The reason why printer ink is so expensive is the same reason printers are so cheap - you're not just buying a printer, you're also buying an obligation to keep it full. And that's where they make all their profits. Some may say that this is somehow unethical, or a scam. And they'd be right.
its was a 200gbp printer, thats a one stock left price listing on Amazon. Also two companies done the responsibly priced ink and cheaper ink and both models failed (Kodak and Lexmark Black)
They stop working when ink is "low" but in truth it never uses the whole cartridge, so you have to replace it more often. Some also recognise when you've manually filled up a cartridge and will reject it. Also, printer ink isn't expensive to produce its a massive scam its actually cheap.
@@BobSmith-rs7tn Though your printer doesn't like this and it always displays that it's low on ink. Once tried to hack it to accept the new ink and it ended up in the Chinese language or something.
I used to work at an office supply store and we had many regular customers that would buy a new printer every month instead of buying ink because a new printer came with ink and cost less than refilling their previous printer.
@@Agarwaen I ALWAYS DID!! The problem is the cheapest laser is only black and white often times doesn't have a document feeder, fax, or do photo quality so even though they won't use any of it they still would rather buy the cheap garbage inkjet they know will break in a week
@@nickNcar Best thing I did was get a cheap black and white laser printer. Works better than the inkjets ever did, prints nicer on ordinary paper, ink doesn't dry out, and haven't needed a refill yet in 2 years. I really don't need colour printing anymore.
@@cuoresportivo155 That's exactly what I've just done. Got my nice and new b/w laser printer yesterday. It also has a scanner/copy function. That's all I need.
This made me laugh. I got rid of my R800 for exactly that reason. So expensive to run, but also like other inkjet printers you have to use them regularly or they will dry up and you have to replace the cartridges anyway. I looked at the number of prints per year I did and decided that I don’t need colour (especially as so many places accept pdf tickets on your phone), and my printer spent at least 95% of the year doing nothing so I bought a black and white laser printer and never looked back. Yes there is a higher up front cost to purchase it, but the one thing that a laser printer does really well is sit around doing nothing until you need it. The dry toner powder doesn’t get any drier so it will work after weeks or months of inactivity. If I do need an occasional full colour print, the local copy shop is cheaper in the long run than owning a colour printer, plus they maintain their machines and replace them with newer units more regularly. Unless you have a specific use case for an inkjet because it will produce work that no other type of printer can do, ditch them!
toner is also great because half the time when the printer reports it empty, you just need to take it out and shake it around a little and it's good to go
Agree. Just printing from an off licence or a corner shop or Post Office or library is much cheaper in the long run than spending anywhere around £20-100 per a few prints and then replacing all the cartridges after not printing for months to do another print.
I had a similar printer years ago with multiple cartridges. The instructions said it was beneficial as you could just replace each cartridge as it ran out. No matter what I printed, all the ink levels went down at the same time. Thus I needed a whole set of cartridges, it was cheaper to just buy a new printer and use the ink that it comes with. Madness.
@@chaos.corner I think there was a video a few years ago showing how they put less and less ink across the years, but making people pay more, more often
Just received my mum’s one-year-old HP inkjet printer, but unfortunately, the cartridges had dried up. I replaced them with new ones, but now I'm getting a cartridge error message. Ended up taking it to the dump and had a good laugh when I saw someone else throwing out the same printer 😂
Printing secret.. food colouring printers are practically free printing for life, i use a Canon pixma xl (something in the ts range) plus bottles of printing food colouring.. easily bought on amazon or ebay, it costs about £120 total, you get maybe 300 decent colour prints before you need to refill, and you can refill about 20 times with the bottles you get with it (they even supply the syringes) almost never breaks down (and even then they are easy to fix just google the issue or use youtube) a full set of refill bottles will set you back about £17 should you ever run out.. have one at home, one at work, one at my bosses house, and one at her mums and a spare just in case.. the prints are crystal clear and indistinguishable from normal ink, with the only exception being that prints hot purple a bit grey, and tbh i can live with that.
Nowadays, printer manufacturers are smart in giving you only small or almost empty ink cartriges when buying a printer. But I remember a time where they had not yet caught on, and you could literally buy new inkjet printers *with* full cartriges cheaper than the cartriges alone. Had a laser printer for 10 years now, I print a decent amount and just recently had to replace the imaging drum and toner - total cost of 50€.
This is why the laser printer I bought over ten years ago is so fantastic. I have not needed to change the ink on it yet and I have a spare black ink cartridge in the cupboard.
The yellow ink is a sneaky anti-counterfeit measure. It prints yellow dot code on anything you print to uniquely identify you, should you be printing money or anything else you shouldn’t be.
Stopped buying Epson printers after my last one used up a while cartridge without me managing to print 1 page. Setting itself up when turned on and then it wouldn’t print clearly so two nozzle patterns, alignments and cleaning runs along with 2 attempts at printing a small image and it was reporting as empty.
worked close with epson (not UK though), really can't recommend any epson printer that is not made for professionals or large offices, as they are cheaply manufactured. They also don't care that much about the home business, it's only there to show presence on the market. Most of their printers under 500€ will probably give you more trouble than it's worth.
I had Epson printers for 20yr since my first computer.... think I'm on my third. I find really good quality print with Epsom cartridges but price is a Fg scam. I hate the fact it locks out - as indicated in the video, when one of the 4 cartridges is low. There no reason to lock out if you just want black - should have that option.
@@stuartd9741 According to multiple online sources, a little blue is allegedly used when only black is printed to strengthen the black, but this also means the blue will run out faster, bringing the whole thing to a halt when it runs out and leaving you scratching your head because you've only been printing in black. I've often wondered if something sneaky was going on with the Gloss Optimiser cartridge too because it always ran out even though I almost never used it and had it deselected in the print settings menu, but would have to buy a new one just to get the printer working again.
