Toner Transfer

[james_s]

The fact that I can go from design to finished board in under 30 minutes is reason enough to keep a the tools around to etch boards at home. Cheap PCBs from China are great, but when I want a one-off board NOW there is no substitute for etching it at home.

[KL27x]

Maybe your good enough to create a perfect board every time, but I know I'm not.

It has nothing to do with skill and everything to do with having done it hundreds of times and finally piecing together what causes the failures and stumbling on ways to take those failures out of the picture.

I had read about pre-etching, and the first couple times I tried it, my reaction was the same as most people. I didn't see the point. After trying it on a large batch of boards, I still wasn't convinced of any difference. It was only after I stopped doing it that I suspected an increase in error rate and that I noticed a difference in transfer quality. Namely, some of the failed non-etched boards had areas of fattened, uneven traces and even some grossly visible shorts. It is only on the area of the boards that I had "messed up" that the pre-etch made a difference. With the pre-etch, those areas that got too much heat were unaffected. I couldn't have known they should even BE different if I hadn't stopped doing it, AND I hadn't inadvertently overheated some of the boards that did not get the pre-etch. AND I happened to be using Pulsar, which doesn't have the chia pet mode of failure when the toner gets too hot.

Once I noticed this difference, I experimented with more heat on the pre-etched boards. Not just a little more heat. Wayyyy too much heat. I found the board fails before you get a significant degradation in the transfer. And now the failures due to too little heat? Those are history, too. It's a sure thing. So the problem... there's some scant info out there about pre-etching. But no one tells you that the benefit gained is that you get to crank the temp up thru the roof. This somehow keeps getting lost in translation. Maybe the first person who started doing it gained some benefit, but he did not even know what it was, because he never consciously tried to use more heat. Maybe his temps drifted up slowly over time from his initial starting point (learned without the holy combo of fiberless transfer medium and pre-etched board), but he was not aware of it. Who knows?

So.. I don't post this stuff to show off. I'm sharing information. It would be nice if every time I described what is basically the solution to the biggest problem with toner transfer that someone doesn't correct me and say it's unnecessary. This, unfortunately, is a losing battle. I'm just ensuring that the "pre etch myth" stays alive a little longer, so that people can continue telling others that the pre etch isn't necessary for another 20 years. If they take satisfaction in that, then I guess I did a good thing. And if one person every 20 years actually learns the difference and importance of the pre etch, and he tries unsuccessfully to share it, maybe the myth can stay alive forever.

"I do toner transfer with no pre-etch, and I get great results." Yeah. I believe it. I believe someone out there can strike out Barry Bonds 99 times out of 100. With the pre-etch and the Pulsar, this stretches the strike zone out to about 50 foot radius circle. So now I can strike out Barry Bonds all day long by setting my catcher up 30 feet away from the batters box. (I might give up a few first base steals, though, given the limitations of a human to catch errant throws )

I'm also not for a second going to claim that I can out of the blue make a pcb in under an hour. Maybe when I was 20. Nowadays, you can watch the gears turn while I try to remember and piece together all the steps. There is a lot of standing around and drudging back and forth inside, to outside. Getting out the cutting board and the steel wool. Firing up the laminator. Waling round the house to fill the bucket with water. Getting a tank of air to pressure and hooking it to the tank. Alignment of the two sides with the drill holes in the board. It is just a complicated process.

Plus there are pre steps. Cutting up the transfer paper into more economical sizes and taping the squares onto printer papers in advance.

[AE7OO]

Greetings,

KL27x, going back and rereading my post it is obvious that I made a boo-boo.

I was not taking about board CREATION so much as board DESIGN.  I thought it was implicit that I was talking about design as the last sentence  mentions me sending the board off to a PCB house and knowing I would receive a working board back(as long as the place made no errors of their own).

