Not for the faint hearted

I cannot believe how many essential things in life I have been missing out on. The thousands of emails I have got over the last couple of days telling me what bargains I can get in the black Friday sales are really educational. So I girded my loins (or whatever the saying is) and made a purchase yesterday. I bought a colour printer! At Big W it cost me $44 AUD which is $31.62 USD, 23.74 GBP or $46.14 NZD if you live in the place where the Aussie dollar looks good. It is an HP Deskjet 2300 all in one printer and it is a USB model. That means it is not on a network where the colour cartridges can be exhausted in a couple of hours depending on what the other family folk are up to.

It has been a few years since I had my last colour printer which was a laser one and I had forgotten what fun it can be when you want to print a PDF or something at actual or rather 100% size. In this case it was a ship card. I have PDf Escape which is supposed to a program that lets you print, edit and do clever things without buying the Acrobat program and the out put from that was a bit variable to be kind. I rarely find that it prints exactly how I want it to, with scale not being quite right etc. Anyway, I got my ship printed using 97% size in printer settings which equated to 100% of what it should be.

Moral of this is that cheap is not always bad and if you are prepared to fiddle a bit then it can be a good investment. :happy:

I would heartily recommend The Epson ET series printers if anyone is looking for new colour printers. Unlike most of these, it uses bottled ink, and large ink reservoirs rather than 5-15ml cartridges - each is 70ml... and cheaper.

It was more expensive to buy upfront, but not by enough to put me off - I'm still on the original bottles but getting toward the refill level on black after using it for a year "freely" to print out pdfs and google books scans & fencing treatises - but is as cheap as a mono-laser to use to print in colour on plain paper (more with specialist papers of course).

I barely used the previous printer (Canon) because of consumables costs, and it died from drying out terminally and getting clogged in the print head.

I must admit that my Cannon is expensive to run, but it is very reliable.
Rob.