Printer recomendations

Erwin

After 4 years of loyal service my Canon Pixma 3000 died on me today. I will try to repair it and call costumer service but in case I have to replace it which one would you recomend?

omegafinal

I got an HP Photosmart 8450. Maybe it's too much if you want to just print documents, but it served me extremely well and my prints look amazing coming from it.

Apreche

For years I used my trusty old HP Deskjet 810c. It was just a color inkjet printer that took the expensive cartridges. Rym had an even older HP Deskjet that was broken. I was tired of buying those stupidly overpriced cartridges and Rym was tired of not having a printer. We realized that we almost never need to print in color. I mean, most of the time we're printing out receipts from online purchases or MapQuest directions. Therefore, the most economical solution for us was to buy a black and white laser printer.

We chose the Samsung ML-2010 because it had Linux drivers and it was only $50 on Newegg at the time. We also were able to pick up an extra toner cartridge on Newegg for $50 more. The toner cartridge that came with the printer has yet to run out. We keep the printer in the living room and use printer sharing so any PC in the house can print. Even people who come over to the house with their laptops can print if they connect to the wireless network. It is awesome and cheap.

There are basically two questions you need to ask yourself when buying a printer. How much do you print? Do you absolutely need color? Answer these two questions and the answer of what printer to buy will become obvious.

Erwin

Thank you guys I decided to go with my old trusty Epson LX 300. I realized that it was old but I mostly only use black and white Thank you guys

GreatTeacherMacRoss

In the future, I'd go with a cheap HP simply because every cartridge of ink has new print heads on them.

Apreche

In the future, I'd go with a cheap HP simply because every cartridge of ink has new print heads on them.

How is this a reason to go with HP? This is true of every inkjet printer ever. In fact, it's a detriment of all inkjet printers. Laser printers and plotters work on a completely different principle, and there are no print heads to mess up. If anything, this is a reason to not buy HP, or any other inkjet printer. New cartridges are overpriced, and they need to be purchased too frequently.

HMTKSteve

I have an ancient Epson Laser Printer kicking around in my basement that I fire up just for printing long text jobs. The cartridge is expensive for it but, I found a cheap way out.

There is a plug on the side of the cartridge that I can open up and pour in new toner powder. What I then do is buy bulk quantities of old toner cartridges for old fax machines. I can get these old ones for about $5 each and I have a decent stockpile built up. These ones I cut open and pour the powder out.

As long as I don't spill any powder everything works great!

We also have a new HP printer on my wife's computer that is full color and photo enabled. It has a small LCD screen that you can use with the built-in SD/USB slots to print without a computer.

The other good thing about the HP is that the cartridges are separate and not too badly priced. I can get a 6 pack of color+black for $40 that comes with a bunch of photo paper. Staples gives me about $3 off for each cartridge I bring back so... Bring back 6 cartridges and that $40 becomes $22!

Strangely enough the 5 pack of ink (no black) costs $50 at the same store. I asked the people there and they said that the more expensive one had more ink in each cartridge. I looked at the boxes and there was no indicator of these cartridges having different size ink wells inside of them.

HMTKSteve

I will no longer buy Epson printers simply because we have one that decided to stop working with Windows. I blogged about it months ago.

What happened is very weird because the printer works fine under Linux!

It would print black banding lines behind all text after printing the first half of the first page correctly. This would happen on every version of Windows I had access to (98/XP) and even if shared from the Linux PC this banding would appear.

On Linux the printer still works fine.

The Epson Stylus C88 Printer, works in Linux but not in Windows?

bunnikun

My family just recently got the Canon PIXMA MP600 "Photo All-In-One Printer". So far, it's worked out great for me. I do a lot of scanning, and it's built in scanner works great. It prints in color and black in white. The ink cartridges are fairly cheap, although we need a new one about every month and a half. It also has a photo card, so if you have a digital camera it can read and print your pictures straight from your card.

To top it all off, it was fairly cheap (for a printer with all this), only $179.99. We also got the IBM discount. ^.^

The only problem with it, is that the color prints slow.

tuttle88

Don't get a Lexmark! The cartridges are crazy expensive (at least they are here) I have a Canon now, I like it very muchly and the cartridges are pretty cheap.