This actually happened to me when I discovered that my very old printer cost more to refill than a brand new printer -- donated the old one, bought the new one! One hint on saving ink: if you are printing a lot of black and white, be sure to deselect colour printing, as even though the doc may be B&W, if colour printing is selected, it creates the black from a mixture of the colours, using wayyy too much ink. Oh and btw, like many other such items, it isn't the ink that is expensive, it's the cartridge that costs and they are all just that little bit different...
If you've not seen "Ink Cartridges are a Scam" you should, the cartridge cost stupidly little for the company to produce, and their claims about research and development are plain lies. th-cam.com/video/AHX6tHdQGiQ/w-d-xo.html
I actually had an R800 and I was just waiting for him to say “gloss optimiser”. I also could not print out a page of black text because the gloss optimizer had run out. To make matters worse the print heads always clogged and you used tonnes of ink cleaning the print heads and doing test prints. Biggest piece of crap I have ever brought. I actually chucked my printer out of a first floor window into back garden, brought a Canon photo printer and have never brought an Epson product since, that was about 15 years ago! Annoyingly I did a similar (ish) story about the R800 to my friends however none of them found it very funny or interesting. It’s the way you tell em! I would also add that I was a professIonal photographer at the time, which is why I brought it, and that when it worked, without clogged print heads, it produced beautiful results (for.the time) and that bloody gloss optimizer did actually make a difference! However I also needed the thing to print invoices, expenses, etc and not being able to print a page of text without an £18 gloss optimizer proved too much, hence the window. I recently brought a really nice laser printer on eBay for £15 and have printed thousands of pages on it without it even needing a new toner!
I switched to a black and white laser years ago. Cheap to buy and online toner is a steal. If we really need colour (very rarely) it gets printed at work or swing past the copy shop.
Why do people still buy ink jet printers these days when colour laser printers are so comparatively cheap? Only slightly more expensive to buy the machine itself and although toner appears expensive, it last a long time and the quality of prints are far superior.
The majority of people should be owning lasers unless they do a lot of pictures. But realistically outside of photographers I don't see anybody needing to print photos all the time, the only time I constantly needed photo printing was in college and I would just pay 5cents per sheet at the library
I have Epson ink printer, with factory-installed CISS (Epson EcoTank series), and the ink is dirt cheap. And ink tanks are so big... One and half year on my original inks set, I hadn't had to refill yet.
I just have a black and white laser printer just need to replace the toner every 3 years or so. I very rarely need to print something in colour, but when I do, I either take the file to a printery or colour my page by hand with pencil crayons 🤷
Yup. This is one of those, funny because it's true type things. Costs $1 to make, sells at $60-$70, and some refuse to print even black and white if the color cartridge is "empty," and spoiler, they usually aren't actually empty. It's the biggest scam next to AEP Electric.
In fairness to Epson, that printer and its ink set ARE designed for high quality photo printing, not your average office/household throwaway tat. As a photographer, the printer meets sledge hammer bit was painful.
@@r0bw00d You'll never get deep blacks printing only with black ink. You'd have to configure it for regular low quality black and white printing to do that. Which dave probably had no clue he'd need to, or how he'd have to do it.
@@Agarwaen I've never heard of this feature. Of course, I haven't needed to print anything for a long time, thanks to this stupidity, so I don't know if this has always been the case. Why doesn't the configuration just happen automatically like it's supposed to?
This forced waste of the printing industry is disgusting in this day and age. We have a graveyard of printers that are perfectly good machines, basically culled from service because we couldn't afford to feed them! It's cheaper to get a new printer, and so people do, even though they don't want to!
To be fair, the R800 was meant to be used for printing photos to professional standards. Back in the time you had to leave a flash drive (or even burn the photos to a CD first) with the drugstores to get them "developed" a few days later. For people that didn't want to wait, this printer was able to give the same quality. IIRC it also came with a CD tray so you could print full colour labels to your CD-Rs. But yes, if you didn't use it every few days and/or mostly printed black/white text or diagrams, it was the wrong printer. You had to do a cleaning cycle after a few days of not using it and that wasted ink like nothing. Nowadays, I have a simple black/white laser printer at home and for everything colour I go to a copy shop or order prints online.
I currently have two printers. The reason being I bought one printer, used up the black ink then went to buy a new cartridge and found out it was cheaper to buy a whole new printer complete with ink, so I did. They’re both empty now though.
If you can forgo colour printing I highly recommend a laser printer. I bought one when my inkjet finally died and it's just so much more economical. I bought a spare toner cartridge at the time of purchase and I'm still amused that I haven't had to install it yet as the included 'starter' cartridge it came with just keeps going and going!
color laser printers at not that expensive any more, they cost mor than the inkjet printers yes, but their consumables (toner etc) last quite a bit longer as jo hinted at
As I mention above, that printer is a high quality photo printer, which is why it has all those inks. You can't do photos on a laser printer (not photos that you'd want to show anyone, anyway).
I need to get a new printer a few years ago. The printer was on sale but I found to replace the ink cost almost as much as the printer. I also found that the printer will constantly says it is low on ink even though there is still some ink left in it. It will still let me print even if it is low on ink so I keep doing that until it actually runs out of ink.
We do this with the postal meter at my job. It'll say it's low on ink for weeks before it actually stops printing, and the color doesn't even fade at all until it stops.
the thing of printer ink is, the printer dont count how much ink left in the cartridge, but instead they use the algorithm to estimate how much ink your cartridge should have left. thats why if you use some kind of ink refill tube, the system will still consider your cartridge is empty.
Furthermore, if he indeed did smell it, according to the laws of farting, he must have also dealt it, thus proving that the jam jar was not farted in by Harry Styles.
I’ve got 4 big bottles of genuine Epsom ink - I think I paid about £12 each for them 4 years ago if memory serves, and I’ve still got tons left. It’s the stupid little carriages with all the chips and printer heads and gubbins built in that last about 50 pages then thrown away that is the cost. Glad to see the back of those.
