OT: suggest a printer

[Arkcon]

Hey guys, I need some wise opinions from helpful people, and that sort of thing is in short supply world-wide, especially in regards to the topic at hand: Computer Printers.

My sister got a Lexmark X75 scanner/printer included with her Dell laptop. And it sucks. Truly. An ink hog, and cartridges are 35 USD$. We changed them, but, it doesn't recognize them. And the "printer driver" is this big invasive "command center" program which insists on loading, even if I uninstall it.

All this is par for the course with modern inkjet printers, but if you're using a printer you love, I'd like to hear about it.

She uses her printer to print up a copy of the quiz or exam for the classes she teaches. Which she then brings to school, photocopies it up on the school's nickel, and distributes to the class. She doesn't need a high dpi, true color, printed right to the border on photo quality paper output. Which is the only sort of thing CNET.com seems to think people at home are interested in. And business users only care about bluetooth enabled, high networking capability, at least, according to every review I've read. Nobody, apparently, just prints stuff out, to read offline, anymore.

Now as for me, I've got a Samsung ML1710. A nice, simple laser printer. No frills, works great, and dirt cheap (refurbished ~60 USD$). I probably should just get her one like mine. But, I'm open to any other ideas.

[Combat Wombat]

Well if you want no frills she could print the original copy at school and not bother with a home printer at all.

[Atrocities]

All printers built these days are ink hogs. That is how the printer industry survives. They sell you a cheap printer and then bilk you for the ink every 100 or so pages. (They say you get up to 500 pages, but I have never been able to make a cartrage last longer than 100 pages.)

Buy HP or Cannon. I like HP printers, have had good luck with them. Although the cost for ink has shot up dramatically recently.

[NullAshton]

I say get an ink printer, that way you can refill it.

[Atrocities]

NullAshton said:
I say get an ink printer, that way you can refill it.

Screw it, just buy an old IBM Electric Typewriter and be done with this computer nonsense!

[Thermodyne]

There is no easy solution. Inkjets use ink and ink cartridges cost too much. My solution is two printers. Keep the inkjet and buy a Laser printer. Use the laser for everything that does not have to be in color, save the ink for stuff that must be in color. Most things don’t need to be in color, and even photos can be proofed in grey scale. You can pick a personal laser printer up cheap these days, Dell almost gives them away. If you have a home network, spring for a network interface, then mount the printer on the network. That way everyone has use of it without worrying about shares and print hosts being left running.

[Instar]

HP 5550. It is a cheap USB inkjet that is very fast. It doesn't seem to use that much ink, just use the options to reduce ink usage.
I like it a lot. Hopefully it is still on the market.

http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en...897-74615.html
$100 for a printer is pretty cheap. The review I read of it in PC Mag was very favorable too...

[Mindi]

Thermodyne said:
There is no easy solution. Inkjets use ink and ink cartridges cost too much. My solution is two printers. Keep the inkjet and buy a Laser printer. Use the laser for everything that does not have to be in color, save the ink for stuff that must be in color. Most things don’t need to be in color, and even photos can be proofed in grey scale. You can pick a personal laser printer up cheap these days, Dell almost gives them away. If you have a home network, spring for a network interface, then mount the printer on the network. That way everyone has use of it without worrying about shares and print hosts being left running.

This is exactly what Richard and I do. We have two hp printers, one is a color inkjet and the other is a b&w laserjet. I try to use the inkjet basically for printing color things, mostly birthday cards, christmas cards, photos, professional paperwork with color logos, etc. We use the b&w for everything else.

The inkjet is an ink hog of course and I normally have to put in two combo packs of ink (combo pack has one black cartridge and one color cartridge) in a year. Each pack cost $35 at officemax, so that's $70 a year on ink for that printer. However the printer cost us less than 40 bucks as we got in on sale during the holidays a couple of years ago (day after Thanksgiving sale). For that price I get somewhere between 500-1000 copies depending on the amount of color the copies have. I think it's definitely worth having around for that price as the price I would pay for cards, professional reprinting of pictures and business paperwork would definitely be more than $70 a year. For a while we didn't even stick with one inkjet for color, we got what we called 'disposable printers'. There were so many sales on cheap inkjets around here that when we needed a new one we just put the old one in a garage sale or something and bought new because ink cartridges were more expensive than buying another color inkjet. But I have really liked this little hp, so I have kept it for a while now.

The laserjet prints thousands and thousands of copies and I only have to replace the cartridge about once every 12-18 months. I can buy refurbished cartridges now at officemax for about $55. We paid $200 for this printer at CompUSA right after the new low priced lasers came out a few years ago and we've had no problem with it in all that time. It's definitely been the best printer investment we have ever made.

[Kamog]

I recently purchased a Brother printer / scanner / fax multi-function unit. The black ink cartridges are $32 each and it's supposed to last for 400 or 500 pages. So far I have printed about 50 pages and it's already more than half empty! What do they mean when they say 500 pages, they must mean a mostly blank page with a couple of lines of text in tiny font at the top.

I looked into refilling the cartridges, and that costs about $20. That saves some money, though it's still expensive. Even though the printer manufacterer recommends not refilling them, of course they would say that to force you to keep buying their expensive cartridges.

[Atrocities]

They mean 500 test pages. You know the ones with virtually nothing on them. I am serious. The funny thing is, the ink cartrages cost next to nothing to make. They are a cash cow for the printer industry.

Anyone who can make cheap printer cartrages, generic, can make a killing in the industry.