Author Archive
Where do you do your Printing? There is an interesting trend right now toward people once again owning personal printers in their home. For some people that has always been the case, but for most of us, that is a blast from the past. Let us take a look at why.
When personal computers became widely available in the 1980s, personal printers were hot on their heels. After all, the primary thing early computers were used for was typing documents or making images, and in an age before internet, those functions were useless unless you could print on paper. Have a printer hooked up to your computer was standard.
However, early personal printers were not that user friendly. By the late 90s, people used their computers differently. They focused on the internet, where they could share things without paper, and they had portable data devices to take documents to a print shop if needed. To many people, this was cheaper and easier than keeping a finicky personal printer working and full of toner.
Printer companies have had to keep up with the times, however. In the last few years they have begun to load printers with features that make printing out quality photos really easy, which is one of them most common print jobs. They have also learned from the“plug in and go” mentality of contemporary software. This ease of use and added functionality has led to increased sales. Home printers are once again on the rise – do you have one in your house?
Are you frustrated by the high prices we all seem to pay for ink and toner? Well they aren’t necessary. Far from it in fact. When I worked at my school library I would see those machines go dry and start running thin or patchy text and I would go to replace those cartridges. But the librarians’ eyes would just glass over at the thought of how much of their budget went into those bloody unhappy hungry machines. And they bought genuine ink direct from the Brother online store, never realizing that there was a far better source of Brother toner out there for them. I’m going to share the possible solutions to your online ink shopping problems—and feel free to tell others. The prices that the big boys charge for that little bit of dye and vegetable oil is unjust and we don’t need to be held a slave to their system. So rise up, learn some new skills, and prepare to shop better.
Whether you are shopping for yourself or your office you should be aware of the system that ink sellers use to make their money. Printers have come down a long way in price in my lifetime. A VERY long way. They’ve come down far enough that right now, if you by the right home computer bundle, you can get them for free. But we all know that nothing is for free and indeed every free printer out there pays for itself with surprising speed. It is known as the aftermarket, a system in which manufacturers sell you one product cheaply, knowing that you will then be roped into buying more from them and not someone else. The razor, for instance, is cheap. But replacement blades are almost as expensive. A watch is a small investment, maybe fifteen dollars, but a replacement strap is another eight or ten. An Xbox is easily saved up for, but a game a month ends up costing four times what the box did by the end of the year. A printer is free, but it only works when you keep it fed with ink or toner…
So, the manufacturers sacrifice short term profits in order to lock you into a long term monopoly—except for one fact. If you are looking for HP toner cartridges, let’s say, you could be a sheep and just log right onto the hp store, pull up their cartridge finder, pay their outlandish prices… or you can introduce an element of competition—which always favors you the buyer. Just Google the type of cartridge you are looking for instead. This should give you the HP store, but it should also give you a number of other stores like my personal favorite 247inktoner.com. These are large scale ink retailers who sell just about every type and brand of ink and toner out three and do it at prices that mirror the intense competition among ink and toner sellers around the world.
When you get to these sites you want to either use the ink and toner finder system that they have up, or you should run a long tail search. For instance, instead of searching for “ink” or “Toner” or even “Samsung toner, you need to search for “Samsung model XXY toner” including the make, model, and the type of item you are after. This will yield very narrow targeted results and get you to the page you are after much faster. The same goes for Google, Amazon, or eBay searches.
Once there you can search between genuine product, which will be more expensive, color packs (VERY EXPENSIVE), high capacity and low capacity cartridges, and remanufactured toner cartridges. The prices should also represent this diversity. High capacity packs are normally the way to go. They work longer and give you more for your buck. However if you are just printing for one job then a low capacity may have less waste—or if you are under extreme financial duress. If you need high quality product get the genuine product. These almost never fail—after all you are paying for quality. Color packs are obviously for special occasions, and you should be aware that they won’t all run dry together. You may have to resupply them in staggered fashion, so stock up so that your color pictures don’t start missing pieces. Remanufactured cartridges, in my opinion, are the way to go. Sometimes they fail or don’t work well, but in general they are just as good for a third of the price.