What I should have said is that I don't know about you, but I know for a fact that not every board I design works perfectly 100% of the time.  I may have to add or delete circuits, reroute parts of the board or change parts.  Creating boards myself allows me to respin a board without with that 5+ day delay for each version.

NOTE: I'm not going to try to create a BGA or a super fine pitch board  at home.  That nrf24L01P board  I did was a nightmare ( I did get two to work though).  Since then I've stuck with larger parts( about 98% of the time, that other 2% of the time I'll create the board and shoot it off the OSHPark and cross my fingers that I did not make a major mistake or forgot parts or circuits.  As a matter of fact just last night I totally spaced a simple STM32F030 board and forgot a LED circuit).

GB

[cdev]

I totally hear you on the usefulness of short turn around. Thats the most useful aspect of it for me. I use the simplest etching solution I know of, hydrogen peroxide, salt and vinegar, and the crappiest free paper I can find, from junk mail I receive, I etch in a tupperware container I use only for etching, I just use a piece of insulation-coated stiff wire to hold the board by its edges, some IPA to use to clean the board of grease, a scouring pad, a flat board and an iron. Some blue 3M painters tape, And some nail polish remover. The beauty of it is its simplicity and the fact that I can etch boards while doing other stuff at my computer. I can agitate the solution every minute or so - sometimes I  just lift the plastic container up and drop it down every 30 seconds or so with my foot.. every few minutes and when I finish with a board and do another one I'll pour in a bit more salt to get it going again. Etch time is fairly short. At the end I pour the liquid into a plastic bottle I have and let the water evaporate away. The gunk from all the etchs I have done to date is represented by a layer of crystals in that bottle, at some point I will likely dispose of it at our local yearly hazardous waste disposal event.

 Its really easy to make small boards, its a very multitasking friendly activity, without much work required at all after the design is done and printed.

The drilling of holes for 'vias' or through hole parts is the most boring/annoying part. I would say it always takes less than a hour this way if you don't count either that (at the end) - its very time consuming if you have a lot of them, or the design process.

the resolution is likely better using other methods but doing it this way works fine for everything I've needed to do, with the caveat that the vias are the weak aspect of this method. So RF PCBs are non-optimal if you need lots of vias, this isnt the method for you. You'll find you need to design differently. It presents the least problems with RF passive circuitry, but active devices can be done with a little thought, just break your project up into pieces one board for each part, then use the entire back of those boards for ground and the front for signals and use multiple hand done vias around the parts to keep your grounds short. They sell rivets for this but I just use copper wire and side cutters.

[KL27x]

AE700, ok. Thanks for the clarification. And for sharing your process and details of the resolution and success rate.

That nrf24L01P board  I did was a nightmare ( I did get two to work though).

I suggest you may have found yourself in a less than optimal process, going by the info you posted. And maybe it's good enough for you. But with Pulsar, pre-etch, a laminator AND a 1200W heat gun, I do 8/8 mils on 9x6" panel with 99% success rate. Those boards that come out almost perfect but are unusable because of traces falling off or smearing together in an area of tight pitch, those problems are just gone.  You can get the transfer perfect, even all the way to the very edge of a piece of copper clad, every time. There's no prayer involved.

As for why? There are some things I produce with toner transfer. Dave did a recent video on "mod boards." I have had occasion to modify one of my production PCB's with such a board. There are only a couple of tiny components on the "mod board," and it gets soldered to another PCB. I can make it on super thin single sided copper clad with zero kerf. Just a panel packed with pads and components, which makes it easy to assemble and cut into individual pieces with just scissors. This takes off the issue of quantities and logistcs. How many will I need? I dunno, but when you do an assembly order, esp, the more you buy the cheaper it is. With a DIY board, I can just print off a bunch of panels onto the transfer paper, transfer and etch a few panels at a time, and populate and depanel as needed. If this approach is scrapped out of the blue, I don't have another bucket of PCBs to dump in a landfill.

