Another ink cartridge maker hit by Epson

Epson hits another ink cartridge maker - ENGLISH NEWS - NEWS - PC-Welt - pcwelt.de: "Epson hits another ink cartridge maker

For the second time this week a manufacturer of Epson-compatible ink cartridges is taking its products off the market as a result of legal action by Seiko Epson Corp., the Japanese company said Friday.

For the second time this week a manufacturer of Epson-compatible ink cartridges is taking its products off the market as a result of legal action by Seiko Epson Corp., the Japanese company said Friday.


Environmental Business Products Ltd. has stopped importing and supplying Epson-compatible printer cartridges as a result of an out of court settlement between the two companies, Epson said in a statement. Epson had brought proceedings against the London company in the U.K. High Court for infringement of a number of patents and registered designs owned by Epson, the statement said.

The company and others like it offer ink cartridges or refills that can be used in Epson printers and are typically cheaper than those from Epson. For printer makers the sale of replacement ink is a major source of profit.

The action couldn't immediately be confirmed with the U.K. company, which has operations in the U.K., France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and Spain. The Epson statement included a quote from Environmental Business Products' managing director, saying sales of Epson-compatible cartridges were stopped because the company isn't confident its products would be found not to infringe on Epson's patents.

In addition to the halt in sales, Environmental Business Products will also have to pay legal costs and 'a substantial payment' for damages, Epson said. The amounts involved were not disclosed.

Earlier this week Epson reached a settlement with Hong Kong-based Multi-Union Trading Co. Ltd. as part of a patent infringement lawsuit brought in the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon in Portland. That will see 75 of Multi-Union's cartridge models barred from being imported and sold in the U.S., Epson said. The cartridges are sold under the PrintRite brand and other names."

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New Lexmark X3480 Multi-Function Printer

TrustedReviews - Lexmark X3480 Multi-Function Printer: "

By Simon Williams

Lexmark X3480 Multi-Function Printer

Some people might think Lexmark makes too many all-in-one devices for its own good. It currently has 14 showing on its web site under Home Products and while some of these may be end-of-life machines, it does makes choices in this crowded market trickier.

The X3480 employs a very similar design to the X2470, reviewed recently, though with a couple of important extras. The square-cut block with the cutaway corner now has a small sloping control panel projecting from its front and a series of slots and sockets at the right for plugging in cards and cameras.


Three memory card slots provide for all the major types, including xD and Microdrive. There’s also a PictBridge socket to connect a compatible camera and this is probably a better option than using cards, as you can use your camera’s display to select images.

Printing from a memory card is a bit tricky without an LCD monitor, though Lexmark makes the best of it by printing a proof sheet, where you can select images, number and size of prints and the type of paper, by filling in little circles and scanning. Instructions appear on the LCD strip and the process is pretty straightforward, if a bit wasteful of ink."

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Today’s printers do far more than churn out letters.

Extra hands for busy families - Doors - Times Online: "Extra hands for busy families
Today’s printers do far more than churn out letters. Rod Lawton finds that clever devices that can scan, copy and bring photos to life are in the ascendant
All that talk of the “paperless world” was nonsense, wasn’t it? Paper is still the cheapest and most flexible means of passing round information. We need printers as much as ever, but perhaps of a different kind. Once, a printer was simply a box that churned out largely text-based documents. That’s not enough any more. Today, families crave flexible devices, able to wear many hats.

Michele Langdon, a designer from south London, says that a multifunction printer has eased the dramas of family life. “We have five people in our household, each of whom frequently wants to perform different tasks, for work and play. A smart printer costs little more than normal models, yet offers far more features, so it was an obvious choice.”

The Langdons’ routine is typical. It starts at 3.30pm with homework. Your offspring need to scan some artwork, print off a few web pages and create coursework that mixes text, diagrams and, often, full-colour photos. Before dinner, you might want to copy a bank statement, print a letter to the manager and address an envelope. Later, once everyone has gathered to watch Dr Who, you might find time to print some digital photos of your last weekend in the country, or burn them to a CD with a neatly printed label."

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Did you noticed how soon your start-up cartridges ran out?

Printing money at PC World - vnunet.com:

"Clive Akass,

Personal Computer World 20 Jul 2006


If you have bought a personal laser or inkjet printer in the past few years, the chances are that you have been shocked by how soon your first cartridge ran out. Manufacturers often include only sample quantities of ink or toner in new machines to keep prices down and ensure that buyers will soon need an expensive refill.

It is an example of how competition can work against the buyer. If one company cuts down on the ink or toner to undercut its rivals, the others will follow suit.

PCW readers may be knowledgeable enough to expect this kind of thing, but a large proportion of buyers will be deceived on the real cost of the printer, for which the consumables will soon cost more than the machine itself."

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Buying printer - Find out How to Choose

How to buy printers: The big picture: "How to buy printers: The big picture

Author
PC World Canada
July 13, 2006

The Big Picture

For most people, choosing a printer entails balancing price, speed and print quality. But, as models improve, manufacturers differentiate them in other ways. Inkjet printers, along with digital cameras, are changing the way we print photographs. When loaded with special photo inks and paper, inkjet printers are one of the best options for transforming a digital image into a photograph.

