A little while back we had to print off some documents, we don’t print as much as most businesses, but we do keep some paper records and we have to send out physical mail from time to time. We have two printers, both have been playing up lately so we had to find a solution.
The older one is a Canon BJC-2000SP, we bought it second hand for about $70 in 2001, so old it uses a parallel cable. This one had the black only cartridge, which is the old style where you replace the entire print head, or do what Canon don’t want you to and refill the cartridge. We got many miles out of refills before this cartridge packed up disabling the printer. So we plugged in the newer printer, an S200SP also from Canon back in (it had not been used for a while) and tried to print. Seems this one also had a cactus print head. This printer was about $90 new on special from memory.
I already knew once both these print heads packed up we’d be in for a costly operation to restore either printer, more costly than replacing the whole thing. In fact after an easy life of under 1000 pages and only ever having genuine ink cartridges the S200SP’s print head had begun to lose some dots. You simply can’t buy an S200SP printhead. So there’s one printer in the bin. My guess is Canon sold a lot more BJC 2000 SP’s and you can buy the printhead/cartridge for that model. It is $85.
An entire new printer, better than this dinosaur is only $75! Still, I bought the cartridge. Why? Because throwing out my cartridge is a lot less waste than throwing out the printer, and we can refill the cartridge several times. It’s annoying that printer companies do this. It is only in recent times that manufacturers have started to provide economical solutions that last more than a couple of years. I’ll be choosing very carefully when I am forced to buy a new printer eventually, and making sure it can be refilled easily and economically.