Cover the inkjet sensor on any cartridge and it keeps working. Most jets still have ink but the printer estimates so thinks you’ve used it all. A more cynical man might say they’re scamming bstrds.
I used to work for a company selling printers and ink cartridges. We would give away free printers in the cost of a printer and set of inks for that exact reason. People would only pay for the ink thinking it would be so cheap to run if that was the price for the printer and ink combined. It's obscene. When they came back for ink some of the individual cartridges could sell for up to £65 each. Also if you get free ink with a printer from the manufacturer, usually your free one would have a lot more in it that subsequent ones that you'd purchase. In some cases less than half the ink. The manufacturers don't care about the large capacity ink cartridges either because the cost of them is negligible
When you buy a printer, first check if third party ink cartridges are available and how much they cost. That's why I decided to buy a Brother MFC printer. Each cartridge costs just 2-3€.
I recommend buying refillable cartridges for your printer. Saves a huge bunch. Also buy a nozzle cleaning kit as running the cleaning cycle on a printer uses up a horrendous amount of ink. I emptied brand new cartridges in about a dozen cleaning cycles one time.
A lot of printers don’t accept refillable ones. They put special tags on their own brand ink cartridges and will only accept that brand. The inktank printers are great though because they are refillable and you can use any ink with them.
You'd be surprised, in some office set-up where the printer is leased and you pay per print, and colour pages are ten times more expensive than black and withe, if you print a pure black text, it may be counted as a colour page because they add a little of colour toner to make the black more vibrant!
Every inkjet needs to do this. It's a matter of how they work and there's no getting around it unless you want to buy new print heads everytime you want to print. Large format printers has multi-liter waste bottles due to this (though they also have print heads costing more than a consumer level inkjet printer a piece).
Dave Gorman wears only check shirts (as opposed to any other pattern of shirt) as far as I can tell. He never wears the same shirt twice - again, as far as I can tell. How many check shirts does this man have? Why does he own so many check shirts? Why doesn't he wear different types of patterns in his shirt choices? Is there some kind of meta joke type of situation going on as regards his consistency and fondness for check shirts? What is it about a check shirt that so draws him to be forever faithful to the check option in shirts? Or is it just a random thing that became a thing sort of thing? There are many different types of 'check', by the way - if you were maybe wondering. There's tartan, plaid, gingham, houndstooth, glen check, prince of wales check, buffalo check, black watch, window pane check, glen check orange, pin check, grid check, tattersall check, madras, shepherd check - and of course just 'checks' check. I'm sure there are many others. So Dave Gorman is not exactly limited in his check choices. But it is strange to see a person favour one particular type of shirt over all the other types of shirts available. I like check shirts, to be honest. Really like them. But not to the exclusion of other varieties of shirts.
The last time I needed to fill up my printer ink, it was 15 bucks per cartridge, it needed only black and colour ink. 30 bucks to fill it up, seems kind of steep. But I found a work around - the thing is the printer itself cost 20 dollars new, and it comes with each of the cartridges I required. It's literally cheaper to buy this printer new, than to maintain it.
Agreed. Epson say you can print up to 14,000 pages of black text and about 11,000 colour. Real world scenario is probably not as good as that although we bought one 2 years ago and haven't had to top up the ink yet, and my wife prints off stuff every day for the kids and her home business. Good thing too is, it only costs around $28 (AUD) for the full set of ink bottles. Best printer we've ever owned.
You can also get the refillable cartridges with a similar deal. The ones I have, once they signal empty, you pop them out and back in again and they reset to full. You have to keep them topped up, obviously but they're a good alternative.
I looked at getting a printer when Star and Citizen printers were common. They seemed quite expensive to me at the time. Then came along the HP printers like 500 which were hundreds of pounds, they seemed very expensive to then! I never bought one in the end after a long time looking. As other comments state, the put their profits on the ink now.
What they do is mix a bit of all the other colours to make a 'finer looking true black' it's not a scam or anything. Even if the ink cartridges cost 20p to manufacture.
@@andrewmurphy5310 100% black doesn't print a deep black it comes out as a faded black so you need to add a percentage of the other colours to darken it
Dave Gorman is gonna hate me but...I actually use this printer for work and have done for over 10 years. I am on my 4th one and it prints photos as good as any high street photo shop.
that's wat I though when i heard the price of that ink, an esp the gloss optimiser, not to mention the price of the printer, this must be pro or at least prosumer gear and for that kind of thing the ink can be ekspesive, no 1 you bill your costumers and they want the best result possible 2: you probably have a frequency of printing that negates the ink drying out problem
If you don’t use your printer very often then It’s actually cheaper in the long run to just buy a new ‘on sale’ printer!! Give your old one away to someone you don’t like very much then head off down to the shops, if you live in the UK then the big 4 supermarkets that have an electronic section usually have at least one or two ‘special’ offers on their printers, they come supplied with ink cartridges that are called test cartridges which hold just enough ink in them for about 15 to 20 prints 👍🏻
I bought a printer with a subscription service for ink and if you'd like to know how much I thought of it, the printer died at the hands of a sledgehammer and lighter fluid in the woods.
Regarding the black and white print without a colour - most of the black "print" is not a sole black ink but a mixture of colours - something like a "signature" of manufacturer
For general colour printing get a laser and use cheap unbranded cartridges off Amazon or eBay. For high quality photo printing upload to snapfish or similar. Ink jets are for dummies only and that’s been the case for at least 15 years when colour lasers became affordable.
Not 3 worrds but one acronym : CISS. It probably won't work on that Epson though, as it is limited to 3 colors and a black. The ink is really cheap, the orriginal cardriges are really expensive.
