Did you check the printer accuracy?

It helps when a 6inch square tile really is square and not or by 1/16th of an inch, not to mention matching more complicated pieces. Most of the time that 1/16th is not a problem, but occasionally it is. Better to get it right in the first place.

I got it originally for about $90. Saw it just today on Wal-Mart's website for $90. I think it's a pretty good deal for what it is. I'd recomend getting the refillable carts from inksupply.com right away. Soon as your first carts are empty just switch right over and enjoy driving that cost per print to the bottom!

Time for my annual check up =)

Few weeks ago it started striping and banding really bad. No amount of cleaning was fixing it. Then it stopped recognizing my ink carts! Just a bunch of flashing lights....

Thought maybe the contacts were getting dirty. I saw a few of them on the back of the print head were crusty. Used a new, clean, pink eraser to clean them. Done this many times on various computer components. Well at least then it recognized the print head and carts again... but printing was still horrible. It wasn't like in the past where you could tell the banding was caused by one color being clogged up. This time it was printing really bold bands of weird colors.

It was either time to buy a new printer or replace the print head. One of the big reasons I bought this was because the print head was removable, clean able, and replaceable. So I thought I would give that a try at least and if that didn't fix it then buy a new one.

$40 for a new one from Amazon. Popped it in and works like new!

I'd still highly recommend this printer. The price of them has not dropped which tells me it's actually retained its value because it's not like so many other disposable junk printers. I'm on my second set of cheap ink bottles. Original refillable carts are still working fine.

Love this printer!

Would also recommend the Officejet 6500. Same printer, uses the same print head, same HP 920 ink carts, but has more bells and whistles people tend to look for. Things like scan & fax & HUDs.

After owning both Ink Jets and Laser printers I am not really sure why people in this hobby still buy the Ink Jets. Yeah, I know you can get them for a hundred bucks, but they need to be filled all the time and the ink is not cheap, unless you refill them yourself. The refills don't last as long as the OEM. Buying the continuous ink supply thingies adds more money and they are not fool proof, and they tend to be a bit messy.

The laser printer does cost a bit more up front, but it has a built in continuous ink supply thingie sort of. I mean, my Samsung goes 5000 pages between refilling, while my HP lasts 2500 pages. Yeah, if you buy the OEM replacement cartridges they do cost about the same as the printer does new. But, when I buy the replacement toner, it is cheap, maybe about twenty bucks or so, with replacement chips. Buying replacement cartridges are about twelve bucks. So, while the upfront cost tends to be a bit more, it does not take long and you are saving money. Except my HP cost me $125 with free shipping. It was a discontinued model, but it is still printing out really good color sheets three years later.

A little more up front? Try hundreds more up front. It's a big cost difference. Inkjets are still very cheap for initial cost and when you buy refillable carts your operating cost is very low too. To me it's a mater of volume; how much I'm printing. As a pretty casual printer (few hundred pages a week) I just can't justify spending so much on a laser.

Refillable Carts: $5.50 ea ($22 total)
Ink: $6 ea ($24) That's enough ink to last me a year.
Printer: $90

So for $136 I have a printer and enough ink for a year. It was three years before I needed any maintenance.

HP laserjet CP1215: About $400 ? It's discontinued so hard finding prices but I saw several listing it over $400. You can get a refurb for about $200 but we aren't talking about refurbs.
Toner: About $60 ? Quick Google search shows a range from $60 to $130 ea.

Laser printers do have maintenance. I used to manage all the IT equipment for an engineering division. We had 2 large scale ink jet printers (they took 48" rolls), Two large Xerox laser copy centers (laser printer, copy machine, scanner, etc all in one unit), 4 smaller color lasers, and a digital sender. You do have to actually maintain those laser color printers. They imaging drums/ units replaced, rollers replaced, and other things do eventually wear out like sensors and switches.

I would have to be printing double the amount I do right now to justify the cost of a laser. They are great for high volume; totally agree with that. For casual builders I just can't see it being worth the cost. I currently refill my inkjet about once every two weeks. If I was doing it every week or twice a week I could see the need for a laser.

