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How To Buy A Printer That Won't Break The Bank

OK I confess I've bought at least 10 inkjet printers in the last 5 years and finally found one that I really like. I'm not going to mention the brand here but I will tell you what the must have features are for me.

After years of refilling HP-like inkjet cartridges where the Cyan, Magenta and Yellow tanks were all mixed together in one unit I decided to buy a printer that allowed you to change each color tank individually. Although a minor change this affected how much it cost to print a colored output page in a huge degree. I never liked the concept of having all of the colors in one cartridge to start with. Every time I went to replace an empty cartridge I wondered how much ink was left in the other two colored ink tanks. If you didn't notice they were always a dark color making it impossible to tell how much was actually in the tank.

My new unit seems to use the Yellow cartridge (black aside) more than any other color which makes me curse the days where I envisioned myself throwing money in the toilet by only using half of the colored ink in a multi color ink jet cartridge. This backs up my initial thought process and confirmed all suspicions.

Since I'm a small business owner and penny pinching is always a must, I continuously test how much mileage that I get out of a cartridge. As you well know the little pop up window tells you when your cartridge is running low and it seems like it's there to annoy you and serves no other purpose. Being the cheapo that I am I decided to ignore the warnings and bells and whistles that normally go off and run a cartridge to the end of its tank.

It was tense, a sense of childlike mischief came across my mental state. I was actually defying the printing gods by defying their warnings of certain doom, nefariously clicking the cancel on every warning message. Surely something spectacular would happen at the end of the life of this inkjet cartridge! I had gotten about a thousand messages warning me of the peril that was coming my way. I envisioned scenes from nuclear war footage and big things happening like the printer exploding or perhaps the printer cartridge police showing up at my house and arresting me for such gross disrespect for printer law. Whatever happened this would be BIG!

Well after running the cartridge for about a month I got a harmless message that the cartridge was now out. No big light show, no explosion no nothing, what a disappointment! Anyway, I installed a new cartridge, realigned the thing using the printing utility and was up and running in about five minutes.

The point of the whole ordeal was to figure out how many more print jobs that I could do without changing the ink. Thus, saving me some extra cash. Well a month of printing is nothing to scoff at and it ended up saving me around $5.00 by using the cartridge down to the last drop.

Will it work on your printer? I don't know.. But you should check out the manual for your printer to ensure that you won't damage it by running the cartridge dry.

But friend I choose to live life on the edge. =)

Alexis Allen is a self-described consumer advocate in the Home Electronics Industry. You can check out her latest articles on the cost of printing at http://www.cheap-toner-cartridges.com

MORE RESOURCES:

Yahoo! News Search Results for hardware
Yahoo! News Search Results for hardware

• DEACOM ERP Software To Integrate Building Component, Lumber And Hardware Busi...
Deacom, Inc. today announced Allensville Planing Mill, Inc. will implement the DEACOM Integrated Accounting and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Software System to manage its truss and wall panel manufacturing business and lumber and hardware stores.
• Rich Forbes, Home & Hardware Unit Leader at Fortune Brands, to Retire (Buildi...
DEERFIELD, IL -- Rich Forbes, president and chief executive officer of Fortune Brands Home & Hardware, announced that he plans to retire at the end of 2009. Effective April 1, 2009, Christopher J. Klein, currently senior vice president - strategy and corporate development of Fortune Brands, will become president and chief operating officer - home products, and report to Forbes.
• Dell hopes business realignment, new offerings help it go beyond commercial h...
Dell Inc. likes the consumer market just fine, thank you, but it sure didn't waste any time shifting the focus from holiday shopping to commercial technology.
• Indian navy agrees to $2.1B deal for Boeing planes (AP via Yahoo! Finance)
The Indian navy has agreed to buy eight reconnaissance and anti-submarine planes from Boeing Co. in a $2.1 billion deal that signals the developing nation's drive to upgrade its military hardware.
• New Apple Mac Mini Hardware To Be Supported By Revolutionary SeeFile Web Shar...
Announcement at MacWorld SanFrancisco - Bundles available to include SeeFile 4.6 software and new Mac hardware; Web hosted version to offer affordable monthly startup (PRWeb Jan 5, 2009) Read the full story at http://www.prweb.com/releases/macworld/DAM/prweb1824054.htm

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