mfunnell
Shaken, so blurred
If you don't want to read a rant, then please move along. You have been warned.
My old Canon iP4500 died today, may it rest in peace (and pieces). I took a punt on resurrecting it with a new print head (the old print head had died on the PGI-5BK channel) but all I achieved was burning out the new head (on all channels) then frying the whole printer. I guess there was something bad in the power feed to the head.
Oh well. It was worth a go.
The CLI-8 inks it used cost 4-5 times more here in rip-off-Oz than elsewhere, so ordering in from the US saved me a lot of money over the years. But they don't make printers that take those inks any more. It's all new printers with different model numbers that take different inks - the only difference being the region-encoding in printer and ink that allow the wonderful practice of "horizontal market segmentation" (ie. charging poor old Skip more that anyone in the whole world - except for the Kiwi's, who seem to get our prices too).
I extracted a good 6-or-so years from the old thing, and a lot of prints, so it probably didn't owe me much.
I've ended up with a rather horrid new device called an MG7160 (the equivalent in the US is, I believe, titled the MG7120 and takes CLI-251 inks, whereas our model takes CLI-651 inks - the only difference being the stinking region encoding and the cost that goes with that.) I wanted an iP7260. I'm told they exist - but nobody sells them, at least not in stores, since people apparently only buy all-in-one devices these days, leaving me with a scanner I don't want (my 9950F works fine) and no rear feeder (too hard to have one of those with the scanner on top, I guess) that causes it to take up rather too much desk space (to pull the trays in and out from underneath, to load paper).
It does have a grey ink, which makes for rather nicer gloss B&W 6"x4" prints, so I guess that's something. It does do network printing, which is handy - though I spent 3 hours trying to install the thing before figuring out that it would not contact my DHCP server unless it was power-cycled, which is something mentioned nowhere in the installation procedure or instructions and (possibly) requires multiple installation iterations (I did that, but I can't be sure I had to).
It does print nice-looking photos.
Now I'll have to re-figure the economics of my printing. The expensive CLI-9 pigment inks for my Pro9500 are starting to look cheaper - yet good gloss output from that thing requires expensive paper and more effort than I'm prepared to go through for a 6"x4" print (which is why I need a smaller dye-ink / gloss paper printer alongside it). I guess I'll just have to figure out what works best.
If anyone here in Oz could use some surplus CLI-8 or PGI-5BK cartridges, then be in touch. They're no use to me now.
...Mike
My old Canon iP4500 died today, may it rest in peace (and pieces). I took a punt on resurrecting it with a new print head (the old print head had died on the PGI-5BK channel) but all I achieved was burning out the new head (on all channels) then frying the whole printer. I guess there was something bad in the power feed to the head.
Oh well. It was worth a go.
The CLI-8 inks it used cost 4-5 times more here in rip-off-Oz than elsewhere, so ordering in from the US saved me a lot of money over the years. But they don't make printers that take those inks any more. It's all new printers with different model numbers that take different inks - the only difference being the region-encoding in printer and ink that allow the wonderful practice of "horizontal market segmentation" (ie. charging poor old Skip more that anyone in the whole world - except for the Kiwi's, who seem to get our prices too).
I extracted a good 6-or-so years from the old thing, and a lot of prints, so it probably didn't owe me much.
I've ended up with a rather horrid new device called an MG7160 (the equivalent in the US is, I believe, titled the MG7120 and takes CLI-251 inks, whereas our model takes CLI-651 inks - the only difference being the stinking region encoding and the cost that goes with that.) I wanted an iP7260. I'm told they exist - but nobody sells them, at least not in stores, since people apparently only buy all-in-one devices these days, leaving me with a scanner I don't want (my 9950F works fine) and no rear feeder (too hard to have one of those with the scanner on top, I guess) that causes it to take up rather too much desk space (to pull the trays in and out from underneath, to load paper).
It does have a grey ink, which makes for rather nicer gloss B&W 6"x4" prints, so I guess that's something. It does do network printing, which is handy - though I spent 3 hours trying to install the thing before figuring out that it would not contact my DHCP server unless it was power-cycled, which is something mentioned nowhere in the installation procedure or instructions and (possibly) requires multiple installation iterations (I did that, but I can't be sure I had to).
It does print nice-looking photos.
Now I'll have to re-figure the economics of my printing. The expensive CLI-9 pigment inks for my Pro9500 are starting to look cheaper - yet good gloss output from that thing requires expensive paper and more effort than I'm prepared to go through for a 6"x4" print (which is why I need a smaller dye-ink / gloss paper printer alongside it). I guess I'll just have to figure out what works best.
If anyone here in Oz could use some surplus CLI-8 or PGI-5BK cartridges, then be in touch. They're no use to me now.
...Mike