My Hp CP 1215 was $125 on close out. It had free shipping. The toner was refilled on two of the cartridges and a third is needing to be refilled soon. It is now two years old. My Samsung is about five years old and I did pay almost $500 for it. Time to replace a couple of cartridges on it too. It has had I think three sets of new cartridges replaced, one original, two after markets. All of them have been refilled once.

There is no need to pay $400 for a laser printer anymore.

As for toner.

Really, the issue of maintenance is a mute point these days when you can get a machine for a hundred bucks or so. The machine is designed to last for a long time. 2500 to 5000 pages for the toner cartridge and about a hundred thousand pages for the drum. If either of my machines needed maintenance I would just junk it as the price of maintenance is more than the cost of a new one. Maybe you are talking about the office machine. That was my job once, to look after the office machines. I took care of the daily maintenance, but the disassemble and replace parts on a $50,000 machine that would go through 2000 pages a day is a different animal than what is on my table.

There are good points to a ink jet machine, but in my opinion a laser printer is much more affordable. But, to each their own, that is why we discuss them so much.

Hi I just wanted to ask you if you ever got the HP officejet 6000 I'm new to paper terrain and am still looking for a printer. I like the fact u went to the office depot and they helped you out and that you liked it. And I found some very cheap on ebay and before I buy one I would like to know if you have any other feedback if you did purchase the 6000. Thanx a million

Bahahahaha nvrmnd I see you did get the 6000 I guess my ph barely updated the thread and I saw u did purchase it. So I guess I will to if u liked it lolz

Can't belive this thread is still going =)

What I can belive is that... my OfficeJet 6000 is still going! Used it this morning in fact. My wife uses it many, many times a week. An 8oz bottle of each color ink used to last us more than a year but now it barely gets us through the year. What I'm saying is that we are using now more than we ever did years ago and it's still a good machine.

It's a tough little machine. We've moved twice with it. I don't even know how many thousands of pages we've ran through this thing. Only replaced the print head once. Nothing else has been replaced.

Here's my only complaints:
- Aftermarket ink carts that you refil yourself are required. This thing uses a lot of ink and spending that kind of money on OEM carts is so expensive.... you might as well buy a laser. That said if you go the refillable route your price per print gets so low that your primary concern is the cost of cardstock; not ink =) I got mine from InkSupply dot com and they've worked fine for many years; never replaced them.

- Sometimes the ink / sponge gets... locked? I don't know how to describe it. You'll get some striping in your print and think it's low on ink. Pull the cart and see that it's got plenty. Pull out the rubber stopper, let some ink flow from the resivour to the sponge, pop it back in... life's good. It's like there gets to be some surface tension or an aire bubble or something and the ink just doesn't flow into the sponge.

- If you don't print something full color every few days the head dries up. Now on most models this is the death of the whole printer. However since this has a removable print head you can take out the carts, take out the print head, and clean it. I think somewhere in this thread I give more details about how to do that. Pop it back in, pop in your carts, run a print head cleaning process (this is actually just to purge the water out =P ) and it's good to go. It's just annoying that this usually happens when you need to use the printer.

- Sometimes prints come out striped. This happens typically when you run out of one or two colors and just need to refill. Sometimes you have plenty of ink in the carts so running the automated print head cleaning routine once or twice clears that up but it uses a ton of ink so you'll have to refill when you're done. Other times the print head is clogged up and you have to pull it out and clean it yourself.

- If noise or vibration are of any concern then read on. I personally don't care but some ppl gave the prodcut bad reviews because of it so I guess some care. It's farily loud and does these automated processes that are nosy and go on for a minute. The thing shakes my whole desk when it's printing =) Apparently there's a lot of weight swinging back and forth as the head prints.


