By now everyone knows about printer manufacturers giving away cheap inkjets so they can make money on inkjet cartridges. But apparently they are now applying that strategy towards laser printers, specifically color laser printers.

According to this article, a growing trend by laser printer manufacturers is to make no profit or take a slight loss on color laser printers so that they can make a profit in the long run from the toner cartridges. The reason they are doing this now is because the color laser printer market is growing rapidly - it was up 50% last year and up 30% in the first half of this year. Some Lexmark VP said that by 2010, color laser printers could make up 22% of laser printers sold but account for 53% of the total revenue. The simple fact of selling a cyan, magenta and yellow cartridge, instead of just black, is what makes color laser printers so attractive for printer manufacturers. They want to sell to small to medium-sized businesses, their fastest growing market, and they are banking on the fact that people won’t buy a new printer based on sticker shock when it comes time to get the first set of replacement cartridges.

Here’s a graph that we used previously in a post about sticker shock:

Color-laser economics [Kentucky.com]

These days when you install a printer you usually get a whole bunch of junky software with it that you’re never going to use.  Since you don’t really have the option to not install it when you first hook up the printer, you usually have to do it after the fact.  Some people either don’t know how to do it or don’t want to do it because they think they might be deleting some necessary software.  In reality, most of the software installed by your printer isn’t necessary and most of the necessary stuff is hidden anyways.

So, go to your Control Panel (usually under the Start menu) and go to Add or Remove Programs.  You will see a list of printer software (it usually always starts with your printer brand, like HP Memories Studio or something) and then you can remove what you don’t need.  You can usually tell by the name of the software or the date last used to see how relevant it is, so the big stuff you won’t miss should be easy to spot.

If you want to just entirely uninstall your printer, you can remove all the software from that list and then remove the printer itself from your Control Panel.  In there, you will see an option for Printers and Faxes and then a list of printers should pop up.  If there is one in there you don’t need, just right click on it and select delete.

**The usual disclaimer:  if you don’t know much about computers, please don’t go into your Control Panel and start deleting things and then call us up wondering why we told you to delete everything.  This is only recommended for those with some knowledge and a desire to rid themselves of bloated printer software.

Circuit City has the PIXMA iP4200 on sale for $60, which is the lowest price we’ve seen for it. The list price on this printer is $130 and the previous low was a brief sale on Amazon where it went for $70. This deal through Circuit City is web-only, but there are no rebates involved so it’s all good. We’ve mentioned the PIXMA iP4200 a lot before, mostly because it is a very popular printer which we recommend. You can read more about it in our Holiday Printer Buying Guide.

The PIXMA 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. It can print a 4 x 6 picture in under a minute and it features automatic two-sided printing, something you will not find in any other model in this price range. You can check out the large number of user reviews on Amazon if you don’t want to take our word for it that this is a very good printer.

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

Dell says they plan to cut prices on their ink cartridges by up to 50% in order to gain a market share from HP in the UK market. They hope this will double their market share every year. Currently they only have about 7% of the overall printer ink market, while HP has around 54%. Dell can do this in England because it’s a much smaller market, so it would basically be the equivalent of testing these prices in one state and seeing what happens. Also, they basically need to do it because their brand isn’t as entrenched over there as it is in the U.S. We all knew Dell for their computers, so it was easy for them to start selling printers. Dell is a worldwide brand, but over there, they don’t dominate the PC market the way they do (or did) here.

Based on the current ink prices for Dell brand cartridges, if the prices do go down by 50%, it might make economical sense to fly over there and buy a boatload of them.

Dom Perignon for printers: Dell aims to slash high price of ink [The Business]

Don’t each too much Turducken.

Canon released the PIXMA MP600 over the summer as a lower-priced alternative to the rest of their PIXMA all-in-one series. Most of these PIXMA models that have been released so far have been popular and highly rated. CNET has reviewed the PIXMA MP600 and based on their review, it seems destined to be another success for Canon.

The PIXMA MP600 is rated by Canon at 30 ppm for black prints and 24 for color. According to CNET, the real-world printing speed is around 8 ppm for text (which is good) and 2.3 ppm for 4 x 6 prints, which makes the MP600 one of the fastest photo printers they’ve ever tested. Canon officially claims it can print a 4 x 6 in 28 seconds, which is basically the speed that CNET reported, so kudos to Canon for accurately advertising that speed. Surprisingly, Canon does not make a huge deal about the speed of the MP600 in their promotional material, instead deciding to focus on overall ease of use. Also, based on the reviews and user feedback on CNET and Amazon, the print quality (a 9600 x 2400 resolution) is also very good for the MP600, so you don’t have to sacrifice anything to get a fast machine.

