The lowdown on Advent printers

My advice (and remember it is my opinion) is DON'T DO IT! Advent is a new brand launched by PC World, the actual manufacturing is done by Kodak. Now this should be a winning formula right? Well no. Once again I am back to the old "look at the price of the cartidges before you buy a printer" There are three printers in the Advent range, the A10, AW10 and AWP10. Now you can buy the most expensive for under £70 - doesn't that sound like a bargain? Have you seen the price of the ink? At first glance it isn't so bad until you realise the actual quantity of ink you receive for your hard earned money. It makes no mention on the PC World website, I had to do a bit more digging to find that the Black - £12.99 - will do 225 pages and the Colour - £18.99 - will do 250 pages. Now HP also do this "how many pages rather than the actual mls" and through my prior knowledge of that I know that 250 pages is approx 5mls. Thats a teaspoon. So the Advent Black cartridge has less than a teaspoon and the colour has approx a teaspoon DIVIDED INTO THREE COLOURS. So the colour cartridge is not going to be lasting very long at all! The lovely people at www.trustedreviews.com have put it far better than I could, this is quoted from their site.

"PC World has done a good job working with Kodak to produce a low-cost, colour inkjet, with a good range of features for the price, fair speed and above average print quality. It's then scuppered the project by pricing the consumables at a stupidly high level. The kind of people who buy an inexpensive printer are those who are going to get very cross when they discover they'll have to pay half the cost of the machine again for every 250 pages they print."

To add insult to injury you can only buy the cartridges from PC World and Curry's (they are owned by the same company) This means they can keep the price artificially high. You can get compatibles but here's the bad news - they are very poor quality. We have trialled them and we were shocked by how bad they were so obviously we will not be stocking them.

So my advice is the same as that for Lexmark printers and for the same reasons. They reel you in with a cheap printer, then take all your money on the cartridges. DON'T DO IT. Buy a Brother, your wallet will thank you in the long run!