I’m thinking it might be time to buy a new printer — which, of course, means getting a copier/scanner or scanner/fax device along with the printing functionality.

I’m an HP and Epson person through and through. I mean, does anybody else make printers?

A colleague had sent me the link to a video put together by Kodak, which was pretty entertaining and got me to thinking maybe I had options outside of the ones I’m used to choosing.

The video gets across the message that maybe you don’t have to pay a fortune for ink cartridges. Could it be time for me to buy a printer for just a bit more money and then restock the ink for half or two-thirds of what I’m accustomed to spending?

As I was pondering that prospect, columnist Katherine Boehret at AllThingsDigital, tackled the very same topic. In a review of three multi-function devices, she poses the question: How can you really compare the total cost of ownership for a printer when the amount of printing any given ink cartridge does is so variable?

As she reports, “When measuring pages printed from a black cartridge, Kodak, HP and Canon claim 342, 200 and 219 pages, respectively.” (In this case, Kodak’s cartridges are the least expensive of the three.)

The Kodak ESP3, the model from Kodak that Boehret reviews, fares well — but so do the other two printers she looks at, the HP Photosmart C4280 and the Canon PIXMA MP470. Her focus is on the photo-manipulation aspects of the devices, which, as I wrote about in “Should You Publicly Profess Printer Love?,” I’ve already got covered in my life. I just need a workhorse printer that I can churn out pages from when the need is there.

And there’s something really attractive about being able to buy my next black ink cartridge for ten bucks. But Kodak? Canon? Aren’t those the photo folks? Next, I suppose you’ll tell me that HP is making cameras…

Posted on April 2nd, 2008 by dian