print head clean – ink down the drain!

mod-edit

[Craig Ross]

I have a Dell 1320C for printing invoices and general stuff on A4 Paper. Quality is fine and it is cheap to run! Plus it can be USB or Networked, and works perfectly, no problems with mine so far and its 2yrs old.

They are only £133.50 inc two sets of toners, they say each toner does 2K prints but I think it does more than that.

Take a look.

http://www.ijtdirect.co.uk/?sct=dell1320cn

[Mo Gillis-Coates]

Ok, just to add a little perspective here, I use my ciss for basically printing my invoices, which is probably about 10-15 a day. Also I print colour A5 flyers to go in with each invoice, and recently I printed 2000 A5 leaflets with colour for a friend…..

So this is how it would work out for me, assuming the print heads eventually get damaged and waste by the continuous system. This happened to my Epson R360 3 weeks ago after 2 years use with the ciss.

Epson R360 printer cost £50
Ciss System (complete with 600ml of ink the equivalent of 20 full sets of cartridges) £30
Ink refils during the 2 year period for the Ciss (once) £20
Total running cost for 2 years = £100 (or approximately £1 a week)

When printer died, I threw away everything including the CISS system and bought a new printer and new ciss system. (i’m in the middle of printing 300 full colour, with photos double sided A4 leaflets on 200gsm paper as we speak)

If I had had to buy cartridges for the printer, and even if those cartridges where non genuine cartridges is would have cost me around £200 in ink alone. So I have no problem dumping a printer in the bin and getting another if it screws up…. and it fulfils my "retail therapy" needs 😉

I strongly recommend this system as a dirt cheap way to print your basic office docs, I use a slightly more expensive ink for my large format ink jets, and use refillable carts with a chip re setter. that’s been banging away 20-30 meters a week on a variety of media such as canvas and glossy photo paper for nearly 4 years now and still going strong.

[Tim Painter]

Mo why o why are you printing flyers when you can buy litho so cheap.

[John Maughan]

He’s got a point – 500 DL flyers on 170gsm silk are £50 inc Vat and delivery on my website.
http://onlineprint.printerpeople.biz/Le … ting-p323/

If you personalise the flyers fair enough, but home made flyers look a bit naff.

PS if you want a Epson R360 I have one boxed. There is also a super A3 Epson out at the minute called a B1100, only about £150

[Hugh Potter]

Am I missing something?

Other than the fact he’s prob bought one in the past 6 weeks since the question was posed, I think he was simply asking for something to print basic black and White, envelopes, letters etc, that’s how I read it anyways.

Just in case he’s not already got one.. My cheap basic printer which only really does envelopes, occasional proofs and invoices etc ( I use the laser for the posh papers) is an Epsom sx218 I think. Cost less than £30 delivered with two sets of generic carts. I buy 6 sets of four carts for less than £20 delivered, what more does one need for basic office duties? The laser isn’t cheap to run so is used conservatively as required. I bought the last one in jan and have still got four unopened packs of carts. Cheap enough for me!

[Mo Gillis-Coates]

quote Tim Painter:

Mo why o why are you printing flyers when you can buy litho so cheap.

2 reasons:

1) They are for a local charity (pre school) so I don’t charge and they don’t want or need anything too fancy or expensive (£50 is a lot of money for the school)

2) The flyers cost me less than a tenner to produce and I can turn them around in an evening at home.

I sponsor a lot of things for the charity. I also just printed off and bound 30 x 110 page (double sided) policies and procedures booklets, which cost me pretty much nothing more than an evenings work at home with the wife.

quote Hugh Potter:

Am I missing something?

Other than the fact he’s prob bought one in the past 6 weeks since the question was posed, I think he was simply asking for something to print basic black and White, envelopes, letters etc, that’s how I read it anyways.

Just in case he’s not already got one.. My cheap basic printer which only really does envelopes, occasional proofs and invoices etc ( I use the laser for the posh papers) is an Epsom sx218 I think. Cost less than £30 delivered with two sets of generic carts. I buy 6 sets of four carts for less than £20 delivered, what more does one need for basic office duties? The laser isn’t cheap to run so is used conservatively as required. I bought the last one in jan and have still got four unopened packs of carts. Cheap enough for me!

You couldn’t ask for better than that hugh! nice one!

[Gavin MacMillan]

Mo – do you have a link for the R360 @ around £50, pretty interested in getting this setup