Attractive Features: General-Purpose Inkjet Printers

Summary Table And Conclusion

This set of printers can be divided into two groups.

The first consists of inkjet printers which only have ink tank cartridges, namely Canon and Epson. The cartridges don't integrate print-heads, which means a risk of clogging and damage to the heads. Since the heads are fixed to the printer, all print operations could be affected. Another problem is that when it has been idle for a long time, when it starts running again the printer often begins with an ink circuit cleaning cycle. This is noisy, prolonged and heavy on the ink. So this kind of device is better left to those who use it regularly. To give you an idea, if long idle periods are frequent, then so are the cleaning cycles, and the ink consumption can reach 30% more than in our tests. The costs per page will increase proportinally. Canon will always be the cheapest on the market, but Epson will shoot up even higher than they are now.

Note that Canon and Epson have different responses to the issue of heads. When failure occurs (head completely blocked, damaged, etc.) the heads can always be changed. With Canon, all you have to do is buy a new one and install it yourself, which takes 5 seconds. With Epson, you have to send your device back to the factory for repairs. This can cost you quite a bit.

Another feature shared by Canon and Epson printers: they are much faster than HP and Lexmark.