For anyone who has lost the manual to their laser printer, Feedroller.com might be of use to you. It has a pretty extensive list of manuals and guides on laser printers, fax machines and a few inkjet printers. In addition to regular manuals, they also have guides on how to fix various printers. So if you are the adventorous type and need to service your LaserJet 2100, then they can help you out.

As with most guides you find online, all the files are in PDF format, so they make take a little while to load.

This is one of the most frustrating problems with an inkjet printer, mostly because you usually have no idea what is causing it. For years, if you computer wasn’t giving you an error messages, then you were just left to guess why lights were blinking on your printer and why it was non-responsive. Luckily these days more printers have LCDs that can actually tell you what the problem is. They can also better communicate with your computer to let you know what’s going on. But what do you do when you know what the error is but you don’t know what to do about it?

First things first: do the most obvious thing and check your manual. Don’t call up the manufacturer if you haven’t at least taken the first step. Usually, the manual is useless, but it’s worth checking out anyways.

If you can’t find anything in the manual about the specific problem you are having, then the second thing you can try is to completely reset your printer. This is usually the first thing that the printer manufacturers will suggest when you call them up with a problem, so you might as well try it before you go calling anyone. Resetting your printer can fix minor errors and can really save you a lot of time if it works.

If you are getting a specific error message, the third thing you can try is to Google that message and see if anyone else has a solution to that problem. There are so many different error messages between all the different printers out there, so it helps to do a specific search to find any solutions. Sometimes certain error messages can be cleared by entering a specific code in your printer. Sometimes, you will just get an error like “change cartridge” that is pretty generic and that likely has no magic solution that you haven’t tried.

Your last option is calling your printer manufacturer directly. This can be a daunting task and can be a huge inconvenience, so that’s why it’s a last option. Hopefully if you have a major problem with your printer, it is still under warranty and you can get a replacement. Otherwise, you may have to do some dealing with the person on the phone to get a real solution. If you get the right person and you make a fuss, they will send you a replacement machine. Printer manufacturers only make their money on ink, and if you don’t have one of their printers anymore then they lose that money. They would rather take a small hit by sending you a new printer if it means years of buying printer ink from them. (Hopefully you know better than that and are buying remanufactured and compatible ink cartridges.)

Finally, one thing you shouldn’t do is take your printer somewhere to have it repaired. Unless this is covered by your warranty, it is just not worth it. A lot of technicians will charge you something like $50-$75 an hour to even look at the machine. So you might get charged $50 for someone to look at the machine for five minutes and then tell you that you need to replace something which will cost you even more. Best case scenario is that they fix something in an hour and you are out only like $50. Well, these days you can get a new printer for $50, so fixing your old one suddenly isn’t really worth it. The exception to this would be if you have an out-of-warranty printer that you paid a few hundred dollars that the manufacturer won’t do anything about. Then maybe taking it to a repair shop might be worth considering. Otherwise, just bite the bullet and buy a new printer. It may seem like a waste, but you will save in the long run.

Office Depot has the HP Officejet 5610 on sale for $55 after coupon and mail-in rebate. The regular price is $150, so with the coupon and rebate, this is a pretty big savings. The coupon code to use at checkout is 21060584 and that is good for $20 off a $100 purchase. The mail-in rebate is for $75 and that expires on 6/17.

The Officejet 5610 is an all-in-one printer rated at 20 pages per minute for black and 13 for color. It includes a fax machine and you can print photos with it by swapping out the black and replacing it with the HP 59 photo cartridge.

You can read CNET’s review of the Officejet 5160 here.

You can find Officejet 5610 cartridges on our site.

Ah, the eternal question. Unfortunately, it is a question with no answer. Every manufacturer makes different sets of cartridges with different amounts of ink in them and they all usually don’t even specify page counts anymore. When it comes to laser cartridges, you will find that most manufacturers will estimate the numbers of pages you are going to get. With laser cartridges it’s easier to guess because people use them mostly for documents and since they last a few thousand pages, it’s easier to estimate since your margin of error has gone up.

The reason why it is even impossible to guess how many pages someone will get from their cartridge is because it all depends on the type of printing they do. Someone could be using a cartridge to only print text documents, and someone could be using it to print 8 x 10s - obviously there is going to be a big difference between the life of the cartridge for these two types of use. With so many printers having photo cartridges now, it’s also difficult to tell which cartridges are actually being used and when.

The other thing that makes this question difficult is that, for the most part, printer manufacturers do not advertise how much ink is in their cartridges. Basically, only HP will tell you the milliliter content of their cartridges. You can check the packages and search around on their websites, but generally that information is impossible to find or nonexistent.

In the old days, HP estimated that their 51645A cartridge could yield approximately 833 pages. These page yield estimates are based on 5% coverage, which unfortunately means that they are way too high because really nothing takes up only 5% of a page. Also, this cartridge is giant compared to HP’s current cartridges. The 45 black contains 42 ml of ink, while the HP 96 contains 21 ml and the HP 94 contains only 11 ml. The following information on HP’s site basically sums everything up:

HP 45 - 42 ml of ink, 833 page yield.
HP 96 - 21 ml of ink, 800 page yield.

So, even when they are giving us information, it is wrong in some way. With inkjet printers, there really is no guessing and all you can really do is watch your ink monitor level.

The one thing you can do to ease this situation is to print in Draft mode. Honestly, how many of your prints ever leave your house? If you aren’t printing photos and aren’t printing something that you plan to give/show to someone, go to your printer preferences and select FastDraft or whatever your printer calls it. Your prints will be done in half the time and you won’t waste ink. This is especially helpful when printing out web pages, since they usually contain lots of colors or images.

A couple of deals for the weekend….