I also tend to use toner transfer for one-off stuff like breakout boards, adapters, pogo pin interfaces, and stuff of that ilk. Stuff I us in test/production gear. Sometimes it only serves purpose of one project and another project will need a different board/tweak. That capability is here and it takes only a few hours.

Another use is when I am using a new part. I might toner transfer a test board just to verify my understanding of the datasheet. Just a small module to test that one component, before I design an entire PCB that includes it. The test board could be something super simple that needs to be used in conjunction with a solderless breadboard and/or other blocks to even be functional at all. If you do it yourself, you spend more time doing the work. But esp on these little rush, throw-away jobs, you have the benefit of never having an "engineering inquiry" that takes 3 days to resolve over email, simply because you rushed over the CAM job or have some simple mistake that would take only 20 seconds to physically bodge after the board is done.

[xavier60]

I have just successfully etched my first board using toner transfer after some experimenting.
I used Celcast Premium Coated Color Inkjet Paper IJ84 94GSM, for the transfer medium.
I used an iron to fuse it to the pre-etched board.
It mostly peeled of with little resistance after wetting. fibers did stick to the toner in some areas.
There is a problem that I have when I use the laser printout directly as a transparency for photo etching.
With my HP6L printer, the toner deposition decreases within larger areas of black causing porosity.
Heating the printout with a hot air gun set to 250°C greatly reduces the porosity.
I didn't expect this step to be necessary for the toner transfer method, but it seemed to contribute to the good result.
Also with my printer, heating the blank paper just before printing to it  increases toner deposition.

[Domagoj T]

KL27x, I believe I stumble upon one of your posts about a year or two ago, also home etching thread and you were advocating pre-etching. Your enthusiasm for the method convinced me to try it. Well, I apparently did something wrong because the result was just horrible. Not even close to what my normal procedure is capable of. You mention that HCl + peroxide (which I use, and used in that situation) is a hack etchant, what do you use and recomend instead?

Anyway, I'm getting consistent and good results (6 mil / 0,15 mm with care) with my method. In a test to see what I can get, I managed to route two traces under a 1206 LED. I usually don't need that, but I feel completely comfortable running 12 mil / 0,3 mm traces in tight spaces.
I am using vinyl foil (search Oracal 640, or 641 or similar from other brands). They provide 100% transfer rate to the copper (none left on the foil), require no soaking and rubbing, just let it cool before you peel it off.
The trick to get the porosity out of the picture is to use something called toner reactive foils. It's a foil with a special layer that chemically bonds with toner, fills up the porosity and provides much better etch resistant than toner alone. The procedure to apply it is simple: after the standard toner transfer, just layer the foil on the pcb and pass it through the laminator again. I'm not sure how well it would work with various paper transfer methods if there are paper fibers left on the toner, but with vinyl foil there are no paper fibers and I get perfect coverage.

This toner reactive  foil is not useful for just toner transfer. It's excellent for UV photo procedures as well (positive or negative, doesn't matter). Laser printing on an overhead transparency results in porosity that affects photo procedure, but this thing fills up everything and acts as good UV block.

I use regular cheap laminator. The only modification I did to it was to expand the infeed and outfeed slots. It had some fins to guide the paper, but they were a little too closely spaced for a 1,5mm pcb to pass through easily. I do plan on replacing the thermo-switch with a little hotter one (current one is 140 C, the plan is to put a 160 C one), but never got around doing that.

The printers I use are Lexmark MX310dn and Samsung ML-1640. I haven't noticed any difference in the results between the two.

[james_s]

I started out using photo paper, then magazine paper, then I eventually went to some of that blue toner transfer film. It looks expensive at first but it ends up being cheap since you only need to use a piece as big as the PCB you're making. I print out the layout first, then cut a piece of film and tape it at the leading edge right over the printed layout. Then I feed the same sheet back through the printer and it gets printed right onto the piece of film.

