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Good Dias scanner + printer with cheap cartridges

F

foges

Senior member
Ok two things:

1) my parents have a couple hundred dias that they want scanned in, so i need a scanner that can do a good job of scanning dias that can scan many dias at the same, whilst not being too expensive, i dont need professional quality. Ive been looking at the HP Scanjet 4890 Photo Scanner. any experience with it

2) Im a student and my current printer is broken so i need a new one. I want one with cheap ink cartridges (yes i have seen the other topic about an AIO printer with cheap cartridges), the one i had was a dell (ie. lexmar), but the thing was i couldnt get a hold of pelikan cartridges or other cheap ink. I dont need an AIO since my parents are already buying a separate scanner. Any suggestions. Im guessing anything with 4 separate cartridges would be cheapest in the long run, maybe im wrong. ( i do some photography so it would be great if the printer was up to some standard). Any suggestions?
 
Dias?

Some of the few printers I know of that still come with unchipped ink tanks are the Brother AIOs - clone tanks are available and you could refill if you prefer for the lowest overall cost. But I've heard that the print quality is mediocre at best. Beyond that, you'll have to refill or use clone tanks on something like the Canon 430 or 450 which are PC Magazine's #1 rated general purpose printers (print excellent photos too). You can often find good deals on Canon refurbs that come with a full set of 5 new OEM cartridges for less than the typical cost of the tanks alone... I recently got an iP4200 for under $35. shipped - turned it around and made $20. on it... However, the Canon tanks are now chipped and the chips haven't been cloned (IDK if they are still working on it or not but I have heard of tanks with one-use chips on them that are twice or more as expensive as the clone tanks I use, so I transplant my chips), so you have to transplant the chips from your OEM tanks to the cloned tanks that are available or refill the tanks yourself. Even using OEM tanks, their TCO is still lower than most others using their OEM tanks.

HP has some that come with separate ink tanks, but I'm not sure if available in a non-AIO format. But even the few clone tanks I've found aren't very cheap as HP made them unnecessarily complicated. But you can refill the tanks if you want.

Lexmark/Dell, the less said of their inkjets the better - except that you can often find new Lexmarks on sale at a lower cost than their cartridges (knowing them, they may be using "starter" cartridges that aren't as full as the regular ones - HP used to do that too on their cheapest models) or for free after rebate along with some other product. And Epson still has their clog-o-matic problems and strange look to their photo prints (at least to my eye). So that's about it.

The new Kodaks, which were intended to cut the cost with cheaper ink tanks, are all AIOs and I haven't seen a really positive review of one yet. Pretty dumbed-down from what I've heard. Certainly nothing most AT forums denizen would want - nothing on them you can tweak much. I've heard you're pretty much stuck using Kodak paper too as it's difficult, if not impossible, to adjust for other brands...

.bh.
 
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