I see a lot of blog posts about printing quality and what kind of machine is going to give you the best, sharpest images or cleanest color for your money. These are important considerations when picking out a printer, but what about picking the best toner? There are cheaper ways to improve quality than just go out and buy a whole new machine, and making sure you are using the right toner is one of the surest.
People often think that toner is all the same. That may have been true once upon a time, but nowadays there are a lot of options. A good toner is going to work with your machine to maximize both quality and efficiency. In many cases, these qualities are one and the same. Let me try to explain.
When a toner cartridge works well with your machine, is well designed, and uses high quality toner, your machine will go through less toner per page. This has to do with both how much toner is actually needed to make the image, and with how much toner is wasted. If the machine is laying the toner on too thick, it becomes less efficient, which drives your cost up. More to the point, with heavy toner the image on the page could appear dark, fuzzy, or blurry, or it may streak or rub off easily later. In other words, quality considerations are directly tied to efficiency.
This is the basis of why choosing the right toner makes such a big difference for you. Using the best toner available is a way of ensuring quality and, in the end, even efficiency.
There is an office scam going around that is older than your secretary may well be. Strange how those classics stick around, isn’t it? Well knowledge is the best defense against these crooks who try to get their food in the door. If your secretary knows the spiel and what they are after, the full process of how toner phoners work, then he or she will know exactly how to shut them out and keep your information, and your finances, safe from this half-baked thirty year old intrusion scam. So, let’s go and learn a little more about how toner phoners work.
The scam operates with an unsolicited call from a very professional sounding person with a script designed to pry a few pieces of information out of your secretary. Obviously they get your phone number and address from the internet or phone book. But next they need to secure what type of toner cartridge your office uses, or the type of printer from which they can infer the cartridge type, and the name of an ordering manager. It doesn’t matter a bit whether you use Xerox toner or Lexmark, they just need the info. One chief script you will hear involves the scammers pretending to take a survey about office ink and toner usage. Another comes from someone pretending to belong to part of the company or group of companies who sells you your printers, often about repair schedules, a mix up somewhere in their paperwork, or a customer satisfaction report. Your secretary has better things to do than work on a phone survey anyway, and a quick inquiry into which organization the caller is working for should send the caller reeling. It is also one very good reason to have your secretary own your list of suppliers by memory so that she or he can sniff out any interlopers as they try to penetrate your information privacy.
But what do these toner phoners do when they get your information—if whoever answered your phones was unwary? Well they send you a little gift. Usually a few packs of the appropriate toner for your laserjet printers. Naturally in a busy environment these toners are simply sent down to the printers and used, and that’s when the scammers think they have you. A month or two after the toner is received the toner phoners send you an invoice marked with the type of toner, the number of cartridges sent, and the ordering manager. Since you used the cartridges and everything looks official and in order, many people think that they need to pay this bill. Essentially the phoners muscle their way into a position as your toner supplier without ever asking, especially as most will continue to send you toner packs after the first one. And after a while of receiving and using your unsolicited HP 1320 toner, and giving into paying them for it, the toners starting making some big money. Did I mention that their prices are half again more than what they should be?
If you have gotten to the point where they are sending you product, or even to the point where you are paying them regularly, there is an easy solution. Stop paying them. The federal government has declared that any and all unsolicited merchandise can be considered a gift and absolutely no repayment is necessary. Of course when they don’t receive their payment they will start raising a ruckus. Basically after the sneaky approach fails the scammers turn to threats and angry calls hoping to turn a soft hearted employee and convince them to buy out. They can also use a pestering g approach where they call different numbers and send mail repeatedly hoping to wear out the opposition and get paid off. Eventually though they will run out of patience and see that your account has lost its worth to them.