[KL27x]

KL27x, I believe I stumble upon one of your posts about a year or two ago, also home etching thread and you were advocating pre-etching. Your enthusiasm for the method convinced me to try it. Well, I apparently did something wrong because the result was just horrible. Not even close to what my normal procedure is capable of. You mention that HCl + peroxide (which I use, and used in that situation) is a hack etchant, what do you use and recomend instead?

Interesting! I might be not be understanding your post. This Orocal vinyl, you are laser printing onto this stuff, and then transferring the toner to the board with heat and pressure?

Then this reactive foil, stuff. You apply it over the toner? I'm confused, because you say it is useful for UV, too. How do you get the foil to stick to UV resist? You transfer with heat and pressure, like toner transfer method?  (edit: Ohhh.. you mean you use it on the clear plastic overlay before doing the UV exposure. )

Anyways, I have some guesses. Yeah, the etchant is a good guess. I use only cupric chloride. That might make a difference. Also, you need really high temp and a fiberless transfer medium to reap the benefits of the pre-etch. The orocal is apparently fiberless. But vinyl will melt before you hit the temps I am using. The only paper I know that makes this process possible is Pulsar. (To be clear, I have never found the "good" photo paper, and I have never tried laser printer backing; those might work, too). If you are using vinyl, you are definitely not playing in the same temp range as I am. If you do not know the experience of bubbling and delaminating copper clad, then you have not fully explored the limits that this process will tolerate. You don't know how big your strike zone is, so you might still be throwing it over the plate, because you're used to the umpire calling balls. It's not that you need this high of a temp to get a perfect transfer. It's that getting it this hot ensures there is not that one small spot on the board near the edge that fails and ruins the board.

FWIW, I bought 3 packs Pulsars reactive foil overlay. I only used it once or twice. By then I had got my method down, and the foil overlay doesn't make any difference. I get essentially no porosity.

PnP Blue reduces the problem of fattened traces and reduced clearances and shorts by making the paper textured. And it has a solid plastic film to reduce/eliminate problems of porosity. But PnP melts at a fairly low temp. So the failure mode I couldn't completely eliminate (with my highly tuned  process of shooting a board with a heat gun as it goes thru the laminator) were the cold spots that failed to transfer. This was particularly trickly on a double-sided board. PnP works perfectly if you get the temp right across the board. I'm sure you could build some transfer system that is adjustable for board size to get into the correct temp band with any paper. With some experimentation and taking notes. PnP is good stuff; if that's as good as it gets, it's good enough for me to have used 150 sheets of it in my day. But now, I have a can't-miss process.

And considering my methodology with PnP was to make at least 2 to 4 copies of a board, depending on the size, so as nearly eliminate the risk of a re-do, Pulsar isn't necessarily costing me anything significant. Although, most of the time I make small boards and just make one copy, wasting a bunch of my precut Pulsar. I'm usually too lazy to even copy and paste the board into a multi-panel, because I know it is going to come out perfect.

[Domagoj T]