@@Lystopheles Interesting. I have converted mine but it is a canon so it is pretty standard. With only 4 colors and it was a pain, but it worked. I can only imagine how much more difficult will be with 10 of them.
Yep. Inkjets are a scam. I got rid of mine as well and Bought an office-rated color laserjet, costs about 450 EUR, starting toner should last for 3000 pages, black for 6000 or so. See you in 10 years :)
I thought about buying a scanner printer but you can find that buying ink requires you to sign up for an instant ink replacement where the printer orders new ink to your door once a cartridge is deemed to be 'low'. I wonder if they let you use the scanner without any ink in the printer? Probably not! Ffs
If you printed a £5 magazine with printer ink it would cost you £150. The reason the ink is so expensive is because the fuckin manufacturers get away with it! It costs about 25p to make a cartridge AND fill it with ink. Oh, and has anyone noticed how much ink they use just to set them up and align the heads? I just take photos and download digital copies of documents. I don't use my printer any more.
This economic model has a specific name, and I can't for the life of me remember what it is :) The manufacture and sale of Disposable razors work on a similar same principal.
Another thing I could never understand, is why when I fill my car up and get a drink and a sandwich, the drink costs more than the fuel. I presume that Cola doesn't have to be discovered in the first instance, extracted from the seabed, shipped to a refinery, refined then delivered to an petrol outlet where a 50% tax levy is slapped on it ? So how come Coke costs £1.80 for a 500ml bottle while Petrol only costs £1.10 for a whole litre ?
By the way, the reason a printer would not print black if the yellow ink is low/empty, is because in order to print black it needs to use the Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Key (CMYK) inks to do so. The "Key" ink is more of a dark purplish-grey colour, not black.
Why is there also a black ink cartridge then? Why can't black and white use the actual black color? I gave up and have been using a laser printer for 10 years that only uses black ink, and it's been far more reliable!
What if you don't care about it being an off-black color? Most applications of printing can do with just printing something resembling black, because all you need is data on the page.
@@renee3461you can't get a good black with only black either. black is used to save other colours when gradients get darker (and also to limit the total amount of ink used, since the media you print on might not be able to absorb that much).
I used to work for a manufacturer of inks and printers. The profit margin on ink we worked to was 18,000%
The reason why printer ink is so expensive is the same reason printers are so cheap - you're not just buying a printer, you're also buying an obligation to keep it full. And that's where they make all their profits. Some may say that this is somehow unethical, or a scam. And they'd be right.
also the most detailed process in the construction of a printer, is the ink cartridge.. also you can get them refilled for cheap af..
its was a 200gbp printer, thats a one stock left price listing on Amazon. Also two companies done the responsibly priced ink and cheaper ink and both models failed (Kodak and Lexmark Black)
They stop working when ink is "low" but in truth it never uses the whole cartridge, so you have to replace it more often. Some also recognise when you've manually filled up a cartridge and will reject it. Also, printer ink isn't expensive to produce its a massive scam its actually cheap.
Aren't you also buying the circuit board? Most people buy the whole cartidge as they can't be bothered filling it themselves.
@@BobSmith-rs7tn
Though your printer doesn't like this and it always displays that it's low on ink. Once tried to hack it to accept the new ink and it ended up in the Chinese language or something.
I used to work at an office supply store and we had many regular customers that would buy a new printer every month instead of buying ink because a new printer came with ink and cost less than refilling their previous printer.
And you never told any of them to just buy a budget colour laser?
@@Agarwaen I ALWAYS DID!! The problem is the cheapest laser is only black and white often times doesn't have a document feeder, fax, or do photo quality so even though they won't use any of it they still would rather buy the cheap garbage inkjet they know will break in a week
@@nickNcar Best thing I did was get a cheap black and white laser printer. Works better than the inkjets ever did, prints nicer on ordinary paper, ink doesn't dry out, and haven't needed a refill yet in 2 years. I really don't need colour printing anymore.
@@cuoresportivo155 That's exactly what I've just done. Got my nice and new b/w laser printer yesterday. It also has a scanner/copy function. That's all I need.
This made me laugh. I got rid of my R800 for exactly that reason. So expensive to run, but also like other inkjet printers you have to use them regularly or they will dry up and you have to replace the cartridges anyway. I looked at the number of prints per year I did and decided that I don’t need colour (especially as so many places accept pdf tickets on your phone), and my printer spent at least 95% of the year doing nothing so I bought a black and white laser printer and never looked back. Yes there is a higher up front cost to purchase it, but the one thing that a laser printer does really well is sit around doing nothing until you need it. The dry toner powder doesn’t get any drier so it will work after weeks or months of inactivity. If I do need an occasional full colour print, the local copy shop is cheaper in the long run than owning a colour printer, plus they maintain their machines and replace them with newer units more regularly. Unless you have a specific use case for an inkjet because it will produce work that no other type of printer can do, ditch them!
toner is also great because half the time when the printer reports it empty, you just need to take it out and shake it around a little and it's good to go
I've done exactly the same thing!
I have had a laser printer for years and I refill it ( when needed ) by recycled cartridges on ebay far cheaper!
Agree. Just printing from an off licence or a corner shop or Post Office or library is much cheaper in the long run than spending anywhere around £20-100 per a few prints and then replacing all the cartridges after not printing for months to do another print.
Toner printers man. The way to go. Inkjet treats you like a sugar daddy. Lazerjet knows you have a budget.
When printing your boarding pass costs more than the flight!
I really, *_Really_* , wanted the printer to start leaking yellow ink
wrong model ;) but made me laugh nonetheless
It pissed its pants.
I had a similar printer years ago with multiple cartridges. The instructions said it was beneficial as you could just replace each cartridge as it ran out. No matter what I printed, all the ink levels went down at the same time. Thus I needed a whole set of cartridges, it was cheaper to just buy a new printer and use the ink that it comes with. Madness.
Printers typically come with starter cartridges which contain a lot less ink.