Amazon has the Canon Selphy CP510 on sale for $50. The CP510 is a compact photo printer that can produce 4 x 6 printers in about a minute.

CompUSA has the HP Photosmart 3210 on sale for $220 after a mail-in rebate. This is one of HP’s newer printers that features their individual ink tanks. It is also pretty fast, as HP rates it at 31 pages per minute for color prints.

NewEgg has the Samsung ML-2010 on sale for $50 after mail-in rebate. This is a popular printer and even without this mail-in rebate it is one of the better bargains available.

So what did this represent? Well, as someone guessed, it is the amount of oil that it takes to produce one toner cartridge.

Technically, it takes about 3/4 of a gallon of oil to make one, but you get the point. Everybody is aware of what’s going on these days with oil prices and all the attention on global warming, and those are two very good reasons why we should do what we can to limit the resources used to produce new toner cartridges. Every time someone purchases a remanufactured or compatible toner cartridge, you save that much oil. Even if you don’t need a new one and you just recycle the cartridge in some way, that is still helping the environment. (On a side note, it takes about three ounces of oil to manufacture a standard inkjet cartridge.)

In addition to the resources it takes to produce a cartridge, once it has been used it continues to have an environmental impact. You can find different specific numbers cited in different stories, but the fact remains that hundreds of millions of toner and ink cartridges are thrown away every year. Given the number of cartridges thrown away every year and amount of time it takes them to decompose, more and more waste is piling up every year.

Now we aren’t saying that if we all use recycled ink cartridges that we will somehow solve our oil problem. But the fact is that a lot of people worry about the problem and don’t know what they can do or how they can have an impact. Recycling your cartridges or using remanufactured products is one easy way you really can have an impact.

These days we are all pretty diligent about recycling our cans, newspapers and our grass clippings - so why not our ink cartridges?

One type of inkjet printer that we haven’t heard too much about is standalone compact photo printers. They started appearing on the market around the same time that at-home photo printing took off, but today they still only make up a relatively small portion of the photo printing market. Even though a lot of people like printing their own photos, so far they haven’t seemed to be totally on board with owning a printer that probably just prints 4 x 6s and nothing else. Companies like Kodak, HP and Canon make an effort to have their customers use their cameras and then hook up those cameras to their compact printers and print with their ink on their paper. Since we haven’t provided too many reviews on any of these kinds of printers so far, we thought we would point out an article in the NY Times that takes a look at five of these printers.

They take a look at the HP Photosmart 475, the Lexmark P450, the Canon Selphy CP170, the Kodak EasyShare 500 and the Epson PictureMate Deluxe. They don’t do any real in depth testing on the machines, but they compare the basic and important stuff like print quality, print speed and general usability. They don’t declare a clear winner, but their top choices are the Kodak and the Epson. Like with most other printers, Lexmark disappoints. They note that the HP has “gadget appeal” but that it is slow and its first print jobs all jammed. The Canon had potential but it had some technical issues.

The Epson and Kodak machines both run about $200, so they right around the same price as some regular photo printers.

Anyone out there own a compact photo printer?

The Joys and Pitfalls of One-and-a-Half-Minute Photo Processing [NY Times]

Lately HP has been coming out with more and more personal laser printers that cost under $200. When laser printers first hit that price, it was mostly just Samsung and Brother who offered those cheap machines, and HP basically stuck with the higher end stuff. Eventually HP realized they were missing out and they started to offer their own bargain laser printers. These days they have a couple of these models, including the LaserJet 1020 and 1022, and now the LaserJet 1018, which will retail for around $120. PC Mag recently reviewed the 1018, and they didn’t come away too impressed with it.

HP says that this is the smallest laser printer currently available, so if that is what you are looking for then they’ve solved your problem. Other than that, it doesn’t appear that this machine has too much going for it. For starters, it is rated at only 12 ppm. Even compared with inkjet printers from a few years ago that is still pretty slow. Most laser printers, even the ones under $200, are around 20 ppm. Even inkjet printers these days bottom out at about 14 ppm. To be fair, you cannot directly compare speeds on inkjet and laser printers, primarily because you will get better text quality from a laser printer, but you also can’t ignore the fact that the printer is only advertised at 12 ppm. Because this printer doesn’t really have any other features to it, the only other thing to judge it on besides print quality is page speed, therefore some people might be disappointed.

The two other printers that PC Mag compares the LaserJet 1018 to are the Samsung ML-2010 and the Lexmark E120n. The ML-2010 is a popular printer and one of the original sub-$200 models to stand out. The E120n is a network printer that is well-rated by PC Mag, but it isn’t as common as the other two machines. You can check out the comparison here.

Since this is a newer printer, there isn’t a whole lot of user feedback out there, so we just have to go on a few reviews along with the product specifications to make a judgement. If anyone owns the LaserJet 1018, let everyone know what you think of it.

Buy this printer Buy HP LaserJet 1018 toner cartridges

The author of this Q & A at the SF Gate, David “Albert” Einstein, hints at the fact that lower priced multifunction printers might not be the greatest machines ever. We have mentioned the same thing before, so we aren’t going to argue. A lot of times the cheaper all-in-one printers do everything, but they don’t do anything particularly well. Their speeds are pretty slow (therefore the copying is also slow) and their scanning is sometimes subpar. The printer manufacturers believe that if someone buys a $100 all-in-one that they won’t care that the scanner isn’t so great, either because they don’t use it that much or because their expectations aren’t very high. That is probably true a lot of the time, but it doesn’t really help the people who truly want/need a quality all-in-one.

So basically, if you will truly use the features on your all-in-one, you will have to spring for one above the entry level models. David recommends the Canon MP750, which is a pretty good choice. Any Canon model similar to that one should be good.

Multifunction printers are adequate for many users [SF Gate]

Saw this today on Yahoo!