Marshall Brain's Blog

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Buying new inkjet cartridges

I went to the store this week to buy new inkjet cartridges for our printer. The prices are nuts -- it's about $65 to buy the two cartridges I need. I can actually buy a Westinghouse microwave oven at Target for less than the price of a single inkjet cartridge:




Leigh and I had been talking about getting an official "photo printer." Since I was about to blow $65 anyway, I went to look at new printers "just in case." At Circuit City they had a Lexmark P707 photo printer on sale, with a rebate, for $29.



Amazon has this printer as well, and you can buy new ones from their "merchants" for as low as $26.

So I bought one. I open the box and inside there are two brand new printer cartridges with a street value of $65. And the printer is fantastic:

• 4,800 x 1,200 DPI printing with 6 colors. I've printed about 20 photos of various sizes and they look fantastic. They look better than 4x6 photos of the same files that we had printed at a camera store for 40 cents a print.
  
• Automatic paper sensing. So if you put in normal paper, the printer automatically cuts down the print resolution to save ink, but if you put in glossy photo paper it automatically prints at the best resolution.
  
• Borderless prints on 4x6 or 8.5x11 paper
  
• Nice photo management and adjustment software
  
• Plus, the printer comes with a built-in memory card reader that reads all four common flash memory formats. The software transfers files from the memory card to your hard disk.

It is not the fastest printer in the world -- it takes several minutes to print a photo at the best resolution. I could care less. I'm printing a couple of pictures at a time, not running a photo lab. So this is not a bad deal when you think about it: $65 in ink cartidges + a 4-format flash memory reader + image software + a really nice photo printer, all for $29.

What am I going to do when this printer runs out of ink? I guess I am going to go back to Amazon and buy another P707 for $26. I will throw away the old printer and plug in the new one. At $26, it is cheaper to buy a new printer than it is to buy two new cartridges -- the new printer actually costs half as much as the replacement cartridges.

We've all noticed this -- inkjet cartridge prices are insane. These cartridges should be costing $3.50, not $35. The printers have become disposable, and in some cases they now cost less than half the price of replacement cartridges. How crazy is that?