I bought a new printer today, a Canon i850. My trend recently has been to replace essentially disposable printers like the Lexmark Z45 and the Epson 640 with new printers. When it literally costs as much to replace the ink as it does to replace the printer, why not?
But then the printer companies figured out what I was doing, and started including "starter" in cartridges in new printers, which are mostly empty. What a scam. So I decided to spend a little more on a printer, and get one that doesn't try to make all their money off the consumables.
It seems the Canon printers are among the least expensive in the consumables department, and Lexmark are among the most. The i850 has 4 separate cartridges so when you run out of cyan, you don't need to replace the whole "color" cartridge, just the cyan one.
And now that I've spent a little more on a printer ($215 vs $57) the print quality is FAR superior. The same image printed on the Lexmark Z45 looks like crap (easily visible pixels on glossy photo paper) compared to the Canon.
Which makes me wonder.. what's a good measure of the quality you can expect from a color inkjet? "DPI" doesn't seem to work since even though both printers advertise roughly equivalent resolutions, the Lexmark's dots looked bigger. The Canon box mentions .2 picoliters of ink per dot, perhaps that's it?
11:48:49 PM 
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