@@chaos.corner I think there was a video a few years ago showing how they put less and less ink across the years, but making people pay more, more often
@@dorcasmalahlela2805there is. They opened up the cartridges to find them half empty.
If you run out of red ink it’s cheaper to open a vein! That really cracked me up! 😆
Not only is it cheaper to open a vein, IT'S NOT YOUR VEIN! Strangers will give you blood for less than printer companies will give you printer ink.
Just received my mum’s one-year-old HP inkjet printer, but unfortunately, the cartridges had dried up. I replaced them with new ones, but now I'm getting a cartridge error message. Ended up taking it to the dump and had a good laugh when I saw someone else throwing out the same printer 😂
Printing secret.. food colouring printers are practically free printing for life, i use a Canon pixma xl (something in the ts range) plus bottles of printing food colouring.. easily bought on amazon or ebay, it costs about £120 total, you get maybe 300 decent colour prints before you need to refill, and you can refill about 20 times with the bottles you get with it (they even supply the syringes) almost never breaks down (and even then they are easy to fix just google the issue or use youtube) a full set of refill bottles will set you back about £17 should you ever run out.. have one at home, one at work, one at my bosses house, and one at her mums and a spare just in case.. the prints are crystal clear and indistinguishable from normal ink, with the only exception being that prints hot purple a bit grey, and tbh i can live with that.
Do you use a lot of hot purple in day to day life?
@@chalkeater1427 Love a bit of a hot purple.
That's the kind of crazy I love. If I hadn't treat myself to a laser printer, I'd try that for an experiment.
Nowadays, printer manufacturers are smart in giving you only small or almost empty ink cartriges when buying a printer. But I remember a time where they had not yet caught on, and you could literally buy new inkjet printers *with* full cartriges cheaper than the cartriges alone.
Had a laser printer for 10 years now, I print a decent amount and just recently had to replace the imaging drum and toner - total cost of 50€.
The end of the clip reminds me of that scene from "office space"
"Damn it feels good to be a... gorman"
I can hear the song in my head now 😁😁
I see you after the *break*
I've always thought he should have said "See you after this break", then smashed it.
Paul Potter He’s not that good a comic.
This is why the laser printer I bought over ten years ago is so fantastic.
I have not needed to change the ink on it yet and I have a spare black ink cartridge in the cupboard.
That's because laser printers run on toner, not ink. 😉
@@mbirth Managed to go *3* years without a clever dick opening their gob. Well done... you're soooooooooo smart.
The yellow ink is a sneaky anti-counterfeit measure. It prints yellow dot code on anything you print to uniquely identify you, should you be printing money or anything else you shouldn’t be.
well that may be used for idebifiy people for supperrion like in a coup
Modern printers will not print money, period. Same with color photocopiers.
@@scottculver most of them aren't that sophisticated
Do you need ID when buying a printer?
Stopped buying Epson printers after my last one used up a while cartridge without me managing to print 1 page. Setting itself up when turned on and then it wouldn’t print clearly so two nozzle patterns, alignments and cleaning runs along with 2 attempts at printing a small image and it was reporting as empty.
worked close with epson (not UK though), really can't recommend any epson printer that is not made for professionals or large offices, as they are cheaply manufactured.
They also don't care that much about the home business, it's only there to show presence on the market.
Most of their printers under 500€ will probably give you more trouble than it's worth.
I had Epson printers for 20yr since my first computer.... think I'm on my third.
I find really good quality print with Epsom cartridges but price is a Fg scam.
I hate the fact it locks out - as indicated in the video, when one of the 4 cartridges is low.
There no reason to lock out if you just want black - should have that option.
@@stuartd9741 According to multiple online sources, a little blue is allegedly used when only black is printed to strengthen the black, but this also means the blue will run out faster, bringing the whole thing to a halt when it runs out and leaving you scratching your head because you've only been printing in black. I've often wondered if something sneaky was going on with the Gloss Optimiser cartridge too because it always ran out even though I almost never used it and had it deselected in the print settings menu, but would have to buy a new one just to get the printer working again.
This actually happened to me when I discovered that my very old printer cost more to refill than a brand new printer -- donated the old one, bought the new one! One hint on saving ink: if you are printing a lot of black and white, be sure to deselect colour printing, as even though the doc may be B&W, if colour printing is selected, it creates the black from a mixture of the colours, using wayyy too much ink. Oh and btw, like many other such items, it isn't the ink that is expensive, it's the cartridge that costs and they are all just that little bit different...
If you've not seen "Ink Cartridges are a Scam" you should, the cartridge cost stupidly little for the company to produce, and their claims about research and development are plain lies.
th-cam.com/video/AHX6tHdQGiQ/w-d-xo.html
I actually had an R800 and I was just waiting for him to say “gloss optimiser”. I also could not print out a page of black text because the gloss optimizer had run out. To make matters worse the print heads always clogged and you used tonnes of ink cleaning the print heads and doing test prints. Biggest piece of crap I have ever brought. I actually chucked my printer out of a first floor window into back garden, brought a Canon photo printer and have never brought an Epson product since, that was about 15 years ago! Annoyingly I did a similar (ish) story about the R800 to my friends however none of them found it very funny or interesting. It’s the way you tell em! I would also add that I was a professIonal photographer at the time, which is why I brought it, and that when it worked, without clogged print heads, it produced beautiful results (for.the time) and that bloody gloss optimizer did actually make a difference! However I also needed the thing to print invoices, expenses, etc and not being able to print a page of text without an £18 gloss optimizer proved too much, hence the window. I recently brought a really nice laser printer on eBay for £15 and have printed thousands of pages on it without it even needing a new toner!
I switched to a black and white laser years ago. Cheap to buy and online toner is a steal. If we really need colour (very rarely) it gets printed at work or swing past the copy shop.