The MP600 has the usual features of an all-in-one, except that it is missing a fax. A lot of mid-level all-in-ones do not contain faxes these days, because these printers are geared towards home users that don’t do any faxing. With a model like the MP600, Canon decided to focus on the photo capabilities, something a business user might not be real concerned about. Conversely, all-in-ones that do feature fax machines generally are not marketed based on their photo printing. But, it still has a good flatbed scanner so it’s not just a glorified photo printer.

All the user reviews so far are positive and CNET gave the MP600 a rating of 7.9, which is very good and is also one of the highest ratings I can remember seeing on their in a long time. The MP600 prints fast, high quality prints at a moderate price, and you get the quality of buying a Canon. Sounds good to me.

If you own this printer, leave us some feedback and let us know what you think of it.

Buy this printer Buy Canon PIXMA MP600 cartridges

Buy.com has the Photosmart 8250 on sale for $59 after rebate. The list price is $100 and then there’s a $40 rebate. There is no shipping and in most states there won’t be any tax.

HP claims that the Photosmart 8250 is the “world’s fastest photo printer”. Obviously that is a little bit of an exaggeration, but it is pretty fast. HP rates the 8250 at 32 ppm for black and 31 ppm for color. HP claims that it can print a 4 x 6 photo in as little as 14 seconds, which kind of sounds like hogwash, but who are we to argue? The Photosmart 8250 can produce prints up to 8.5 by 24 inches, which is pretty good for a printer this cheap. It has all the usual connectivity options, two-sided printing, a special 4 x 6 photo paper tray for dedicated prints and a 2.5″ LCD. It is also a wide-format printer which can print up to 8.5 x 24.

If you need Photosmart 8250 cartridges, then you can check out our site.

Some think tank over in England is suggesting that they should have a “waste tax” on goods that end up in landfills. One of those items would be ink cartridges.  The Institute for Public Policy Research and the Green Alliance want the government to impose a £5 tax on disposable cameras and then some other tax amount on ink cartridges, batteries etc. that aren’t recycled.  The IPPR notes that similar programs have worked well in both Belgium and Germany.

This is a very good idea, although some people might balk at the idea of a higher tax, since I assume the manufacturers would just pass it along to the consumers.  But the amount of waste from products that can be recycled (like ink cartridges) is astounding and it grows every year.  Sadly, we are behind Western Europe when it comes to this type of thing.  This is due to the fact that they are a lot less corporation-friendly than the U.S. is and because, frankly, it’s easier to take steps like this in a country like England simply because the population is so much smaller than ours.

Ministers urged to tax waste [The Independent]

It’s Friday, so that means it’s time for an environmental story.  YAY!  Do you ever feel guilty because you leave your computer on all the time?  Do you try to turn off your home computer when you aren’t using it because you feel like it’s such a waste if you don’t?  Do you leave your work computer on all the time because it’s their problem, not yours?  If you answered yes to those questions, then you are like everybody else.  Well, this guy figured out what leaving our computers on really costs us per year.

He cites the following statistics:

• there are 660 million computers worldwide
• the majority (probably around 95%) run some form of Windows
• Microsoft says it costs a business $55-$70 a year per idle computer left on
• that means it costs us between $5 and $7 billion per year

Now to the disturbing part: using a sample of 100 million computers, he figured out that we could reduce our annual CO2 output by 45.2 million tons if those computers went to “sleep” mode instead of just sitting idle.  He uses some fancy calculations that you can check out, but the numbers used all come from strong sources, so they aren’t just made up.

The idea that Microsoft would send out an update forcing computers to go to sleep mode might be a big task, but nonetheless it’s definitely a very valid suggestion.  As the article mentions, personal computer use will continue to grow and thus the cost to the environment will grow as well.  I’ve thought about what a waste it is to leave some computers on, but a lot of us don’t do it to blatantly thumb our noses at conservation - we just forget or it’s not convenient.  But when you think about it in terms of the big picture, a few extra seconds to turn it off or put it in sleep mode is a small price to pay.

Microsoft could save 45 million tons of CO2 emissions with a few lines of computer code [Foreign Policy]

HP reported today that their profit was up fourfold from a year ago. Their income for this quarter was $1.7 billion and they ended the year with $91.7 billion worth of sales, which meant they surpassed IBM as the world’s biggest technology company in terms of revenue.

The interesting thing about all these giant numbers, as always, is how much of HP’s profits come from their printing and imaging division. That division had an operating profit of $1.1 billion on total sales of $7.3 billion. For comparison, their computer division had a profit of $336 million on sales of $7.8 billion. To be fair, computers sales always involve very low margins, but it is still a stark contrast and their printer division continues to be their most profitable year after year.

HP’s overall ink and toner cartridge sales were up 9% over last year, so they must be doing something right. They didn’t exactly set the world on fire with any of their new models in the last year, so the increase must just be due to the size and availability of their printer line.

H-P profit rises fourfold; sales up 7%, topping views [MarketWatch]