The defense ministry of India has launched an investigation after a recent theft at their Integrated Defence Staff headquarters. The score that the thieves made off with: 13 ink cartridges.

The thieves broke in over the weekend and so the missing ink cartridges weren’t discovered until the following Monday. There have been some other recent problems with security similar to this, so this is embarrassing for the Indian defence ministry. The location of the theft, the Kashmir House, houses top secret offices like the IDS, which is a joint project made up of the army, navy and air force. So while it’s not exactly like someone breaking into the Pentagon, it’s still not that far off. The police think it’s an inside job, although they haven’t ruled out an international cartel of cartridge thieves.

Another ‘leak’ rattles defence, probe on [Time of India]

Here is a list sites where you can find printer drivers:

HP Drivers
Canon Drivers
Epson Drivers
Lexmark Drivers
Brother Drivers
Dell Drivers

When there is a problem with your printer, one of the first things that comes up is “did you try reinstalling the drivers?” This can be helpful, but it’s best to try easier things first, like resetting the printer. These days some manufacturers are making their printer drivers more and more bloated, so it is no longer a quick download and install. Still, if your printer and computer are properly communicating, reinstalling the drivers usually has to be done.

First off, this is a little off topic. I want to talk about the spam we receive on our blog. Now, of course everyone gets billions of spam messages every day. Hopefully not a lot of people read them thanks to email filters. But with blog spam, you basically have to read it. Every day we get about 10-20 spam comments on various posts in the blog, most of which are filtered out automatically by our software. As with all spam, the comments run the gamut from nonsensical to amusing to offensive. Here is a recent sampling from some we received in the past day:

Best free samsung ringtones, Cingular ringtones and more, Ringtones for free. From website - pretty standard, as we have received a ton with links to a ringtone domain that was instantly deleted for abuse.

Geben mir bitte eine a rel=”nofollow” =”http://monika-levinsky***.com/”>poker Brotchenaam - I deleted the full address on the URL, but it was pretty amusing that this domain was presumably trying to capatalize on the Monica Lewinsky’s name, which would have been useful maybe about eight years ago. For some reason he also included “nofollow” in his address, which automatically tells search engines not to go to his link. That is a spammer thinking outside the box. Also, the user name for this one was satan4aam.

If an average book is 300 pages long and there are about 350 words per page that means that there are roughly 105,000 words in a book. I am going to add up the amount of words are left in our spam comments every day to see how long it takes us to accumulate a book. I have no idea how long this will take, but it should be somewhat entertaining and mildly informative. After that, I assume the next logical step is to take all those spam words and publish a book full of insights on where to find the best online poker sites, prescriptions and can’t miss stocks.

Stay tuned. Also, if anyone has their own amusing spam messages to share, go ahead and post a comment below.

Buy.com has the Brother HL-2040 laser printer on sale for $66 after rebate and free shipping. The rebate is for $20 and it expires on 7/31.

The HL-2040 is a monochrome laser printer that is rated at 20 pages per minute. It has a resolution of up to 2400 x 600 dpi and Brother claims that it can get its first page out in under 10 seconds. This is a pretty popular machine that has received good reviews from most users.

If you already own this printer, you can find Brother HL-2040 toner cartridges on our site or you can leave some feedback to let other people what you think.

Today CNET posted a review of the Lexmark X342n all-in-one laser printer. This machine hit the market a few months ago and is a pretty rare model for Lexmark, since these days most of their laser all-in-ones have come out under the Dell brand. They gave this model a 6.7 out of 10, which sounds pretty bad, but since it’s CNET that translates to a “good” rating.

The Lexmark X342n is a monochrome printer, scanner, copier and fax machine that is rated at 27 pages per minute. The official speed that CNET got in their tests was 17 pages per minute, which was better than some of the other machines in this class that they tested but ironically, slower than the Dell 1815n. The X342n was slower than the Dell in every test except for color and graphic scans. This is part of the reason why they note that you will “get more bang for your buck from the Dell 1815n”.

Overall, they liked the scanning capabilities and the price of the machine, while they didn’t like the lack of duplexing or the ergonomics of the X342n’s menu. One huge downside to this printer is the cost of the toner cartridges. A standard toner cartridge for this model currently retails for $102, and that’s for only a 2,500 page yield. A 6,000 page yield cartridge retails for $155, making it a much better deal than the standard yield but still outrageously priced. Luckily, the X342n comes with a high yield laser cartridge, which makes it a better buy than the X340n, which comes with the standard cartridge.

Lexmark X342n laser all-in-one printer [CNET]

Staples has the Canon ImageCLASS D320 Personal Digital Copier on sale for $200 after a $100 mail-in rebate. The D320 is a laser all-in-one printer that is rated at 15 pages per minute and 15 copies per minute. This printer has a number of copy features, including legal-size copying and the ability to fit two pages on to one standard size page. It also features a 250-sheet paper capacity.