Yes, I'm printing onto the vinyl. For the sake of clarity I'll describe each step in detail.
1. This is adhesive foil I stick to the regular printer paper roughly where the artwork will be and run in through the printer.
1a. If it's a double sided board I use tracing paper instead of regular printer paper and translucent vinyl. It makes a world of difference in step 3, but is otherwise irrelevant for the process.
2. I scrub the copper clad with either steel wool or scotch brite. They both work fine. If I was smart enough to turn on my air compressor, I blow the dust off, otherwise use a clean cloth or paper towel to remove tiny steel wool particles.
3. If it's a double sided board I align the layers using a glass table with light underneath it (its actually just a piece of glass and an array of LED strips turned down low so as not to be too bright but still provide even lighting). Transparent foil and tracing paper make it easy to see both layers and align them. I use small pieces of vinyl to stick the top and bottom layer in position, making a pouch. I put the copper clad in the pouch.
If it's a single sided board, I just leave a bit of paper overhanging and bend it over to keep it from moving until I stick in the laminator for the first time.
4. This is the toner transfer step. I pass the board 5 to 6 times through the laminator. If its big board I help keeping it warm with a heat gun (pain stripping type) on low and from medium distance.
5. I let it cool and peel off the vinyl. Usually there is no toner left on it, but if I don't get perfect transfer it is immediately obvious without checking the pcb. Toner is black and vinyl is light gray, white or transparent, so it's easy to see. If there was a screwup and a lot of toner is still on vinyl, I clean the pcb with toner and start over, but when errors happen they are usually just a spot or two which are easily fixed with a touch of a permanent marker.
6. I place the toner reactive foil on the pcb and run it two or three times through the laminator again. It sticks only to the toner and not the bare copper. Excess is easily peeled off.
7. Etch
8. Acetone gets rid of both toner reactive stuff and toner itself.
9. Drill. I have a small purpose built high speed drill press with a ring light around the ER11 collet to give some light from above and another light below the table (shining through the hole in the bed where the drill bit drills). It also has an air pump to blow away the debris.
10. I tin entire board and it's ready for components (vias first).

Yes, I say this toner reactive foil is good for UV, but I don't apply it to the UV resist. I print the artwork on a transparency (is that what it's called? the transparent plastic sheets you use for overhead projectors) and laminate reactive foil on that. This is then placed over UV resist, pressed down with a sheet of glass and exposed. In this case, the transparency with artwork and reactive foil is not consumed in the process and can be used to expose more boards.

How do you achieve such high temperatures? I assume you are using FR4 (the glass-reinforced epoxy laminate) which can withstand such temperatures and not FR2 (pertinax) that falls apart if you are careless with the soldering iron for just a second too long.
How does the laminator withstand such temps? I have a small contactless thermometer and if I remember correctly, and please don't hold me to it, as it's leaving the laminator the board is about 80°C / 175°F. Much too hot to touch and hold by anything other than the paper.

[KL27x]

How do you achieve such high temperatures? I assume you are using FR4 (the glass-reinforced epoxy laminate) which can withstand such temperatures and not FR2 (pertinax) that falls apart if you are careless with the soldering iron for just a second too long.
How does the laminator withstand such temps? I have a small contactless thermometer and if I remember correctly, and please don't hold me to it, as it's leaving the laminator the board is about 80°C / 175°F. Much too hot to touch and hold by anything other than the paper.

I have a $35.00 GBC Creative laminator. As my board size increased from my initial tiny pcb experiments, I found I was running my boards thru it 5-6 times to get the toner to stick. And a big enough board, this wouldn't even work. So I started using the heat gun. Then I took the plastic case off the laminator and screwed it to a board. So I can put the heat gun on max setting and put it right up to the board, just a couple inches between the tip of the heat gun and the board. I move the heat gun across the board, right where it goes into the laminator (hence why I removed the plastic case). Then back the other way, I move a few inches back to preheat the incoming board. So it's a bit of a circle or a rectangle.

Just be careful, because the exposed metal can shock you if you're grounded. To prevent burning smaller and/or thinner boards, I have to pause between passes across the board. This is more reliable than trying to turn down the temp on my heatgun. The dial is super twidgy, so I just leave it on full. On large, full thickness boards, I have yet to burn or bubble a board. But small enough surface area, you would be putting the heatgun in basically the same spot nonstop. If you didn't give it some rest, you can burn the board. I have bubbled and delaminated thinner and/or smaller boards.

I give any size board just two passes. The board is warm to begin with, because I just dried it with the heat gun. One to stick the paper without the heat gun. Then one pass with the heat gun. The board is too hot to hold when it comes out the second pass.

[Domagoj T]

I think I'll order this Pulsar thing and give preetch another try.
Is this what you're using?
https://pcbfx.com/main_site/pages/products/transfer_paper.html

In the meantime, I still plan on upping the laminator temperature a bit.

