Dell have announced the launch of their range of “Nextlife” inkjet cartridges and have described them as ‘industry changing’ as if they are some innovative product. I have never heard a bigger heap of hyped up balderdash in all my life.

Nextlife are a range of remanufactured cartridges for 70% of HP, Canon, Epson, Lexmark and their own Dell printers. Their marketing material claims that you can save ‘up to’ 20% and print ‘up to’ 20% more when compared to branded cartridges.

Granted the packaging is made from 50% post consumer waste and is 100% recyclable but the ‘up to’ is just legal speak for ‘may not be as much as 20%’.
This approach is more environmentally friendly than purchasing new cartridges every time but…..
why would you use this product instead of the multitude of much cheaper, reliable products that have been available for years?

Get this, Dell printer owners. You purchase your dell printer cartridge, on-line as you can’t get them in the shops, then when it is empty you send it back to Dell. They then refill it and sell it back to you for only ‘up to’ 20% less than the price you have already paid for it. Sounds like money for old rope to me.

I wonder what Lexmark have to say about this bearing in mind that they manufacture Dell inkjet printers and the cartridges !

The video below shows what not to do when you fit your new, expensive printer cartridge. Surprising how many times we have seen this!

Contrary to popular belief it is not necessary to print photographs at your printers maximum resolution. Modern inkjet printers are capable of printing at thousands of pixels per inch. You may need to use this resolution to print minutely detailed engineering drawings but for photographs the ideal resolution to use is 300 dpi.

This is because our eyesight can not really take advantage of anything over this value and if you do crank up the resolution there is a tendency to swamp the print head, creating poor quality prints and even unwanted artifacts in the image.

To do this you really need to decide what size you want to print before you take the photograph.

For example to print a 6 x 4 photo at 300 dpi the image should be 1200 x 1600, surprisingly only a 2 megapixel image……

3 megapixel should be used for 5 x 7 and 8 megapixel for A4.

This technique has the added bonus of using less ink.

Do you run a laser printer for your business?

Have you ever worked out how much each printed page is costing you?

• Q  -  How much can a box of coloured dust cost?
• A  -  The answer is a lot.

There is also a good chance that even if you only use your laser printer in an average way for a business, it is costing you over £100 per year in electric.

Look at the page yield statistics for these toners and they look quite favorable.  Generally they quote a figure between 1200 and 2000 pages.

These figures are only a best case scenario when printing at only 5% coverage. (A basic Dear Sir or Madam letter covers around 5% and costs around 3 pence)

However, many documents printed in the workplace cover much more than 5% of the page.  Take for example the kind of estate agents window display that we have all seen.  That kind of document with bold text and pictures costs more like 40 pence and you can only print a few hundred of them from a set of expensive toners.

There is an alternative.  Click on the business tab above to access an interesting, free report.

Here at Continuink we like HP products and we have sold a great many of them.  There have been some issues with the software they come bundled with however.  The problem is that the setup program either freezes or crashes. Even if it appears that you have been successful you may find out at a later stage that the device does not behave as expected. Commonly the printer works but the scanner does not.  Invariably this is caused by anti-virus and firewall software interfering with the setup process.  HP software tends to install itself into computer memory addresses commonly frequented by spyware and viruses, and your security software does not trust it.  To minimise the risk of failure, disconnect your computer from the internet and disable all your security software before you start.  Then we recommend you watch the following video that shows you how to disable other programs that run in the background of your computer that can also create conflicts, before running the HP installer.

Invariably in this world I find that if something looks too good to be true it generally is.

That’s just how it is for printers.

How do they sell a really good all in one device for £40?

Where do they make a profit?

On rip-off cartridges of course.

Please don’t be mislead by enticing sales material.

Call us before you make a decision.

Even if you don’t purchase one of our printers we’ll happily advise you on what to avoid and what’s good.

Have you ever left your printer for a while and not used it?

Perhaps only over the weekend, only to find when you start it up again it has poor print quality.

This is caused by ink drying out in the print head.

Go to control panel and select printers.  Right click on your printer and select printing preferences.  Then within preferences you will find maintenance or something like it.

Now select “clean print head”.

In most cases this will solve your problem.

Don’t be tempted to use cheap paper in your inkjet printer.

At best you will achieve poor print quality because the budget paper is too porous.  Ink tends to bleed into the paper and you do not get nice sharp lines or images.  At worst the fibers from the paper stick to the rubber rollers that pull paper through your printer and they will slip, causing feed problems.

Check the packaging and ensure the paper is rated for use on an inkjet printer.

Spend a little bit more, it is worth it.