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“Cheap” Printers

Roll Up. Roll Up. Get Your Bargain Printers Here

Not so very long ago, a printer was a non-trivial purchase. Back in the eighties a basic mono 8 pin dot matrix printer would set you back a couple of hundred quid at a time when your Atari ST or Amiga wasn’t much more expensive. Prices have fallen to unprecedented levels and today you can pick up a usable printer such as Canon’s BJC-1000 for £40 or so. Is this really the bargain it looks? Why spend £200 on an Epson 890 if you can get something similar for less than a quarter of the price? 

One of the driving forces behind the reduction in price is similar to the almost giveaway prices of many games consoles. The bottom line is, the printer isn’t where the money is made. It is the consumables such as the ink cartridges and specialised papers that make the real cash. 

Manufacturers know that by selling you a printer at a low price, you will make them lots of money over the coming months or years buying their matching ink. Sure, you could conceivably use someone else’s ink and there has been a booming market in third party inks in recent years that undercut the official products by quite a margin. This had had some interesting side effects though. Firstly, rumours started to abound that manufacturers would refuse to honour guarantees if they found someone else’s ink had been used. They argued that the inks damaged the print heads or clogged them up causing many of the problems. To further protect this position, manufacturers have made their ink cartridges more intelligent by adding chips that more accurately monitor ink usage and allow the printer drivers to better predict how many pages can be printed before a new cartridge is needed. It’s purely a side effect that this also means that unless the ink cartridge had such a chip it won’t work, effectively locking out the third party ink makers.

However, devices are starting to appear that can reprogram used ink cartridges allowing them to be refilled. Additionally, third party cartridges are starting to appear that have chips and appear to work well. Perhaps the result of some reverse engineering?

So that accounts for how the printers can be made so cheaply. Why buy anything else? There are in fact many reasons. The cheaper printers tend to be very slow and have limited print quality and features. If you just want to print the odd letter or perhaps a few web pages then the Epson Stylus 480 at around £43 is more than adequate. If you want more speed then the Stylus 580 at £49 is 50% quicker for not much more money. The very cheapest ones sometimes need a change of cartridge to print colour whereas more money buys a printer that holds both black and colour cartridges at the same time. Finally, cheaper often equals louder. More upmarket printers can be almost whisper quiet as they print compared to the clanking and banging that cheaper ones can produce. 

If you want to print photos, even the cheap printers will work but for true quality you want to look more upmarket. Both Hewlett Packard and Epson have some superb printers around the £200 mark that produce prints almost indistinguishable from ‘proper’ photos.

The prices at the bottom end of the market are very compressed with big leaps for not much extra outlay. As mentioned, Canon do a printer for £40. This gives you 720x360 printing at 4 pages per minute for black and .6 for colour. £50 spent on an Epson 580 gets you 1440x720 at 3.2 pages per minute, a huge jump for another tenner. If you then move on up to an HP 840C at £73 you get 8 pages per minute in mono and 5 for colour.

The bottom line is that you do get what you pay for. If your needs are basic then you really don’t need to splash out much more than £80 for a printer but do bear in mind the running costs. The cartridges and paper soon start to mount up especially if third party inks aren’t available. If you do a lot of printing and need high quality then you really should consider the more expensive printers as the time and effort they save you will more than make up for the extra outlay. 

Iain Laskey