Oops, the manual is missing. Maybe I never got one when I bought the used printer from a NBCUG member but no problem. After a little Googling I found it on the web but I couldn't find anything wrong that might have caused the problem. Conclusion: mechanical problem - scrap the printer. I don't know of anybody that repairs printers locally and if they did it probably would cost more than a new one.

After installing an old printer that I used with my backup PC I began to look at two alternatives for a replacement: (1) Buy a new printer or (2) Determine if any of several old discarded printers people had given me might work.

Printers have gotten cheap since I bought my last one. My first choice was an all-in-one printer that could print, copy and scan since several were available for around $100. But what about ink? It always irked me that I had to shell out $25 or more for a cartridge when I ran out of ink. Well, big surprise for the all-in-one! They generally require four ink cartridges - a black one for $35 and cyan, magenta and yellow cartridges each for $13. Thus a $100 Epson CX4600 all-in-one printer would cost me $74 for ink. Forget that. I decided I really didn't need an all-in-one printer.

Laser printers used to be very expensive. They've come down in price but are still higher than inkjet printers with most starting in the $200-300 range. They are fast and especially good for high-volume printing needed in a business. You pay dearly for the ink/toner but it lasts longer than inkjet ink making the costs per page just a few pennies versus 5-10 cents per page for black and white and 10-20 cents for color pages using an inkjet printer. I decided that I wasn't in the high-volume printing category and didn't need a laser.

A plain inkjet printer was good enough for me since most of my printing was e-mail messages and recipes for my wife. I rarely printed in color and even printed color web pages in black to save ink. I started comparing inkjet printers in the under-$100 range to see if any had lower ink costs than others. Of the brands I looked at it was surprising that $50 seemed to be the average cost of a black and color cartridge for a printer no matter what brand printer you chose. One printer required that both cartridges be in place for the printer to even work. Another surprise from Staples was that while you do get ink with a printer it's now a limited supply cartridge. Count on adding at least $50 to the cost of the printer because you're going to run out of ink quick.

I finally narrowed down the printer I wanted from Staples but before rushing out and buying it I decided to inspect four disabled printers I had stored away to see if any of them still worked. In doing so I inventoried my ink cartridges and the types that each printer used. Hey don't give me any more old printers unless they have some ink left because you can't troubleshoot a printer without ink and who wants to shell out $25 - $50 for ink to determine if a printer works. To make a long story short, in gathering up my ink cartridges I discovered one that was brand new and it just happened to be for my printer that failed. Gee I thought I had installed a new cartridge when I bought the used printer a few months ago. Could it be that I simply ran out of ink? Of course that's what happened! I was fooled because it was the first printer I ever owned that didn't start printing intermittently just before running out of ink. It just quit and I never suspected a lack of ink. I plugged in the new ink cartridge and all is well now.

By the way, I left out a discussion on re-inking of cartridges intentionally because this could be a topic for a future article.