Agreed completely. Also, laser is more reliable, faster, quieter, and more consistent.

But laser's can't print photos very well. See, I was also buying ink for my Canon photo printer (the one I keep upstairs plugged directly into my desktop PC), and was noticing how the printer is so old that the ink is getting harder to find. And also the printer is (like most inkjets) a real pain to keep working right (though the canon is not quite as bad as the epsons).

And so while looking at printers, I was noticing how, for about the price of a set of ink cartridges and a wifi adapter, I could just get a new wifi photo printer and just replace both the laser and the old inkjet with that. And how, for just a few more bucks, I could get a really good one that could print long-lasting photos at tabloid size. And I'd just live with the fact that the text-only pages would print slower, since we don't print THAT much text.

But you're right: The advantages of laser printing still outweighed it, and I stuck with my current system: Laser downstairs for household shared text-only printing, and keep the old inkjet upstairs for photo printing and the occasional chord chart in the studio.

Funny thing is, after putting the new inkjet cartridges into the old printer, it still printed like crap, and I spent a lot of time trying to find out why. I eventually got to the bottom of the *cause* but I still don't have a solution. The cause was interesting, I thought I'd share it here.

(Note to start with: although this is the same printer, I was not making the same old mistake.)

Problem: Color photos on glossy paper are streaked and the color balance is all wrong. Printing them on plain paper is fine, but of course the quality is lower on plain paper. I wanted a glossy print.

Even when the ink tanks were full, the color was coming out wrong. Well I looked closer at the ink tanks and I found out what the problem was. Some of the lighter colors (Yellow, Cyan, Photo Cyan) had gotten other darker colors "bled" back into them. So the yellow ink was now a murky brownish, and the cyan looked purple.

I replaced *all* the cartridges instead of just the empty ones and did a cleaning pass. Photos on glossy paper were better but still streaky. I attribute this to the fact that some of the "ruined" color was still in the ink heads and so I did more cleaning passes. I created a document with large squares of color and printed out some pages of it on plain paper, and the squares started out streaky and got better over time. Finally they looked good: Solid with no streaks. Okay, I said to myself, I've worked all the bad color out of the heads. Time for good color prints. Then I printed out a photo on glossy paper, still streaky. Why?

Digging through some internet forums, there was a tiny little secret posted by someone that tipped me off, something I never knew about inkjet printers:

If you print on plain paper, and tell the printer driver that you're printing on plain paper, it will only use the C,M,Y, and K tanks. Only when you tell the printer that you're printing on glossy photo paper will it add in the Photo Cyan and Photo Magenta tanks.

So what was happening, why plain paper looked good and photo paper looked bad, was because my Photo Cyan and Photo Magenta print heads still have cruddy ink backed up in them. The other four heads are fine now.

So I have to figure out how to clean these heads out. That's my next project: To find out how to do that.

First step: I tried printing out some light cyan and light magenta squares on plain paper, but told the printer driver it was glossy paper. This got me some streaky output that eventually looked pretty solid. But photos are still coming out bad. So maybe I just gotta dig out the print head and carriage assembly and clean that. Ugh.

Maybe while I'm at it I'll convert the thing to one of those DIY continuous ink systems... :-)