You should also be aware of a similar scam known as the free sample approach. In this approach the caller is advertising free samples of a new and improved toner type, you only need to report your results. After this arrangement is accepted they send their package with fine print located either on the box or in the instructions. There is always a hook. Either you need to return something within the right period or not open a certain box, your even they can go as ridiculous as to say that if you use your free sample and don’t return it unused in fifty days they bill you for an extortionate amount. Always say no; always keep your information and your phone lines safe from toner scammers. And always invest in a quality ink and toner provider (see links above).
The cost of printing has really been going up. I am sure I am not the only person who noticed this. It seems like toner is like gasoline: the big companies can price it however they want, and are constantly raising the price further. How can you fight this trend? Well, have you considered getting a Printing Guide?
I know a printing guide sounds like overkill, because you think that printing is a pretty simple thing and you know the ins and outs of it. But did you know there are ways you can save a lot of money? A savvy shopper goes a long way in terms of saving on toner and other supplies. So what kind of tricks are there? Well, I can tell you a few of them.
For starters, making sure your machine is properly maintained. A machine can waste a lot of toner if it is not running efficiently, and that translates as you wasting a lot of money. A few simple things can be checked to make sure your machine is in good shape. Second, think about where you buy your toner – there are alternatives to the big box stores or the company that manufactured your printer in the first place, and these alternatives will save you money.
A good printing guide will walk you through these things step by step. It is an investment that takes little effort and can result in lots of savings, especially over time or when you consider how many other printers you will have in your lifetime. I found it worthwhile – I hope you do too!
How often do you read about toner? I know, probably never in your life, right? What if I told you that you could be missing out on some pretty significant savings? Or that shopping for toner and ink is a process that can contain many hidden discounts and cheap options you never thought of? Would you be interested? I know I was.
The thing about toner is, each printer company wants you to stay loyal to them and only them. They write their manuals and product materials to tell you to only replace your toner with the stuff they make. They make it sound like some other companys toner is going to ruin the quality of your work, or worse yet, sabotage your machine. Plus, they make it easy to re-order from them – but that also makes it hard for you to see that they are overcharging you compared to their competitor.
What they will never tell you is that third party companies manufacture toner too, and no just for their own machines. If you have a Dell or an HP printer, for example, lots of companies make toner cartridges to match your machine other than just Dell or HP. These companies use toner that is essentially the same substance as what your name brand would make, possibly even made in the same factory. Then it is put into a cartridge designed identically to the name brand one. And these are sold for cheaper, sometimes significantly so.
Taking a little time to read about toner is a good idea. It is a product you likely spend a whole lot of money on and by learning the options within the industry you can save a lot of money.
Digital printing has actually done a lot to revolutionize our world. I have a great appreciation for this technology which is part of the reason why I chose to work in the industry. So recently I was pleased to head down to a digital printing expo and see some of the latest developments going on there.
If you are not familiar with it, digital printing refers to an important development in the printing industry over the last several decades. Old fashioned printing, from the original printing press up to the middle of the 20th century, used plates with letters on them to ink many pages one after another. This is called analog printing because the letters needed to be set on each place more or less by hand. Only once the letters were positioned and the plates loaded in could the machinery take over.
Digital printing however means that the letters, as they appear on the page, are fed to the machine electronically. Think of an early dot matrix printer – unlike a typewriter, it did not have individual letters striking the page, it could make any letter with a series of dots. Our present day printers like laser printers and ink jet printers are just much more advanced versions of the same.
This development has come with many advances. For example, on demand printing. There used to be a fixed base cost for printing whether you were doing 100 copies or 100,000 because the plates had to be set. With digital printing this is no longer the case. This is why I love digital printing and enjoyed my visit to the digital printing expo.
Starting a business is not easy. One of the qualities it demands is being willing and able to dive into many different roles. The new business owner will not just be manager and salesman, he will be logistics, advertizing, human resources, building maintenance… the list goes on. I would like to think I am pretty intrepid and that is why when my office costs sky rocketed I rolled up my sleeves and read about ink.
