Peter's Blog

I never mentioned this but I bought a Canon LBP 1120 laser printer a couple of months ago because I had a lot of printing to do and they were going half price.

I had found with an inkjet printer that I used it only rarely and when I did the ink had invariably dried up and I would end up buying more cartridges for $$$. Whenever I tried cheap clone cartridges the results would be poor, with one of the colors not working.

Discussing this at work someone mentioned how much better laser printers were: they work out quite economical to run as a toner cartridge can print 2500 pages and doesn't dry out.

Hence I bought the Canon and it works very well. The print quality is very good albeit only black and white. It works fine with some old paper I have had for over 10 years. For printing photo's I would rather use photobox as the prints work out cheaper and are much better quality and don't start to fade after a year.

The printer was probably cheap because it was an old model and I ought to grab a spare toner cartridge while they are still available.

It is very nice having a printer available. I no longer have to memorise google maps.

My Mum's Epson Stylus 680 printer wouldn't print, it would just flash a red light, no indication of what it wanted. The printer properties are supposed to show how much ink is in each cartridge but these have never worked under Windows XP when using the default printer drivers. I got my brother to install the proper printer drivers but still no joy. I looked on the Epson site and found the 'Epson Status Monitor' and installing this did the trick: the printer properties now show how much ink is in the cartridge and attempting to print brings up a clear message: colour cartridge is out of ink. Being a con, it won't print black and white documents with the colour cartridge empty.

I have an Epson with default windows drivers here at home and that cannot tell me if the printer is out of ink so I should install the status monitor here. Odd that the drivers do not include it, they just show a greyed-out diagram of how full the cartridges are.