Hi,
1) For laser printers, are all the cartridges designed in such a way that there is an opening for us to pour the powder toners? Do we need to buy refillable cartridges?
In office, we just change the whole cartridge, but for home use, I would like to economise. For inkjet printers, we need to buy refillable empty cartridges for $5 each, costing total $20. The original cartridge and some third party cartridges are not refillable.
2) I see some very cheap second hand laser printers in carousell. If the printout has vertical lines or dirt, can this problem be solved by using alcohol to clean?
3) How often do we need to change drum head?
I am sick injets getting clogged up. The ink is very cheap if buy from tao bao and print on ink tank printers using draft mode. But the stupid print head is built in and cannot be cleaned and if it got clogged, the whole printer has to be discarded, then it becomes no longer economical. Plus they force us to top up all 4 tanks even though I only need to print in black. AIO is the worst. They cannot last beyond 3 years, and once they give error message, the whole printer is as good as gone case.
It looks like you print very infrequently and hence your inkjet printers clog up... the technology has not improved significantly since I last used photo printers to print out my photos in large format (A4-A3+)... basically I used to print about 2-3 times a year in large quantities 50-60 photo copies each time... each time I have to spend a lot of money using original Epson ink cartridges to unclog the print heads before I can get good prints... I was using an Epson R1800 with 8 ink tanks including a gloss optimizer... it generated really beautiful prints, better than what a photo shop could do with chemical prints - but it was an expensive and time consuming hobby...
Subsequent to that I only printed black & white documents and only very occasionally... maybe once in 2-3 months... and in hence I bought a monochrome laser printer from HP... it's the cheapest duplex monochrome laser printer at $215... it's served me well, always producing clear prints although it's started to give a faint line running vertically through the A4 page...
Bottom line is this: print very frequently like my sister does for her children's worksheets for school and tuition (1-2 times a week) - ink tank inkjet printers are more economical if you're not after the crispest print quality - it's definitely good enough on cheap 80 gsm plain paper... but print infrequently like me, avoid inkjet printers like the plague - whatever is being advertised about not clogging print heads is just false advertising... whether you use original ink or third party ink, the print head will clog... unless you can be bothered to run off test prints every day to keep the print heads clear...
Finally, cheap monochrome laser printers are so cheap ($100-200+), the price of a replacement toner cartridge maybe be up to 50% of the printer ($99-100+), so it may not be worth to replace the cartridge but just replace the whole printer... I would just buy whatever is being lelong at all the many 'sales' each year... may be more economical in the final analysis... as for third party toner, best to buy third party toner cartridges (possible only if the toner cartridge is not replaced with the drum) where you can just pop it in and use... refilling the original toner cartridge is just too much trouble and unless you have a dedicated work space to do it, the toner powder is apt to fly around and the powder is actually carcinogenic if it enters the lungs... not worth it in my opinion...
I'm currently using a HP monochrome laser printer M211d - this is without the wireless function which I don't need... currently retailing at Challenger at $199 if you're a member... standard toner cartridge at 1100 prints costs $80, while the high yield toner cartridge at 2600 prints costs $140... for a laser printer with built-in duplex, I think it's very good value and I get the famed HP laser quality prints...
