Where to find cheap printers?
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During this COVID, the printer price has been jacked up a lot, and that there are lots of people who ask me where to buy cheap printers. Let me first go over a couple of sites I go to get cheap printers, and then we're going to take one of the printers I bought and fix it.
I used to use Craigslist a lot but not recently because recently, the price hasn't been reasonable. I'll search for the keyword "printer". After finding a good priced printer, I would do a speedy check on the inkchip.net and see if there is a chipless solution. Then we go Soft. Here is model XP-434, and let's see how much it costs. Select our model here. It costs $25 to make it into chipless, so totally, you can spend $45, plus gas, and then you can turn it into chipless. I have a video that will show you how to modify the cartridge and refill it again. The ink probably costs $20 for 600 mills. That's enough for two, three years of ink. You get the whole thing set up for under $60. That's what I call a good deal.
Another place is Facebook Marketplace. You go to Facebook. Rather than staring as people relax, you click the marketplace icon. Let's try to search for Epson so we can compare that $20 deal. Here's a free one. Pages come out with light blue ink versus black. You guys know how to fix that one. If you don't, follow my channel. Free versus $20. Of course, free.
Next one is Macari. However, you can get an excellent deal on the specific model that you're looking for. Somebody is selling a BCH ink here. At least, this guy is happy about the product.
This one is $25. He doesn't need it anymore. You can see you have to pay to ship here to be comparable to our Facebook Marketplace. However, if you look for a specific model, this is the place to go.
Let me search for a model that I'm looking for; it's Epson 1430. That's a really hot model. That's cheap. That's cheap, really cheap. Let's see what's wrong with it. This guy for a brand new should be around the $700 range. Sold. Too late.
This one, I bought it for $30. The owner says there's something wrong with the printhead. Whenever she goes to print, it only produces blank pages. She never could set it up properly. That's a good thing for us because we can call Epson's warranty if something's wrong. By the way, Epson will honor the warranty even if you bought it from a third-party. The supply line looks good. Let's take a look at the printhead and make sure it has enough ink.
We'll turn our printer off first. See that white lock? That locks the printhead in place. We need to unlock it. Just use your finger and push this wheel forward, and that will move the lock. See, it is unlocked now. You can move it. Now, we remove the screw from the top, and then we can remove the cover. The ink looks filled. Let's check the colors. Pay attention to the bottom. Look, the bottom is filled, so it should provide enough ink for the printhead. Let's put it back and print. What I worry about is maybe the fuse to the printhead has gotten blown out. In that case, the printer still functions, but no electricity goes to the printhead, so you get blank pages.
I had hoped the user didn't know they had to press and hold the stop button for three seconds to get the ink to charge to the printhead before using it. That's why she got blank pages. However, this doesn't seem to be the case. We looked at the ink box, and they are charged already. Yes, it's blank.
We plan to do nine cleanings and do nine of them in a row. If there's any ink that comes out, we'll keep cleaning, but if there's no ink that comes out after nine cleanings, we're going to open it up and look at the motherboard.
After four or five cleanings, the colors started coming out, so we don't need to worry about taking the mainboard out and test the fuse. We're just going to keep cleaning until the pattern is perfect.
This person just kept printing blank pages, printing 40 pages after bought it three months ago. The printer's still under full warranty. Even she couldn't figure out how to use the cleaning function. She could call Epson rather than selling on Facebook for $30. Anyway, I feel guilty about buying this printer now.
If you enjoyed the scavenger hunt, please join me in the next video. The following printer just arrived today. I haven't opened it yet. It's ET-4700, and I paid a whopping $53 plus $27 for shipping. The problem is the paper always jams. It seems like I have an excellent printhead, and everything works except the paper. I hope so.
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