Ink and toner can be a substantial cost for a business, especially a small business. Unlike a larger company, which can get bulk discounts, you are at the mercy of the store prices. Plus, unlike a more established company which has predictable cycles of business, your schedule may be more spontaneous. You could go months with relatively little in the way of printing needs and then suddenly need to turn out thousands of pages for something. Planning and stocking can be a pain.
This is why my cost was so high. We we were over ordering whenever we could get a tiny discount, or under ordering and then running out mid project, and I did not really know how to secure a discount for us. My research turned up some great information. For example, did you know the company who made your printer is not the only company who makes toner for it? Even if you have a very specialized machine you can find a third party source for ink cartridges, often at cutthroat prices.
Armed with this kind of knowledge I began to shop online for our toner, focusing on getting the best price regardless of brand and never relying on the catalog from our manufacturer. It turned out this strategy paid off and I lowered our costs significantly all because I took time to read about ink. Of course I could not stop to celebrate
Whether you are a professional photographer, an amateur enthusiast, or even have just gone shopping for a decent digital camera for family use, you have probably seen the HP Photosmart line of digital cameras. They are very ubiquitous on the market, have been around for a few years and have branched out to several specialized versions for different levels of budget and features. However, did you know they are attached to a line of printers as well?
As a company, HP has been in the printer business a lot longer than it has been in the camera business. HP produces a wide range of office equipment and is a leader in the field of printers, scanners and photocopiers. In the printer industry, producing inexpensively priced machines is considered good practice. It attracts customers who will then end up buying toner and other supplies for many years, which is why toner is so expensive.
HPs move into the camera industry can be seen as an extension of this. When people needed personal computers and printers at home, producing home printers was good for toner business; now that people need cameras and the ability to print professional quality photographs at home, offering inexpensive cameras is good for ink business, too.
That is why the Photosmart line does not just include cameras, it also included branded photo printers, photo paper, ink and peripherals. By producing everything you need under one brand and offering you an inexpensive camera to get you started, HP locks in a dedicated customer who will be around for years.
Last week I was finally ready to give up. Ordering toner has to be my least favorite part of my job, but the cost is ridiculous. If you have ever shopped for toner you know finding it for cheap is like finding your way through a maze. I was ready to give up till I found some reviews on toner.
I was not exactly looking for reviews, as I thought I knew what I needed, but I came across them by accident during an internet search. I started reading them because some of them mentioned getting discounts on toner. I was shocked at what I learned!
I have been going about shopping for toner all wrong. I am constantly crowding my budget trying to keep us stocked on supplied and toner is the big bandit. I was buying all of my toner supplies directly from the companies who had sold us our copiers and printers, and trying to find rebates. Well that is the wrong approach. Those companies have no incentive to give you a deal because they think they have you locked in to buying from them!
These reviews on toner helped me find other sources for toner that would work with my machines, often at half the price. This was a huge relief to me! As you can imagine it has made my job at work a whole heck of a lot easier, plus lowered my stress level significantly. I hope this helps you in your own search!
A lot of people are using printers that are three, four, even ten years outdated. I understand that a lot of people are trying to save money right now, but between the falling cost of printers and the great new advances in cutting-edge printing coming out, I think it is worthwhile to invest in a new machine.
Many people are unaware of the newest features that will have a profound impact on their day to day use of their printer. My favorite is direct printing from a smartphone or other hand held device. If you are using an older printer, how do you print your photos? First you have to plug your phone into your computer, then download all the images, then open each one in a photo editing program, then print them – probably one at a time, right? With cutting-edge printing devices you can simply plug your phone into your printer and print your photos without ever even turning on your computer.
It is also become more common for printers to do more than just print. Some all-in-one copiers/scanners/printers/fax machines retail for well under $100 now. You might not send a lot of faxes but it sure would not hurt to be able to make quick photocopies at home, right?
These kinds of features make a big difference in how I use my printer, which is why I keep up to date on the latest advances and try to stay on top of them. I think that by investing in a good printer every few years you save yourself a lot of frustration, and even money, in the long run.