I'm beginning to hate Canon with a passion

[nanosec]

One of my Ip4500 print heads is failing, so I decide to call Canon up at the same number I used to get the trays from.
They tell me they no longer handle sales to end users with respect to parts and refer me to Global Electronics.

I then call Global Electronics and they give me a price of 104.00 CAD for a lousy print head.

I am seething. Has anybody got a place where I can get refurbed or new print heads relatively cheap?

 

[ghwellsjr]

I see some on eBay in the USA. What country are you in?

 

[nanosec]

Canada, looks like I am going to have to order off ebay, I found a place that has them refurbed, going to try them first.

 

[websnail]

I would imagine your best bet in terms of the "end-users" issue is to get someone you know with a company to phone and see if they can place an order.

I'd offer to do it myself but there's a small matter of being in the wrong country.

 

[nanosec]

Well Canada was a colony at one point Websnail!

IIRC the prices Canon had on printheads were about 50 CAD+, so no real savings I guess. Guess it's going to be ebay, however I will try my hand at a company that's doing refurbs and report back on how well it goes.


I also have wanted ads up on craiglist for used ones.


I am just kicking myself for not buying a store's complete inventory of them when they were blowing them out for 40 CAD

 

[InkWiz]

Canon is not in the business of selling printers.

They sell "INK".

The printer is just a marketing tool to help sell their brand of INK.

People need to keep this in mind.

Don't hate Canon. They are an INK company when it comes to printing.

If you contemplate what this means, then you'll love Canon.

Because they are not selling printers, but basically giving the printers away, so that they can sell their INK, we get to buy their printers CHEAP.

We then turn around and fill the CHEAP printer with our own CHEAP INK !

So, we win big time. So, smile.

To fight back, canon changes their printers every 6 months, and makes their previous printers discontinued and obsolete, which makes parts hard to find and expensive.

This is deliberate.

So, users have to buy the new printers, to use the new carts, so they can keep selling their INK.

So, everytime you buy a CANON Printer, you should buy 2 printers at least of the same model, to use one for spare parts.

The cost of a new printer from a local store is usually cheaper than buying and shipping a part like the print head.

I discovered this when I bought my ip4500, so I bought 2 ip4500 just to get a second set of carts, print head spare, and extra waste pad etc..

Just remember this philosophy when thinking about CANON and you'll love Canon once again.

 

[chirantha7777]

Consider yourself lucky... the people in Sri Lanka asked :

USD 85 for Print Head
USD 60 for waste pad
USD 20 for service charge

And this was for my IP3500... so I just bought a new IP3600 for USD 100

 

[nanosec]

Thanks guys, I know I get ranting, and you are right. My only gripe is this is ALL about preventing people from refilling carts, and some of the methods they are using are very underhanded.

 

[qwertydude]

I'd say just buy an ip4600 and refill it. Once you go through the ink and disable ink monitoring it no longer wastes ink with needless "cleaning" cycles and doesn't go through it's extended startup and preflight checklist everytime you turn it on, it just prints reliably and cleans itself only when necessary which is a lot less often. You either buy a print head for your aging printer or buy a new printer. IP4600's are selling on amazon.com for only $59. I paid that much for a print head early on so I have a spare ip4600 print head as insurance against the next generation of canon printer being even lousier than this one, which in my opinion isn't too bad as it's print quality is very good and you still don't get as boned as when you buy an hp printer, I laugh when I see that it has a 125 sheet paper tray but people can at most get 50 pages of prints before they're out of ink and you have to buy a truly expensive and overpriced color cartridge at $50 for all of 9 ml of ink. With the canon you just refill it, you do get to enjoy just how fast you can go through your first set of cartridges though. Mine were depleted in two weeks of just a couple photos and documents a day. I will regret the day when canon decides to go the hp route and get rid of ink tanks entirely and go with tricolor mini carts, oh wait the ip2600 already does that. The harbinger of doom perhaps?