One of the more common Dell cartridges is their T0529, which works in the Dell 720 printer. Like other common ink cartridges, there are a number of options available for people who are tired of buying a brand new cartridge all the time. Here are your options:

Remanufactured T0529 - this is a product that we sell at a price that is lower than Dell’s retail price. A remanufactured T0529 cartridge is one that has been refilled to capacity with ink and fitted with a new print head. So what you are left with is a cartridge that has a recycled outer casing, but new parts on it and ink guaranteed to give you the results you are used to.

Dell OEM T0529 - this is the ink cartridge that comes installed in your printer and the one that you would buy directly from Dell. This is the one that their software alerts you to buy from their online store when your printer is getting low on ink. It is also known as the Dell K1014. It is a relatively small cartridge and therefore does not have a very long life.

Refill kits - available for almost all Dell inkjet cartridges, this is the way to save the most money on ink. For the T0529, we offer a refill kit that is $10.99 and gives you almost four full refills, which works out to be under $3 per cartridge refill. All our refill kits are basically the same size, but this one is a better value than most due to the small size of the T0529. The only downside to refilling is that eventually you will have to buy a new cartridge, as most cartridges last for an average of 3-4 refills.

Refilling service - if you don’t want to mess around with refilling, you can pay someone to do it for you. The service we offer is Renew and it works like this: you purchase the service, you then receive a mailer and then send away your empty cartridge. About a week or so later, you receive a refilled cartridge. This option works for people who are interested in recycling or conserving, but don’t have the time.

More are becoming aware that you don’t just have to throw away your empty Dell cartridge and go online and order another one. Because T0529 cartridges are pretty small they can get used pretty quickly, so sometimes it probably feels like a waste to just keep going through them. Just know that there are other options out there, and they can all save you money.

Camera phones these days are all the rage. Sometimes it’s even hard to find a new phone that doesn’t include a camera. Everywhere you go people are taking pictures of everything and anything with their phones. So, where do all those pictures go? Well, pretty much nowhere according to this story from Forbes.

The numbers that they cite from Lyra Research are that this year an estimated 112 million camera phone users will take 11 billion pictures. That’s up from 69 million users and 5 billion pictures last year. But of all those images, only 20% will be sent to another phone, only 14% will be transferred to a computer, and most disheartening to the printer industry, only a measly 3% will ever be printed. Companies like HP and Kodak are looking at a potential fortune in revenues, but they haven’t figured out how to make it work.

The main reason that nobody ever does anything with these pictures is because of their poor quality. Anyone that has seen a camera phone knows that the pictures don’t even look that hot on the tiny little camera screen. Once you transfer it to your computer, what you get is likely a dark and blurry memory. A typical digital camera takes 4 megapixel pictures at 1600 x 1200. A good camera phone takes 1 megapixel pictures at 640 x 480. Odds are no one is going to want to waste some ink and photo paper on something of such low quality. There is also the issue of the lack of a flash, which is found only on more expensive models, which explains why all those pictures you took at that bar or restaurant turned out like mug shots.

Maybe some day more than 3% of camera phone users will take pictures, transfer them to their computer, and print them on an inkjet or photo printer. These days people use camera phones because they are available, easy to use and don’t require much effort. When you start talking about transferring and printing them, there is actually some effort involved and people probably aren’t that interested. If they were, they would just be carrying tiny digital cameras around everywhere.

Pushing Camera Phones To Print [Forbes]

HP announced that Staples will now offer large-format printing services in their stores using HP printers. These printers will be able to produce prints up to 2 feet wide and 50 feet long. A few Staples stores will also have an HP Designjet 5500 for printing banners.

Staples will be using the HP Designjet 130 printer to produce these giant works. You have probably never heard of it because large-format printers are very expensive and pretty rare. The machine itself costs anywhere from $1300-$2000 depending on which version you get, and the six replacement ink cartridges will cost $200+ for the set. So far there is no indication of how much it will cost customers to use these machines, but given that they are very expensive and for “professional graphic design”, it’s probably not going to be very cheap.

Although Staples sells lots of HP printers and computers, this is a pretty interesting arrangement since Staples sells, among others, remanufactured HP ink cartridges. So they make a big deal about having HP bring in these fancy expensive printers, yet all the while they probably have annoyed HP by selling remanufactured cartridges.

Staples Selects HP for Nationwide Large-format Printing Services [Press Release]

Although the SAVEHPPRNTER discount ends today at Amazon, they have a discount on select Canon printers that lasts through 5/8. One of the printers on sale is the Canon PIXMA All-in-One MP830 inkjet printer. It is on sale for $265 and you can use the SAVECEEVENTT coupon to save an additional 5%. So, the normal price of $300 goes down to around $252.

As you can tell from the price, the MP830 is a pretty serious machine. It is an upgrade of the MP780 and it just recently went on sale. It has an automatic document feeder for two-sided printing, a resolution of up to 9600 x 2400, a 2.5″ LCD and Canon claims it can produce a 4 x 6 photo in 36 seconds. This machine is also pretty impressive in terms of its scanning and faxing capability, so it is not just a glorified inkjet printer.

You can find ink cartridges for the Canon PIXA MP830 on our site.

In most of the reviews on this site, we make note of the fact that there is a big difference between the pages per minute that printer manufacturers claim and what you will actually get. When reviewing a printer, we refer to it as the “advertised” speed, just to add our own little disclaimer. By now most people probably know that their inkjet printer is going to print 20 pages in one minute. So, that means that the advertised speeds are really only useful for comparing different models and trying to get a general idea of what is fast and what is adequate.

One other factor is the actual connection between the printer and your computer. Someone wrote in to The Mac Guy at the San Antonio Express-News and asked about their new HP Deskjet 5150 being slower than their old standard HP Deskjet. He explains that if they are using a USB 1.1 connection, that could be the problem. USB 2.0 can be up to 40 times faster than 1.1, and that can make a huge difference if the memory-intensive photos you are printing are what’s slowing down your printer.

A new USB 2.0 cable might not be the cheapest thing ever, so if your local stores only carry $20 cables it might not make sense to upgrade. If you have a Fry’s in your area, you can find a USB 2.0 cable for about $8 and it will work exactly the same as the expensive name brand ones that Staples and CompUSA carry. If you are buying a new printer, that would be a good time to go with 2.0 since you are going to have to buy some kind of cable anyways. This is one of the rare times that a new cable will actually make a very noticeable difference. These aren’t those useless $100 gold-plated Monster cables that the TV salesman at Best Buy is trying to get you to add.

The Mac Guy: Ink jet printers pose tradeoff between speed and photo quality [MYSA.com]