[KL27x]

Yep. I buy it from Mouser. It seems to only come in 10 packs. That's why it's more expensive than say PnP, which you get a discount when you buy the 100 pack.

[james_s]

I don't remember now if the stuff I have is Press n Peel or Pulsar but it's a plastic film coated with a blue powdery looking finish. The 10 pack I bought has lasted me close to a decade, I don't etch a lot of boards at home and the ones I do make tend to be pretty small.

[KL27x]

That's PnP. I have 70 sheets of it, somewhere. It was my good stuff, at one point. Now I can't be bothered to use it anymore. I'm about 50 or so sheets into Pulsar and can't imagine going back. 

[Doctorandus_P]

What does such an HP cartridge cost, and how many PCB's do you make in 5 years?
And how many of those PCB's are wider than 8cm?
What is the average price of "toner cartrige wear" for the amount of PCB's you print?

Just write it off as expenses, and use the rest of the toner cardridge for less critical printing where ghosting is acceptable.

Alternatively there are loads of alternatives.
Marco Reps made some nice youtube vids about directly lighting UV film with a laser.
Alternatively you can write directly on copper with an etch resistant pen, or write with a pen on UV film and develop that.

All those methods would require an investmet of a few hunddred EUR / USD / Pesetas /Lires / Whatever, but it is easily doable if you're a bit proficient in mechanics, or you can choose from a multitude of CNC kits from Ali / Ebay / China / Etc.

Watch some Marco Reps vid's. He does fun stuff with electronics, and instead of some soap series you might learn something usefull from him.

[tautech]

All those methods would require an investment of a few hundred EUR / USD / Pesetas /Lires / Whatever, but it is easily doable if you're a bit proficient in mechanics, or you can choose from a multitude of CNC kits from Ali / Ebay / China / Etc.

Actually they don't for the average 'equipped' office as all have laser printers and many have laminators too so your only outlay is for the etching process, the etchant and a bubbler tank.
All it cost me to get into home etching was time and etchant, the rest I learnt or cobbled together with stuff on hand.

[mosafet]

Find a used HP1200. The thing is a tank and OEM toner available at the corner store. Mine is 20 years old and only "recently" replaced the original toner cart(!). Worked fine until empty and the new high capacity cart still going after 5 years. I've never once had a misfeed or jam even with the super thin magazine paper we use for toner transfer. I also use it as a regular office printer though I don't print much these days.

[james_s]

The holy grail for me would be a printer that can print etch resist directly on copperclad in a single step. Laser, inkjet or some other tech, doesn't really matter to me, well, actually maybe it does, I gave up on inkjet after buying several cartridges in a row that dried up before I had printed 10 pages, I just don't print very often. For a while I remember there were people using modified inkjet printers that showed promising results but the printers supported by the kits I looked at were eventually discontinued.

[KL27x]

What does such an HP cartridge cost, and how many PCB's do you make in 5 years?

I dunno. At a guess it I bought a 2 pack of OEM for maybe 45 dollars like 2 or 3 years ago. I replaced the cartridge only once in the last 5 years.. but I dunno when I got this printer. It might have been only 3-4 years since I bought it. Since I use it for printing, too, the pcb-related portion of my use is probably just a small fraction of the total usage.

If it weren't for wanting to do PCB's, I might have bought another Brother after I stuffed my last one.* I had been using Brother laser printers for the previous 4-5 years. I found my particular Brother worked for PCB's if you replaced the toner with generic. But this degraded the print quality fairly quickly, ruining the cartridge or the drum or something.

*I had the Brother and the HP at the same time, for awhile, and I kept a stack of Pulsar ready to go in the HP. But my Brother printer died a year or 3 back when I turned it off while a large (mistaken) print job was spooling. And it never worked again. So on second thought, maybe I wouldn't buy another Brother.

