Because the entire color printing industry is a con. There is no such thing as cheap, quality color printing.

To explain further: good color printing costs 1-2 pounds a page, whatever the technology used, but this is never mentioned by the manufacturers or sellers of the printers.

Many years ago, when color inkjets first became available as consumer items, my father and I bought a Canon unit (i forget the exact model). This produced, for the time, very good results, and the cartridges were reasonably cheap. However, after about 80-90 prints, the print head died. it turned out that a new one cost 50% more than the entire printer, and wasn't available anyway. Working out the cost of having produced those 90 prints, it came to about £1.50 per page. My father swore at that point he would never buy another Canon printer, and never has.

A few years back, I bought a small (A6) dyesub printer, the Colorgraph Pixprint 150. It was cheap (about £75), and produced very nice results, for about £1.50 a page. Unfortunately, there are no drivers I can find for Windows 2000, which means I can no longer use it, and the consumables are getting difficult to get hold of anyway.

A few months ago, despite my bitter experience, I was seduced into pruchasing an Epson Stylus 810 photoprinter. This cost £87, and produces fantastic results. I printed off about 20 A4 colour prints of digital photos, using 80% of the cartridges it came with, and was very pleased. I haven't used it for about 2 months, but today wanted to print some more pictures.

It printed the first image with no cyan at all, which looks pretty crap By the time I had run enough cleaning cycles to unclog the cyan lines, it had emptied the remaining 20% of the color cartridge. I had obtained some third-party cartridges, from a reputable source, which were guaranteed to work with the thing despite Epson's monopolistic efforts to ensure that only their cartridges could be used.

Inserting one, however, made the printer simply sit there flashing an error code which the manual says means 'unknown error, contact dealer'. Replacing the original cartridge (something you can now do, although on older epsons removing a cartridge killed it instantly), makes it say it has an empty cartrige installed, which is in fact correct.

Several attempts proved that the third-party cartridge doesn't actually work in the printer, despite the guarantee. I'll call them on Monday, but I don't hold out much hope of success. So, all in all, it will cost me £38 (nearly 50% of the cost of the printer) to get some epson genuine cartridges, which I now know are good for about 25 A4 pages. Total cost per page, £1.52, not including the paper. Does anyone see a trend here?

Not only is it damned expensive to run an inkjet, but the bloody things are very unreliable to boot. It looks like I'd have to run the 810 at least once a week, just to make it work when I wanted it too. Not something I'm impressed by.

I am now pretty much of the opinion that I should just bin the 810 (you can't even use it as a mono printer, since it won't work without a color cartridge installed), and just go and buy a cheapish dyesub and be done with it. It will still cost about £1-2 per page, but at least with dye subs this is made known fairly obviously, and my experience is that they're a hell of a lot more reliable than inkjets anyway.

I have been looking at the Olympus P-400, which seems to be one of the lower-cost dyesubs on the market. Alps used to make a range of low-cost dyesubs as well, but they seem to have vanished unfortunately. I had a demo of one a couple of years ago, and it was pretty impressive.

Does anyone have any other suggestions? I want print sizes up to A4 (which cuts out the Fuji NX series, which is a pity as they're cheap to run and give very nice results, but only A6), high quality, reliability, and reasonable cost both of purchase and running.

pca