Need advice on buying a new printer...

[manxixe]

hi everyone, what a great forum this is...i've been reading through all the posts and trying to get up to speed on making my next printer purchase....but hoping for some input from everyone

i need an inkjet that has decent quality, but is easy on wither catr refill prices, or is fairly easy to do refills on

the printer will only be used to print out e-books....so mainly black text, but they need to be color because there are illustrations in the ebooks

right now i'm doing all my printing on an HP L7780 which puts out some great looking prints pretty fast, but i don't want to use it so much anymore for 2 reasons

its pretty ink thirsty, and the refill carts arent cheap

also, this is our main office AIO printer, and i'd rather not put all the wear and tear on it for something like printing out alot of ebooks

thanks !

 

[websnail]

For that sort of work and given that you already have an L7780 I'd give the K5400dtn a look...

It's got the same printheads and inks as the L7780 and you can get the paper capacity around 550 - 600 with the extra tray so less time spent re-loading the paper all the time.

As to the ink side of things... There are options available for HP88 built printers of which I sell myself but I'd recommend casting around and see if there's anything like 3rd party carts, re-manufactured or other continuous ink supply (CIS) system that might otherwise do the job.

Canons are good for photos but you'll be refilling paper all the time, Epsons can be good but you'll want an older one to keep costs down in terms of consumables and also to ensure you can fit an external waste ink tank and thus reset the waste ink counter.

Epson are also bringing out a new model in the UK (not sure about everywhere else) called the B300 or B500dn which is similar to the HP K5400. No hard figures on the consumables but you can guarantee there's no 3rd party consumables out there yet and unlikely to be for 6 months or more until the new style chips are hacked so your options would be OEM Epson consumables only there too.

Hope that helps anyways

 

[zepper]

I bought a set of refillable ink tanks for my K5400 (same print engine) on fleaBay (some come with a fill of ink already in them) and they seem to work fine. They hold the same (or more) ink than the 88XL tanks. Haven't gotten to the end of the original fill on mine, so I can't tell you from experience about the ease of refilling them, but they come with the syringes and plugs, so it should be very easy. But when you change you have to do all 4 as apparently they don't play well with the OEM tanks.
I plan to buy my refill ink from either Hobbicolor or MIS.

.bh.