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Printer Recommendations?
Professor Snugglesworth
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
For what must be up to ten years now, I've been using this Lexmark All-in-One Printer as my primary printing device for my PC: http://reviews.cnet.com/multifunction-devices/x6170-all-in-one/4505-3181_7-21225886.html
It's also, frankly, a piece of crap that continues to unnerve me. The reasons being....
1. It's huge and clunky: I can't even fit it in my new desk.
2. I have to turn it off and on again whenever I'm printing multiple documents in succession.
3. And the biggest offender of all: constant, constant paper jams. If the alignment of the paper is even a little off, the fucking thing gets stuck and wastes good ink every time. Today I wasted at least six pages because of this.
So I think it's about time to trade up. Problem is I know nothing of today's printers, so I could use your help for something both reliable and (especially and) affordable.
I don't require perfect quality or such, since I mostly only use it to print out EBay labels. That said, I would prefer a printer that met most of the following criteria:
1. Is compact
2. Can scan, copy, and fax (last one isn't really needed, but I have found myself requiring to fax more often than I care to admit; if the price difference is big enough, though, I can easily do without it)
3. Cheap and/or long-lasting ink.
Opinions are welcome.
It's also, frankly, a piece of crap that continues to unnerve me. The reasons being....
1. It's huge and clunky: I can't even fit it in my new desk.
2. I have to turn it off and on again whenever I'm printing multiple documents in succession.
3. And the biggest offender of all: constant, constant paper jams. If the alignment of the paper is even a little off, the fucking thing gets stuck and wastes good ink every time. Today I wasted at least six pages because of this.
So I think it's about time to trade up. Problem is I know nothing of today's printers, so I could use your help for something both reliable and (especially and) affordable.
I don't require perfect quality or such, since I mostly only use it to print out EBay labels. That said, I would prefer a printer that met most of the following criteria:
1. Is compact
2. Can scan, copy, and fax (last one isn't really needed, but I have found myself requiring to fax more often than I care to admit; if the price difference is big enough, though, I can easily do without it)
3. Cheap and/or long-lasting ink.
Opinions are welcome.
Professor Snugglesworth on
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Personally, I like Brother laser printers.
I think that inkjets these days are a scam. Once upon a time, when a decent B&W laser printer was $500 and a decent color one was $1000, you could be forgiven for buying an inkjet. Not anymore. It doesn't take very long for the cost of inkjet ink to pile up. Just to give you a comparison, one of the more popular cheap inkjets on the market is the HP OfficeJet 4500. The high-yield black cartridge costs $32 MSRP and gets 700 pages. Compare that to the low-end B&W Brother HL-2240 laser, which is 2600 pages for $68 MSRP. You can usually also find laser toner for much, much cheaper than inkjet ink. Lasers tend to be more reliable and last longer, and the ink doesn't dry up if you don't use your printer for a while.
I also don't like HP's lower-end printers anymore. The software drivers tend to be bloated and unstable. I have problems with driver corruption, incompatibility with some programs, slow printing, and just general software-related bullshit with HP printers that I don't have with other manufacturers. Their larger, business-class printers are fine. It's just the low-end ones for home use that I dislike.
I've settled on Brother as my preferred brand. The B&W printer I like is this one: http://www.brother-usa.com/Printer/ModelDetail.aspx?ProductID=HL2270DW
I have the last generation (HL-2170) at home and I've rolled them out at my clients (I do IT consulting).
It's got Ethernet and wifi, so if you have a laptop, you don't need to be tethered to it by a USB cable. You can find toner for it at a lot less than MSRP.
The driver software is low-footprint and zero-bullshit.
For color, I haven't found a current-model color laser that I love quite yet. But there's an older model that has served my company very well: Brother HL-4040.
What makes this better than the other low-end color laser printers I've seen is that some color lasers require you to replace all the cartridges at once. That is bullshit. Part of the cost savings of a color laser is that you generally only need to replace one color at a time. Print a lot of red? Just replace the magenta.
That's the way the HL-4040 is, and the toner lifetime itself is very long.
I'm sure Lexmark or Samsung makes a good color laser printer, I just haven't found one yet that I can recommend. I would definitely steer clear of HPs, though, for the reasons I said above.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
That color one you linked looks good, but it's also well above the price range I was hoping for.
Really, I'm not uppity about quality and such, I just want something where the ink is cheap and it doesn't get a goddamn paper jam every time I print.
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It was on sale, got good reviews, seemed to be just what I needed and at an affordable price.
I haven't opened it yet though, so feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
I just hope they weren't wrong when they assured me that ink was included.
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Reasons:
1. The printer will last FOREVER. My parents still have and regularly use a laser printer that they bought in like 1996.
2. Cheap ink - toner will cost you around 1.2 cents per page, inkjets cost 2-3x as much AND if you don't print for a while you will end up with dried up wasted ink.
If you need to print in color do it at a print shop, or do it at work and don't expense that cab ride you took on a work trip to clear your conscience.
It's a color laser printer with wifi and Ethernet. The print quality and speed is fantastic, and the cost of toner is pretty great compared to ink. It was on sale at Microcenter for $150, but I knocked another 30 bucks off with a coupon. It's a steal. I will never go back to an inkjet printer again. I can't even count how many times I had to rinse the print head in my old Canon because it hadn't been used in a couple weeks and was all clogged up with dried ink.
It's dangerous to live so close to one. So many things to BUY and so many COUPONS! I should just rent a room there.