The rebate for this printer expires on 8/5.

If you already own this printer, you can leave a comment about it or else you can find ImageCLASS D320 toner cartridges on our site.

Recently Tom’s Hardware did another one of their excellent reports on printers, this time taking a look at a couple of color laser printers. Printer manufacturers have been trying to make color laser printers more mainstream over the past few years, so they have lowered their prices and marketed them towards regular customers. As usual, HP machines are the most common, but there are still a fair number of competitors.

In this comparison, they took a look at the HP Color LaserJet 2600n, Color LaserJet 3600, the Konica Minolta Magicolor 5430DL and the Lexmark C522n. A lot of people have probably never even seen a Konica Minolta machine, while the LaserJet 2600 is probably available in every major office store out there. That doesn’t mean that one is necessarily better than the other, but if you are interested in the Magicolor, you are probably going to have to order it.

Not surprisingly, the Lexmark machine performed the worst. They liked the design of it, but the bad performance negated the positives. They liked the Konica Minolta for its low costs per page and its solid speeds, but it lost points for its clunky design (it weighed it at 92 pounds). The Color LaserJet 2600n was impressive for its speed, but the long term costs of owning it are very high. The Color LaserJet 3600 came out as the winner, as it had the best balance of performance and cost.

One important piece of data they used to compare these machines was the cost of printing out 10,000 pages:

Color LaserJet 2600n - $755.79
Color LaserJet 3600 - $344.09
Magicolor 5430DL - $354.60
Lexmark C522n - $575.93

Out of the 10,000 pages, 70% were black and 30% were color. This data is important because it allows you to look at the whole picture and not just the initial cost of the printer. The Color LaserJet 2600n is relatively cheap for a color laser printer, but you can see that whatever you save initially will definitely be wiped out in a matter of time.

Color Laser Printers: Fast and Affordable! [Tom’s Hardware]

InfoTrends released a study last week that said the number of people printing at home since 2004 is down 10%. By 2010, the amount of home prints is expected to decline to 45%, down from 53% this year. InfoTrends believes that people are getting fed with the cost of ink and so they are using places like Costco or Wal-Mart to print their pictures.

It seems pretty difficult to forecast what the home printing market is going to be like four years from now since it changes so rapidly. Four years ago, home printing was just beginning to become popular and the majority of people probably still had film cameras and got their prints done at their local drug store. The market has exploded over the past few years, so it’s expected that it will cool down at some point. It just doesn’t seem like it has peaked already and now it will start to decline significantly every year.

On a side note, according to their study, there were 17 billion digital prints made in this country last year.

Home Is Where The Printer Is, For Now [Forbes]

Appropriately, Amazon has the top-ranked PIXMA iP4200 on sale for $80. We just mentioned this printer yesterday in looking at the top sellers on Amazon. In addition to being the top seller, it also has a 4.5/5 star rating from 71 reviews.

The PIMA iP4200 features two-sided printing and a resolution up to 9600 x 2400, which is higher than almost every other printer in this price range. This machine has the features of a expensive photo printer without the price. Since this is an Amazon sale we’re not sure how long it will last for, but the good part is that there’s no mail-in rebate.

If you already own this printer, you can head over to our site for Canon iP4200 cartridges.

Just to give everyone an idea of what’s popular, here is a list of the top ten selling printers on Amazon:

1. Canon PIXMA iP4200 Photo Printer
2. HP Officejet 5610
3. Canon I-9900 Photo
4. Canon PIXMA iP90
5. Canon SELPHY CP510
6. HP Deskjet 3930
7. HP Deskjet 5440
8. Canon PIXMA iP5200
9. Canon PIXMA iP6000D
10. Epson PictureMate Deluxe Viewer

Some things stand out, like how the list is basically all Canon and HP. There are some Epson printers that are popular on Amazon, but they fall just outside the top ten. There are no Lexmarks in the top 25 and only one in the top 50. Amazon actually offers fewer Epson models than Lexmark, but Epson has much more of a presence among the top sellers. Also interesting to note is that there is only one all-in-one machine among the top ten, but there are two compact photo printers.

Since these are the top ten based on sales, not all of them are necessarily recommended. For instance, the HP Deskjet 3930 is a pretty poorly reviewed printer, but it also sells for $30 so it’s easy to see why it is a top seller. On the other hand, there are some printers on here that are high quality and have received very good reviews, like the Canon PIXMA iP4200.

Because these printers are popular, they all have a pretty good amount of reviews, so just glancing at this list can give you a good overview of what’s out, what’s a good value, what’s a good photo printer etc. You can also learn valuable information, like for instance that the HP Deskjet 5440 has a perfect rating and costs $68 while the Deskjet 5940 has a not-so-good rating and costs $90. Because of the way Amazon lays them out, you can quickly get an idea of certain printers are popular because of their price or because they are quality machines.