School me on printers

lowlylowlycook

Yeah, I just want to buy a decent printer for occasional use but my attempts to educate myself on this have failed. This will be for fairly casual use so probably an inkjet is in order but there are so many models.

What I'd like

1. Wireless
2. Lowish ink cost (I'm not going to be printing a ton so it's not super important but I'd like my head to refrain from exploding when I have to buy ink).
3. Decent enough print quality
4. Smaller is better

Don't care about

1. Print Speed
2. Large paper capacity
3. All in one functionality

Any suggestions?

Tanooki Mario

Are you printing color? If not, pick up a little laser printer. I bought a Dell about five years ago with a 10,000 page toner that's still going strong.

If you are doing color, nice printers are going to run you $200+ if you want low ink costs. Most printers on the market are designed to be loss-leaders on ink, so my best advice there is to keep an eye on ink cartridge prices when you're looking at a particular model.

travathian

B&W or Color?

Wireless is going to add a chunk of change. Wired networking is almost a standard feature on all laserjers, but wireless is definitely a premium.

lowlylowlycook

Yeah, I'll probably need color.

Xenogears of Bore

Wireless is a feature that the smaller brands tend to give away cheap so you can buy their shitty printer, which may or may not be any good.

What sort of color printing do you expect to do and how much of it? Very important to narrow down what you need by those two criteria.

For instance if you very occasionally need to print high quality photo level printers...well, find a local printshop and have them do it.

If you need decent but not great color pie charts and shit get a low end color laser on the cheap from Brother.

If you need great photo prints all the time by a high end espon, canon, or HP inkjet and a cheap B&W laser.

Tanooki Mario

Also, do you have a router with a USB port? Bam, wireless printing. I know for some people the location of their router and the location of their printer aren't the same thing.

They also make USB-to-WiFi dongles for printers, so if you find a printer you like that lacks wireless you can go that route.

shadydentist

Some printers also come with an ethernet port you can hook up directly to a router.

lowlylowlycook

So this is what I'm leaning towards: HP Officejet 6000.

Seems cheap and wireless, PC mag seems to think that it doesn't suck and that ink is not at rape me prices.

Xenogears of Bore

I think that thing uses 920 ink, which is a decent deal.