New ink!

Well, I have a day of deep nozzle cleaning ahead of me, which sounds like the sort of thing a man should either enjoy or fear. The reality is much more banal. New ink arrived for my printer which has not tasted ink in a very long time. I used to use the printer daily but, for various reasons, the old beast has been slowly gathering dust on the end of my desk.

I am now in the process of trying to wake it up. Initial print test patterns look good but I'm having trouble with the nozzles on my cyan.

There is a chance that none of my efforts will get the old printer working again but the alternative is to buy a new printer and that way madness lies.

Printers come in two types: cheap and expensive. If you buy a cheap printer, you will usually end up paying a fortune for ink over the course of its lifetime. Not sure if printer ink is still as expensive as gold but it still comes in at ridiculous prices for small amounts. Yet if you buy an expensive printer, then the ink will usually be cheap, which says to me that printer ink is essentially a scam. The trick, I think, is to buy cheap ink unless you really want your documents to be 'archive quality'. I've never bought original ink for any of my printers and I've generally not had much trouble. This Canon MP620 has been running years on the kind of ink that the manufacture would tell you would bring it to its knees. (Apropos of nothing: electric shavers. I bought a shaver years ago and the instructions told me to change the blades every few months. That was years ago and it's still cutting the stubble every day or two. So what game where they playing, expecting me to fork out £20+ every few months? So much in the world seems to be a scam.)

Back to printers: Epson have a new 'tank' system which looks clever as hell but is also expensive as hell up front. [Dear Epson. Any chance of a test model to review?] It claims to come with two years of ink which, when I get printing in heavy duty mode, would save me about £100 (though that's buying really cheap non-OEM ink from Inkredible). Yet £100 off the £250 still makes it an expensive printer to buy.

But as I type that, another sheet emerges from the old Canon MP620. Colours seem to be clean and solid. Cyan is working! I can proceed with my plan. That machine is a beast!

New ink in my printer is only part of the reason I have a new 'private' blog, which is now alive and open to regular readers. Not that this now becomes my 'old' blog. This is still my main blog, where I'll continue to post the occasional bit of work. However, maybe not as many cartoons. Day to day, I want to live over there where things will be grubby and disorganised and, more importantly, 'unpublished'. Only a crazy fool gives all his best work away for nothing and I'm tired of being a crazy fool. So, if you do read regularly and want to come look in, send me an email or leave comment. You are most welcome.