Boy, ain't that the truth. I got a BJ-230 (11" carriage, black only) off
e-bay for $30.00. The cartridges are about $25.00 apiece. I also have
a BJC-210, but haven't bought a color cartridge in years, I do so little
color printing. The BJC-210 was $99.00 on special at the store - at
the time, $99.00 was a very very good price for a color inkjet. But hey,
after 10 years, it still works!
Cheers!
Rich
Yeah, I have a BJ-200ex, at least 10 years old and still going strong.
It uses BC-02 cartridges, cheap, good volume, and most important of
all, very easy to refill at home. I can get 5 or 6 refills out of it
before the nozzles get so worn the print gets splotchy. The too large
nozzles waste ink too.
When the Lexmark Z25 I use for color prints runs dry I'll throw it out
and get something cheaper in up-keep, a new cartridge set is over half
the purchase price. ATM I have my eye on the Epson C-65.
Last week I got real lucky. A friend of mine handed me a non-working
LaserJet III as he already has a newer model and wouldn't bother
sending the boat-anchor for repair. I got the scanned 400+ page
service manual off some russian site and determined the problem was in
the fuser unit. Turns out it uses the same engine as the Lasermaster I
bought for junk some time ago, it needs an external interface card
that's gone missing so I couldn't do much with it. Swapping the fuser
fixed the error messages, then spent a couple of hours cleaning it up,
it had toner spilled all over the insides. Still prints with some
faint smudging but some further cleaning and tweaking should fix that.
Will be real handy now that my wife's college work (psychology) picks
up speed and she'll be doing ever more write-ups. The ~$5 for the
Lasermaster were really worth it.
- YD.