They practically give the printer away these days, profit all in the inks. No excuse for expensive printer AND expensive inks.
true, infact i dare too say, buying a new printer each time your ink runs out is cheaper than buying only ink!.
@@Lazarus404 Where's me sledge hammer?
This is a cheap printer.
Compatible ink on E-Bay £8.47 the set delivered! Job done!!!
Why do people still buy ink jet printers these days when colour laser printers are so comparatively cheap? Only slightly more expensive to buy the machine itself and although toner appears expensive, it last a long time and the quality of prints are far superior.
Toner doesn't dry out like ink does either.
The majority of people should be owning lasers unless they do a lot of pictures. But realistically outside of photographers I don't see anybody needing to print photos all the time, the only time I constantly needed photo printing was in college and I would just pay 5cents per sheet at the library
I have Epson ink printer, with factory-installed CISS (Epson EcoTank series), and the ink is dirt cheap. And ink tanks are so big... One and half year on my original inks set, I hadn't had to refill yet.
I just have a black and white laser printer just need to replace the toner every 3 years or so. I very rarely need to print something in colour, but when I do, I either take the file to a printery or colour my page by hand with pencil crayons 🤷
Yup. This is one of those, funny because it's true type things.
Costs $1 to make, sells at $60-$70, and some refuse to print even black and white if the color cartridge is "empty," and spoiler, they usually aren't actually empty. It's the biggest scam next to AEP Electric.
you wish it costed 1 dollar, the cost is in single digit cents.
In fairness to Epson, that printer and its ink set ARE designed for high quality photo printing, not your average office/household throwaway tat. As a photographer, the printer meets sledge hammer bit was painful.
Rob Nunya I agree! Ignorance is bliss and I guess hilarious. Fair enough for non archival, non photo printers though
That doesn't excuse any printer, regardless of design purpose, from failing to print a black and white copy merely because one of the colors is low.
@@r0bw00d You'll never get deep blacks printing only with black ink. You'd have to configure it for regular low quality black and white printing to do that. Which dave probably had no clue he'd need to, or how he'd have to do it.
@@Agarwaen I've never heard of this feature. Of course, I haven't needed to print anything for a long time, thanks to this stupidity, so I don't know if this has always been the case. Why doesn't the configuration just happen automatically like it's supposed to?
Luckily I only find myself needing to print once or twice a year and $1 at a copy center is cheaper than maintaining a printer. :)
I only use after-market cartridges (a quarter of the price)
Dave your jokes are amazing you are a great comedian.
3:06 You can tell how old a video is based on how cheap car fuel is :(((((
This forced waste of the printing industry is disgusting in this day and age. We have a graveyard of printers that are perfectly good machines, basically culled from service because we couldn't afford to feed them! It's cheaper to get a new printer, and so people do, even though they don't want to!
I cannot believed I missed the entire run of this show. Praise Jeebas for TH-cam
To be fair, the R800 was meant to be used for printing photos to professional standards. Back in the time you had to leave a flash drive (or even burn the photos to a CD first) with the drugstores to get them "developed" a few days later. For people that didn't want to wait, this printer was able to give the same quality. IIRC it also came with a CD tray so you could print full colour labels to your CD-Rs.
But yes, if you didn't use it every few days and/or mostly printed black/white text or diagrams, it was the wrong printer. You had to do a cleaning cycle after a few days of not using it and that wasted ink like nothing.
Nowadays, I have a simple black/white laser printer at home and for everything colour I go to a copy shop or order prints online.
I currently have two printers. The reason being I bought one printer, used up the black ink then went to buy a new cartridge and found out it was cheaper to buy a whole new printer complete with ink, so I did. They’re both empty now though.
Sell printers on ebay.
The starter ink cartridge included with the printer is usually tiny and can do a pathetically small number of prints
If you can forgo colour printing I highly recommend a laser printer.
I bought one when my inkjet finally died and it's just so much more economical. I bought a spare toner cartridge at the time of purchase and I'm still amused that I haven't had to install it yet as the included 'starter' cartridge it came with just keeps going and going!
Colour lasers start at about £150, but check you can buy unbranded replacement cartridges for it. I would never buy an inkjet these days.
this is why I use laser printers, never needed to clean the heads after not using it for sometime, it just works and I don't print colour stuff anyway
color laser printers at not that expensive any more, they cost mor than the inkjet printers yes, but their consumables (toner etc) last quite a bit longer as jo hinted at
As I mention above, that printer is a high quality photo printer, which is why it has all those inks. You can't do photos on a laser printer (not photos that you'd want to show anyone, anyway).
@@robnunya572 Sure you can, but that quality takes more money than most home consumers would be willing to spend.
I need to get a new printer a few years ago. The printer was on sale but I found to replace the ink cost almost as much as the printer. I also found that the printer will constantly says it is low on ink even though there is still some ink left in it. It will still let me print even if it is low on ink so I keep doing that until it actually runs out of ink.
We do this with the postal meter at my job. It'll say it's low on ink for weeks before it actually stops printing, and the color doesn't even fade at all until it stops.
the thing of printer ink is, the printer dont count how much ink left in the cartridge, but instead they use the algorithm to estimate how much ink your cartridge should have left. thats why if you use some kind of ink refill tube, the system will still consider your cartridge is empty.
Austin McConnell has an excellent video on printer ink. And you’ll never guess what he does with his printer at the end!
Saw a Kodak printer sat on a wall outside a house when walking home with the note "Take me" on it. This video was the first thing that came to mind! 😅
Furthermore, if he indeed did smell it, according to the laws of farting, he must have also dealt it, thus proving that the jam jar was not farted in by Harry Styles.
This is why you buy laser printers, bigger upfront, but lasts longer and has lower cartrige costs (compared to pages per cartridge)
Never got an ink printer. But i love scrapping the things. I take them apart with a mallet too!
