Printer Ink for my Canon MX850
Canon Pixma MX850
Let's go there and talk printer ink.
I bought a new multi-function device a few months ago - a Canon MX850 printer/scanner/fax WITH double-sided printing. At $300 it wasn't a cheapie, but I work from home, so I wanted a pretty good one. It has 5 different ink cartridges (cyan, magenta, yellow, black, and a bigger black for black-only printing). The benefit of this over single-cartridge systems is that when your yellow runs out (but you still have cyan & magenta & black) you can just buy more yellow and you don't need to toss the others.
Anyway, I ran out of yellow a while ago, and since then I haven't been able to print. The printer tells me that I need more yellow before I can print EVEN IF I only want to print in black! WTF? Yes, Canon built its printer to extract maximum dollars from your pocket. "Your device shall always have ink in all cartridges" is their mantra. It doesn't matter if you only ever print black & white, you always need the colour cartridges to be full (are they tiny so that they run out faster?
BETTER YET, I needed to scan something the other day, to send to a friend. The printer told me "Sorry, you can't scan until you buy a new yellow ink cartridge. It's empty." -- HOLD ON a second here. Scanning is the process of putting something INTO the device, not getting something out. It doesn't require ANY ink, let alone yellow. As I said, their mantra is "Your device shall always have ink in all cartridges".
Ok, fine. I'll buy your damned ransom-ink. So, I march down to the local BESTbuy to get some. I figure I'll buy 2 sets of cartridges so I won't run out again at an inopportune moment. How much for 2 of each cartridge (2 cyan, 2 magenta, 2 yellow, 2 small black, 2 large black) ? Guess! Go ahead and guess!
I bet you didn't guess $241.96 !
What the FUCK!
I went home empty handed, and hopped on eBay, hoping I'd find a more reasonable deal. Boy, did I ever.
The seller TouchDream2009 happily sent me all 10 ink cartridges, from Hong Kong, with new chips that will always report my ink as not-empty, for $9.99 plus $20 shipping and handling. Yep, $29.99 total, delivered to my door.
That's fully EIGHT times cheaper than BESTbuy, who has just lost my printer-related business forever. It REALLY pays to shop around.
The printer market is ripe for disruption. Someone needs to develop OPEN printers and OPEN ink, whose manufacture is full of competition based on quality, not arbitrary rules enforced by software & hardware. I would gladly pay $500 for a printer if it took ink refills that only cost $30, versus the competition's $50 printer that requires $300 of ink per year.
In a world where printers are cheap, and ink is expensive, there's a fortune to be made by a company that sells expensive printers and cheap ink.
Update: I received my ink from TouchDream2009, and it works perfectly!