FOAK: Colour Laser Printers

Excellent. I'd be interested to know how their inks compare.

 

OK, as promised. Impressive delivery, ordered Sunday night, arrived
today by tracked Parcelfarce (who even took it to my local PO so I could
collect after work).

First impressions:

Crude, rather crude. It looks like good quality plastics etc, but some
of the design is a little crude. There is a 'stop' valve, which is just
a roller that wedges against the pipes to block them. Other things like
sticky pads and cables ties make it look a little Heath Robinson.

Of course they're making one kit fit as many printers as possible, so
pretty much as expected I guess - it's actually very akin to fitting a
Snottoiler!

Fitting:

Took much longer than suggested, as I got the wrong instructions. That
was soon remedied by watching a video on their website. I also paid more
attention to detail as well - such as trimming the lid of the printer to
fit better with the kit in place [1] - it's a tight fit in my Canon
iP4500, so the gubbins prevent it closing fully. I chopped a little off
the side where the pipes exit, and it also definitely needed the
moulding cut away where it rests *on* the pipes inside the chamber.

A little more work is needed inside, as the pipes rub on the moulding
around the lip of the print chamber, but that'll be a few minutes work
some time.

The instructions showed a procedure for cutting out and transferring the
chips, but I found they were already fitted, and worked.

Printing:

It took a while to work out how to get the lid-close switch to operate,
but a couple of sticky pads sorted that.

Once printing, all was fine. I did a couple of tests on A4 plain, using
any old photo with varying colours, and it came out OK. A test print on
Fuji 6x4 photo paper was as good as anything I've printed before, and
looked perfectly natural.

Conclusion:

If you don't mind function over form, this will do you. It doesn't look
pretty, but hell, it does work out a *very* cheap way to print, and I
can't see a quality issue so far.

All the best.

 

Cheers.
Looks like I'll be giving that a go, then.
Ta.

 

Yeah, I reckon. There's nothing much to lose over a set of cartridges
(unless you get really cheap ones), and if you don't modify your
printer, you can always revert back to normal in future.

I'd suggest you have a look through the video tutorials though, they
give a good idea of how well the lids fit back (or not).