OK, we took a chance nearly two years ago, and bought a dirt-cheap color laser printer by OKI, model C5200ne. It has excellent quality, high speed in both color and B&W modes, a Postscript processor, 8MB of RAM, a 100KB network card with network printer sharing built-in... yup, it was LOADED. When we saw it at Office Depot, we, of course, asked how many images per cartridge, and how much to replace the cartridge. The drop-dead purchase price of the printer, after all the rebates, was $300. A full set of color cartridges was nearly $500! Drums and belts were gonna be extra after around 25K-40K sheets.

Our thinking was this: we'd bought inkjet printers several times over the last decade, each with a seemingly voracious appetite for cartridges at outrageous prices. The printers were cheap, ran SLOW, and they sold cartridges to make the profit. How much do you figure one of those little plastic whatchmathingies costs to make? We figured 16PPM in COLOR mode was a nice boost, and our usage would get us at least a year down the road before we needed cartridges. If we couldn't find a sale, refiller, or third-party replacement set by then, we'd look for ANOTHER printer, and the $300 printer would go on the eBay auction block. Well, we found the Media Sciences replacement cartridges just in time, for less than half what OKI wanted for theirs, and they were the high-capacity units (~5000 sheets). What's more, there are other vendors who sell refill kits to refill THIS BRAND of cartridge for less than HALF their already-low price.

We bought the economy pack that includes all three 5000-sheet color carts plus the K toner cart for around $185 in January. We noticed that price is lower now, so shop around.

Our initial OKI BLACK cartridge blew out at 1850 sheets, but we had a genuine OKI replacement that we negotiated for at printer purchase time. We installed the Media Science color cartridges as the printer called for replacements, which all happened within a couple hundred sheets of 2500.

Gotta say, we never had much luck with third-party inkjet cartridges, even less luck with refilling them. The nice part here? Toner replacement went smooth as glass: no surprises, no headaches, no mess, and no unexpected color shifts. Took maybe ten minutes from initial TONER OUT ALERT to resumption of printing. And the printer just keeps on printing, using the same color adjustments we plugged in when we first got it. When these carts start getting down to 5% or so, we'll look into those refill kits, and see about loading our own. Or we might be ready for a new-technology printer at that time; should be about two years from now!

DON'T SELL THE PRINTER! Buy these replacement cartridges, they are a good deal!