For monochrome lasers--whose text quality is so good and uniform that models' output samples are almost indistinguishable from each other--breadth of features is a major selling point. This is good news for busy offices: for example, thanks to extra paper trays and more memory, lasers can print more efficiently; they also come with more capable drivers, and permit easier remote management. And, as colour lasers drop in price, more users can afford to add colour to their workplace documents.

Key Features
Speed: The marketing war among printer vendors has escalated so much that it has yielded utterly meaningless print-speed ratings. Vendors frequently cite ratings based on printing only the simplest text documents, or printing in draft mode, and some don't include the time it takes for the PC to send a job to the printer. In any case, claimed speeds are frequently two, three or more times faster than the speeds you'll see in real-world printing.

In our most recent Top 10 roundup of inkjet printers, the rated text speeds ranged from 5 to 30 pages per minute (ppm)-but, in our tests, the actual text speeds ranged from just 3.8 to 6.9 ppm. Similarly, vendors claimed graphics speeds ranging from 2 to 24 ppm, while our tested speeds ranged from 0.8 to 2.6 ppm.

For a ranked list of all recent inkjet models we've seen, consult our Reviews and Rankings index page.

Though you'll get similarly misleading promises from monochrome and colour laser vendors, you will find faster speeds. In our most recent tests, monochrome lasers printed text at 15.0 to 25.1 ppm; colour lasers printed text somewhat slower, at 6.8 to 18.7 ppm. For graphics, colour lasers' printing speeds ranged from 1.1 to 5.6 ppm--much slower than advertised."

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Seven New Printers from Canon

Canon Announces Seven New Printers: "Canon Announces Seven New Printers


M. David Stone - PC Magazine

July 11

It's been a big week for Canon printers: the company announced three new inkjet printers and four inkjet all-in-one (AIO) printers.

The three printer-only inkjets range from $49 to $199. Like most recent new printers, they represent an evolutionary improvement over last year's models, claiming better performance, and offering additional features for any given price. Canon says they will also print long-lasting photos, with a touted 100-year lifetime if kept in dark storage (such as a photo album), and a 30-year lifetime for photos framed behind glass.

The most basic, and least expensive, printer in this group is the Pixma iP1700 Photo Printer, which measures 6.5 by 17.2 by 10.0 inches (HWD), and weighs just 6.6 pounds. The iP1700 uses two ink cartridges to print in four colors—cyan, yellow, magenta, and black, with a maximum resolution of 600 by 600 dots per inch (dpi) for black and 1200 by 4800 dpi for color.

Canon says the iP1700 can print a 4-by-6 borderless print in about 55 seconds, and it rates the printer at 22 pages per minute (ppm) for black and 17 ppm for color. (Ink jet speed claims have very little to do with reality, but you can use them to compare the relative speeds of different printers, particularly with printers from the same manufacturer.)

Although Canon calls all three of these printers photo printers, the Pixma iP6310D and Pixma iP6700D are more clearly focused on photos than the iP1700.

Offering 1200-by-4800-dpi maximum resolution for both black and color, the iP6310D adds more nozzles (2304 compared with 1472 in the iP1700). It takes either two color cartridges, with cyan, yellow, and magenta ink in each, or one color cartridge and one photo cartridge, using black, light cyan, and light magenta ink. Canon doesn't even bother giving a page-per-minute rating for the printer, but folks at the company say the iP6310D can print a borderless 4-by-6 snapshot in 60 seconds, and an 8-by-10 photo in 1 minute 47 seconds.

The iP6700D is the high-end choice here, with a maximum 2400-by-9600-dpi resolution for both black and color, 3072 nozzles. It also has a smaller minimum drop size—at 1 picoliter rather than the 2-picoliter minimum size for the iP1700 and iP6310D—providing more precise control over the dots on the page."

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Replacing ink cartridges can get costly

Computer printers need ink, lots of it - Orlando Sentinel : Business: "Computer printers need ink, lots of it

Replacing cartridges can get costly, but they don't have to soak your budget.

Gregory Karp | The (Allentown) Morning Call

The price of ink for home printers may be the only price besides that of gasoline that so infuriates consumers. It doesn't take long for the cost of ink-cartridge replacements to exceed the price of the printer.

So it makes sense for consumers to search for ink bargains, especially if you print many photos from your digital camera.

The bad news is, it's somewhat complicated. Even so, the decision is based on an age-old trade-off: price versus quality.

Studies show the printer's manufacturer makes the best-quality inks. But think about what quality you need. A child's grade-school project printed on regular copy paper doesn't need high-quality ink.

If you're worried about a printed photo fading after a few years, ask yourself whether that's a big deal. If it fades, you could print it again from the digital image on your computer.

If you seldom need superior quality, you could use cheap ink at home and just pay for commercial photo finishing for those few important photos. For snapshots, a commercial photo finisher online or at a retail store such as Wal-Mart may be cheaper than doing it yourself anyway."

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