I’ve got 4 big bottles of genuine Epsom ink - I think I paid about £12 each for them 4 years ago if memory serves, and I’ve still got tons left. It’s the stupid little carriages with all the chips and printer heads and gubbins built in that last about 50 pages then thrown away that is the cost. Glad to see the back of those.
Oh God, brilliant - even my parents love this.
i had the same issue with my epson and i just went on ebay and got non official ink for about 10 quid for 12 cartridges works a treat!
Cover the inkjet sensor on any cartridge and it keeps working. Most jets still have ink but the printer estimates so thinks you’ve used it all. A more cynical man might say they’re scamming bstrds.
I used to work for a company selling printers and ink cartridges. We would give away free printers in the cost of a printer and set of inks for that exact reason. People would only pay for the ink thinking it would be so cheap to run if that was the price for the printer and ink combined. It's obscene. When they came back for ink some of the individual cartridges could sell for up to £65 each. Also if you get free ink with a printer from the manufacturer, usually your free one would have a lot more in it that subsequent ones that you'd purchase. In some cases less than half the ink. The manufacturers don't care about the large capacity ink cartridges either because the cost of them is negligible
Brilliant presentation.
The best thing about this video is that because of it, I’m now getting advertised printer ink directly below it
I got strong Office Apace feelings at the end, haha
These days, it's Boris that probably drinks the Gloss Optimizer.
Thanks for the laughs, Dave. 😂
Trump was slightly wrong don’t drink bleach to cure corona drink Gloss Optimizer
Brendan McCabe Trump drinks the red and yellow.
When you buy a printer, first check if third party ink cartridges are available and how much they cost.
That's why I decided to buy a Brother MFC printer. Each cartridge costs just 2-3€.
I recommend buying refillable cartridges for your printer. Saves a huge bunch. Also buy a nozzle cleaning kit as running the cleaning cycle on a printer uses up a horrendous amount of ink. I emptied brand new cartridges in about a dozen cleaning cycles one time.
Where do you buy your nozzle cleaning kit?
A lot of printers don’t accept refillable ones. They put special tags on their own brand ink cartridges and will only accept that brand. The inktank printers are great though because they are refillable and you can use any ink with them.
You'd be surprised, in some office set-up where the printer is leased and you pay per print, and colour pages are ten times more expensive than black and withe, if you print a pure black text, it may be counted as a colour page because they add a little of colour toner to make the black more vibrant!
I searched on the sites that provide the cheaper inks and bought the printer based on that.
Cheap ink and a decent printer to match.
We used to refill cartridges at home from cheap ink, worked great. Now they put microchips in the cartridge so that you cant refill them!
Some printers actually squirt a bit of 'waste' ink out of each nozzle, to 'clear' it every time you turn the printer on.
Every inkjet needs to do this. It's a matter of how they work and there's no getting around it unless you want to buy new print heads everytime you want to print. Large format printers has multi-liter waste bottles due to this (though they also have print heads costing more than a consumer level inkjet printer a piece).
2:39 why does david cameron drink gloss optimizer?
Haven’t bought a printer in years. I just go to the library and use theirs. Plus he should have taken the printer; sold it on eBay 😊
I’m actually looking for an epsom printer. Any for sale?
Dave Gorman wears only check shirts (as opposed to any other pattern of shirt) as far as I can tell. He never wears the same shirt twice - again, as far as I can tell. How many check shirts does this man have? Why does he own so many check shirts? Why doesn't he wear different types of patterns in his shirt choices? Is there some kind of meta joke type of situation going on as regards his consistency and fondness for check shirts? What is it about a check shirt that so draws him to be forever faithful to the check option in shirts? Or is it just a random thing that became a thing sort of thing?
There are many different types of 'check', by the way - if you were maybe wondering. There's tartan, plaid, gingham, houndstooth, glen check, prince of wales check, buffalo check, black watch, window pane check, glen check orange, pin check, grid check, tattersall check, madras, shepherd check - and of course just 'checks' check. I'm sure there are many others. So Dave Gorman is not exactly limited in his check choices. But it is strange to see a person favour one particular type of shirt over all the other types of shirts available.
I like check shirts, to be honest. Really like them. But not to the exclusion of other varieties of shirts.
Lovely, not watched modern life for ages, Sheet Dave is Comical.
The last time I needed to fill up my printer ink, it was 15 bucks per cartridge, it needed only black and colour ink. 30 bucks to fill it up, seems kind of steep. But I found a work around - the thing is the printer itself cost 20 dollars new, and it comes with each of the cartridges I required. It's literally cheaper to buy this printer new, than to maintain it.
This guy is hilarious!!!
Just buy an Epson EcoTank printer, built-in ink tanks, you can get 4 100ml ink bottles for around £30, it will print hundreds of pages.
Agreed. Epson say you can print up to 14,000 pages of black text and about 11,000 colour. Real world scenario is probably not as good as that although we bought one 2 years ago and haven't had to top up the ink yet, and my wife prints off stuff every day for the kids and her home business. Good thing too is, it only costs around $28 (AUD) for the full set of ink bottles. Best printer we've ever owned.
You can also get the refillable cartridges with a similar deal. The ones I have, once they signal empty, you pop them out and back in again and they reset to full. You have to keep them topped up, obviously but they're a good alternative.
This is brilliant! #Epson, #Canon and co, that's our experience with your printers visualized!!!
Epson is notorious for this.
I have an HP and refill my cartridges using syringes and bottles of ink :)
I looked at getting a printer when Star and Citizen printers were common. They seemed quite expensive to me at the time. Then came along the HP printers like 500 which were hundreds of pounds, they seemed very expensive to then! I never bought one in the end after a long time looking. As other comments state, the put their profits on the ink now.
Epson also builds in a limited number of cleaning cycles, so the machine will have to be replaced regardless of whether it still works.
