Y’know, I’m heartily sick of the rip-off printer manufacturers that dominate the market now. I bought an Epson printer some years back which, if I’d bought Epson cartridges, would have cost me £60 a time to refill (5 cartridges at £12 each). However, I bought a kit of refillable cartridges and with much fucking about, inky fingers and the occasional purchase of refilled cartridges on the Internet to get replacement chips – I was reprogramming them and they often went wrong – I did save myself more than three times the cost of the printer itself. But the printer finally died and I had to bin it. My next purchase was a Hewlett Packard. The replacement cost of the one black and one tricolour cartridge for this too is ridiculous, but that’s not a point to belabour since we all know that most printer cartridges retail probably at something like 10,000% of manufacturing cost. I got my colour cartridge refilled at a local computer suppliers (the machine there drilled the holes for me so in future I would know where to inject ink) but, having left the printer alone for six months, the cartridge of course dried up and fucked up. I’m now trying to clean out the printer head holes to get it working again, but don’t hold out much hope. Wouldn’t it be nice if some printer manufacturer produced a printer with refillable reserviors and maybe an extra one for head cleaning fluid? Wouldn’t it be nice if said manufacturer made it so it will print on any paper, rather than its own expensive brand? Wouldn’t it be nice if it was built to last rather than fucking up just after the guarantee ran out? Again this is something I don’t hold out much hope for. So, what I’m after is a printer that doesn’t have its ink cartridges chipped, doesn’t make the printing head integral with the cartridge, has a print head accessible enough to clean, has a transparent cartridge so I can see how much ink is inside and also refill it, doesn’t have software that says, “you’re using cheaper printing supplies therefore I am going to shut down”, doesn’t have a software package that takes hours to load (like the HP), and maybe, just maybe, lasts for a while. Any ideas?