Id say about once a month or so I have to do some sort of cleaning. Either the automated print head cleaning or the manual method. Probably fill the ink twice a month under normal use. If we are doing some project that uses a lot of printing it's about once a week. HP claims you'll get 300 full color prints out of a cart; dream on... more like 150. I guess their idea of full color and mine are different.... World Works Games print jobs are full page full color in a lot of cases so take the manufacturers estimate and cut it in half at least =P

I guess it's a little higher maintanance than what some people want. It's certainly not a device you're going to set and forget for 5 years.... you're going to have to keep it working well. Honestly I don't mind and that's why I bought one with a removable print head so I could at least TRY to fix it myself instead of throwing it away like most other printers.

Anyway if I had any reasons to pitch this thing I would have years ago. Not like it's expensive or hard to find a new one. It's been a good machine and I'll use it untill the thing falls apart or out right stops working. Prolly bite the bullet and get a good color laser at that point but... who knows when that will be!

Good luck!

I finally gave up on trying to find an accurate color laser here (NZ) and picked up an HP Officejet Pro 8600.

The HP 8600 It might be an inkjet, but it has everything (and I mean everything) I've been looking for in a laser printer: good looking accurate prints (will have to try a photo print - not something I tend to do), quick, prints are water resistant, handles cardstock just fine, automatic duplex, full multifunction with fax and automatic document feeder on the scanner/copier, full connectivity (USB, LAN and Wireless). On top of all, not only was it a fraction of the price of comparable lasers, even with official HP carts it still prints cheaper than every low cost color laser I've found.

Will its SIXTH year be it's last? Maybe... wifey went to print off some epic birthday invitations she made as birthday party set production will begin in a couple months. A couple colors weren't printing, not uncommon and usually just means it's time to refill the carts, so I pulled them and sure enough black and cyan were almost empty. Filled them up manually which after six years I can almost do blindfolded, popped them in, and did the obligitory test print... hmmm... still no blue or black. OK no sweat; just do a 'print head cleaning process'... not uncommon. Still no cyan or black.

Pulled all the carts, ejected the print head, and rinsed it out. Have to do this every few months; especially if it's sat for a week or so unused. Popped it back in, ran the print head cleaning, and a test print.. WORSE! What?! Ok... now I'm getting flustered. Print head might be shot or totally clogged up. I've replaced one over the years.

So now I'm thinking... another $64 print head? Maybe time for a new printer? Looking through the official print accuracy thread and another printer thread on here... not exactly a lot of models people are swooning over. I'd *LOVE* a new HP 6000... I paid $90 for it... they go for $480 new! Surprised there are any "new" ones left but doesn't matter; not paying that.

Would love to find another $100 gem but nothing is coming up in my searching. Thinking I'll try another print head but there's honestly only so many hours left on her... she squeaks and squeals something fierce during some of it's weird little procedures it decides to do whenever it feels like.

How's that HP 8600 been treating you Zenguy? As much as I want a color laser... I've yet to find one that really competes with these inkjets.

Wow. Even the black-only mode used up the colors??

Thanks for replying guys.

I just put in the new print head and after about 5 test prints ink is flowing again. I guess the old HP 6000 is back in business. Damn thing just wont die! A part of me was kinda hoping to go buy a new printer =) So that's two print heads in 6 years at about $60 each. Not bad IMO.

Here's what I was looking replacing it with:

Epson WorkForce WF-7110: http://www.amazon.com/Epson-Wide-Format ... ce+WF-7110

Manual Refill Kit: http://www.inksupply.com/product-detail ... erID=67910



Epson Artison 1430: http://www.amazon.com/Epson-Artisan-Wir ... B006WAPTVM

Manual Refill kit: http://www.inksupply.com/product-detail ... erID=67542

My Canon seems to have died. It is giving an error message and I can't get it to work with 15 minutes or so of troubleshooting. No time to fix it now due to a Con this weekend. I will try next week...hopefully I don't need to buy a new printer to get some serious building done this summer.

Spoke too soon... I'm taking her out back and putting her out of her misery...

New print head worked for like 20 prints and now magenta is clogged up. I can't get it cleared out and I'm done piss'n around with this thing.

Pulling the trigger on the Epson WorkForce WF-7110... hope I get another 6 years of printing!