David Gorman is a Genius
What they do is mix a bit of all the other colours to make a 'finer looking true black' it's not a scam or anything. Even if the ink cartridges cost 20p to manufacture.
So what is the actual black made from then?
@@andrewmurphy5310 100% black doesn't print a deep black it comes out as a faded black so you need to add a percentage of the other colours to darken it
Andrew Murphy - Voldemort tears
I used to have the R1800 (A3) Ridiculous prices for ink
Razors and blades model, wrongly attributed to Gillette. Used for everything "they" can get away with. Camera and lenses was the one that got me
lenses i can sort of accept, different people have different needs so selling the lenses sapareate from the camera makes sense
Dave's been watching Office Space.
David Cameron reference. Blimey how old is this?
6 years give or take
Old enough to not realise that labour party died in 2019!
Bravo sir!
There is a printer that has an integrated scanner. You cant use the scanner if it's out of ink!
Dave Gorman is gonna hate me but...I actually use this printer for work and have done for over 10 years. I am on my 4th one and it prints photos as good as any high street photo shop.
that's wat I though when i heard the price of that ink, an esp the gloss optimiser, not to mention the price of the printer, this must be pro or at least prosumer gear and for that kind of thing the ink can be ekspesive, no 1 you bill your costumers and they want the best result possible 2: you probably have a frequency of printing that negates the ink drying out problem
@@bjarnenilsson80 The printer had an msrp of $399. The price is(was) that high because it's discontinued.
@@chaos.corner thanks for the info
@@bjarnenilsson80 I know it's timely ;D
If you don’t use your printer very often then It’s actually cheaper in the long run to just buy a new ‘on sale’ printer!! Give your old one away to someone you don’t like very much then head off down to the shops, if you live in the UK then the big 4 supermarkets that have an electronic section usually have at least one or two ‘special’ offers on their printers, they come supplied with ink cartridges that are called test cartridges which hold just enough ink in them for about 15 to 20 prints 👍🏻
Continuous Ink Supply System.... had the same printer
Ah that was so funny to watch in the studio
I bought a printer with a subscription service for ink and if you'd like to know how much I thought of it, the printer died at the hands of a sledgehammer and lighter fluid in the woods.
Rock and Roll! Awesome stuff!
Loved MLIG bring it back Dave, terms and conditions wasn't in the same league
Great video as always but it didn't explain it, just reiterated the idea.
Regarding the black and white print without a colour - most of the black "print" is not a sole black ink but a mixture of colours - something like a "signature" of manufacturer
it's called a colour profile. No photo quality black is going to be printed with only black ink.
For general colour printing get a laser and use cheap unbranded cartridges off Amazon or eBay. For high quality photo printing upload to snapfish or similar. Ink jets are for dummies only and that’s been the case for at least 15 years when colour lasers became affordable.
It's not just the price of the cartridge, they are less than half full. So the price is actauly twice.
Not 3 worrds but one acronym : CISS. It probably won't work on that Epson though, as it is limited to 3 colors and a black. The ink is really cheap, the orriginal cardriges are really expensive.
you'd be surprised, I've seen 8 and 10 color epson printer that were converted to have CIS.
@@Lystopheles Interesting. I have converted mine but it is a canon so it is pretty standard. With only 4 colors and it was a pain, but it worked. I can only imagine how much more difficult will be with 10 of them.
Yep. Inkjets are a scam. I got rid of mine as well and
Bought an office-rated color laserjet, costs about 450 EUR, starting toner should last for 3000 pages, black for 6000 or so. See you in 10 years :)
I thought about buying a scanner printer but you can find that buying ink requires you to sign up for an instant ink replacement where the printer orders new ink to your door once a cartridge is deemed to be 'low'. I wonder if they let you use the scanner without any ink in the printer? Probably not! Ffs
Nope, it will not let you scan if you run out of ink...
It’s the same story with laser printer toner cartridges. The IT guy where I work said it was cheaper to refill them with cocaine.
[insert "office Space" MEME here]
If you printed a £5 magazine with printer ink it would cost you £150. The reason the ink is so expensive is because the fuckin manufacturers get away with it! It costs about 25p to make a cartridge AND fill it with ink. Oh, and has anyone noticed how much ink they use just to set them up and align the heads? I just take photos and download digital copies of documents. I don't use my printer any more.
strangely enough, the printers that have independant inks are actually cheaper to run than those with a single cartridge or a dual b/w and colour.
Apparently now some printers have refillable cartridges of actual liquad ink and not ink dust.
This economic model has a specific name, and I can't for the life of me remember what it is :) The manufacture and sale of Disposable razors work on a similar same principal.
_"Razor and blade"_
It's a price-fixing cartel
Another thing I could never understand, is why when I fill my car up and get a drink and a sandwich, the drink costs more than the fuel. I presume that Cola doesn't have to be discovered in the first instance, extracted from the seabed, shipped to a refinery, refined then delivered to an petrol outlet where a 50% tax levy is slapped on it ? So how come Coke costs £1.80 for a 500ml bottle while Petrol only costs £1.10 for a whole litre ?
Because Coke is made from a secret formula! Or something.
I recently replaced my old inkjet with a new ecotank printer and have not looked back.
By the way, the reason a printer would not print black if the yellow ink is low/empty, is because in order to print black it needs to use the Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Key (CMYK) inks to do so. The "Key" ink is more of a dark purplish-grey colour, not black.
Why is there also a black ink cartridge then? Why can't black and white use the actual black color? I gave up and have been using a laser printer for 10 years that only uses black ink, and it's been far more reliable!
What if you don't care about it being an off-black color? Most applications of printing can do with just printing something resembling black, because all you need is data on the page.
@@renee3461you can't get a good black with only black either. black is used to save other colours when gradients get darker (and also to limit the total amount of ink used, since the media you print on might not be able to absorb that much).
i had this printer and the same i ditched it as it was cheaper to buy a new one rather than buy the cartridges