Actually they don't for the average 'equipped' office as all have laser printers

Me, I'm always going to use a laser printer. Loved it since day 1. The laser printer can print pages in order, without having to print in reverse order, so you can start using the first half of your doc before it's done printing. You don't have to wait for the ink to dry, the cartridge never clogs, and w/e the toner costs? Sure. Bend me over. It's part of the cost of modern business.

[tautech]

If it weren't for wanting to do PCB's, I might have bought another Brother after I stuffed my last one. I had been using Brother laser printers for the previous 4-5 years. I found my particular Brother worked for PCB's if you replaced the toner with generic. But this degraded the print quality fairly quickly, ruining the cartridge or the drum or something.

*I had the Brother and the HP at the same time, for awhile, and I kept a stack of Pulsar ready to go in the HP. But my Brother printer died a year or 3 back when I turned it off while a large (mistaken) print job was spooling. And it never worked again. So on second thought, maybe I wouldn't buy another Brother.

Yep, if you read the printer advisory for PCB Fab-In-A-Box they specifically state:

B&W Laser Printers are ideal, however...the entire BROTHER printer line does not work with our PCB process. They use a non-standard toner formulation that does not work well with our process.

https://pcbfx.com/main_site/pages/start_here/printer_info.html

[KL27x]

^ They might be wrong, though. Someone on the forum posted their success using a Brother printer. They even tracked down the MSDS or somesuch of the toner. Some of the Brother printers apparently use a standard formula. The cheap entry level one I had wasn't one of them. It was a higher melting temp plastic. The lights flickered when the fuser was heating up. I don't recall the model of mine, but IIRC, the replacement cartridge was model TN 350. So if you can find the ingredients in that, then you could research any other Brother Printer by looking it up in the same way. I seem to remember looking at it, but I don't remember where. It is documented somewhere on this forum's history.

So if you were in the market and interested in a Brother, I wouldn't let this automatically put me off.  I actually liked my Brother, better. At the same cost, it printed faster, the toner might have been a little cheaper, the print software was better for printing 2:1 reduced booklets/datasheets, and the printer fully enclosed the paper drawer, keeping out lint and dirt. Because my printer is underneath an electronics workbench, it gets a bit of debris, now and then.

Any rate, IME with entry level inkjets and entry level monochrome laser printer, the laser printers are way more reliable, have faster output, and are probably cheaper in the long run. I don't miss running down to the Staples to buy a new inkjet cartridge.

Someone on the forum pointed out the refillable inkjets as being the cheapest. I googled it. The cheapest one was double the price of an entry level inkjet printer, and it intentionally did not have a replaceable sponge. When the internal sponge was filled with ink, the printer was dead. The reviews said that you could only refill it ONCE!

[Kilrah]

Hmm I still see those original cartridges available on amazon, so is there any reason you wouldn't be good for at least another 5 years with one? Does the wiper also degrade in factory sealed package?

[Kilrah]

Someone on the forum pointed out the refillable inkjets as being the cheapest. I googled it. The cheapest one was double the price of an entry level inkjet printer, and it intentionally did not have a replaceable sponge. When the internal sponge was filled with ink, the printer was dead. The reviews said that you could only refill it ONCE!

Look at the Epson EcoTank ones.

Friend has one and I recently used it for an animation where we'd take photos of people at an event and give them an A4 high quality print on photo paper. Printed about 150 of them and only used about a 3rd of the printer's photo ink tanks (which a refill bottle fills 2-3 times), so maybe about $5 worth of ink. The sponge is an externally accessible "maintenance kit" that costs about $20 and is swapped in seconds, and on his 1 year old printer currently reports about half used.

Of course the printer is more expensive, aka its real value instead of being discounted to nothing because of making up for it in the long run with inflated cartridge prices.

[james_s]

I make a point of never, ever buying OEM cartridges retail, I refuse to support that business model and the tremendous waste resulting from the fact that it's often cheaper to buy a whole new printer than it is to replace the consumables. If I really want an OEM cartridge I'll find one on ebay.