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Personally I prefer the original font. The thicker letters would likely photocopy better too.

I use a Brother printer that cost me £40 2-4 years ago. I can buy 20 cartridges from Amazon that work perfectly for just £12.90 with shipping on Amazon Prime. That's 65p each. A single original Brother cartridge can easily cost £16.44 from Amazon or £7.62 each when bought in a pack of 4 (I think the largest quantity they sell together). So these copy cartridges are over 10x cheaper.

I've used them ever since I got this printer with no ill effects. The printer still makes create printouts and prints photos great too. I've heard that perhaps they break your printer faster than original cartridges but if this is true when I'm happy to just spend the extra £40 ever few years to just buy a new printer. I'll still have saved far more than that on ink alone (I print quite a lot).

If anything perhaps this is the solution to cheaper printing instead?

Also, random note. Once I went a Korean friends house and they had a normal inkjet printer with 4 gallons of ink in large pots of top of it. These had small tubes feeding down into the cartridges. They never had to replace the cartridges and they would never run out of ink. Apparently this is quite common in Korea although I've never seen it before or since myself in the UK. From googling it was something like this: http://www.amazon.co.uk/PrinterKnow%C2%AE-Compatible-Continu... Although they had much larger ink containers. It seems it's called a "continuous ink system".

It's pretty cool to look into anyway, even if you don't do a huge amount of printing.




Yes, CIS is quite popular in Asia where inkjets aren't as prone to nozzle clogging but toner-based printers suffer from the more humid climate.

Buying generic ink in bulk quantities is also much cheaper than individual cartridges (you can buy a whole LITRE of ink for the price of an original cartridge for some printers), and you can even dilute it a significant amount if you don't mind slightly reduced saturation - I've run 10:1 black dilution in my CIS and the output looks only very slightly greyish.

Some printers have EEPROMs on the cartridges to deter refilling/CIS systems but the Chinese have produced "modchips", self-resetting cartridges, etc. to get around this; some can even reflash the firmware, presumably with one that has all the checks patched out.




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