Printers?
Sadly, I don’t have quite the readership of Ursula Vernon, who tends to get unfathomable quantities of feedback when she asks questions far more obscure than the one I’m about to, but hopefully someone on MystBlogs will be able to point me in the right direction here…
I’m thinking about looking for a new printer soon, because the printer/scanner/copier we’ve got right now (an Epson CX-7400) sucks down ink like a cocaine addict in a sugar factory (or something), and tends to get its heads clogged at more frequent intervals than I would prefer (granted I’d prefer “never”, but I’ll take what I can get on the reliability front).
There are a few requirements for a new printer:
- It needs to be able to print photographic prints with a reasonable degree of quality.
- It needs to have large enough ink reserves that I’m not buying new cartridges every month at $12 a pop.
- It needs to play nicely with Macs and PCs (this is largely a given, but as some animals are more equal than others, so do some printers play more nicely cross-platform than others… a Bonjour-compatible one would be ideal).
- It would preferably be a multi-function printer, because we don’t have a lot of room for a printer and a scanner (or worse, a printer and a printer/scanner, since getting rid of the scanner in the CX-7400 in favor of a dedicated device seems unlikely).
- For the purposes of this discussion, price is not necessarily an object, but keeping it below $300 would be nice, because then I’ll be able to afford it before the end of the world.
I have, in the past, had bad experiences with Canon printers just falling apart after a year or two, because Canon hadn’t evidently mastered the concept of selling an affordable, functional printer that runs forever but kills you with ink costs the same way that Epson has, but if that has changed, by all means point it out to me. I’m also hesitant to go with Epson again at the moment because of the aforementioned ink-sucking tendencies of our current printer, but if the higher-end models are less susceptible to this, again, please let me know.
I wonder if it would be worthwhile to buy a laser printer for the day-to-day document printing, and save the color printing for an inkjet… if you think such a split-responsibility setup is a good idea, what would you recommend in the way of laser printers, and would you still suggest replacing the current inkjet all-in-one?
December 3rd, 2008 at 1:26 am
If you do a lot of black-and-white, go laser. We have a Canon ImageClass D320 laser printer at work, which is probably over 5 years old by now and is still kicking around, and it was a reasonable price. We’ve printed a few ten thousand documents on it, which come out at exceptional crispness and the disposable cartridges end up costing around a cent or two per full page. It has a scanner on top of it for photocopying and black-and-white scanning, though we have never tested the scanning part of it so I can’t vouch for its job as a scanner. ’tis a very nice and compact little unit that’s served us very well and we’re very happy with it. You won’t find them for sale any more as they went out of production years ago, so I don’t know what comparable printers are available now.
But that’s all dependant on how much you do black-and-white printing, heh.
December 6th, 2008 at 1:49 pm
I’ll second our resident australian’s comment here: laser is the way to go. (and not only in 70s sci-fi B movies).
If more that 40% of the pages you print is made of regular B/W documents it’s a no brainer.
I know that because for a long time I was in the same situation and when I realized that at the end of the month I had spent nearly as much on ink as I had on food I knew something had to change.
I can’t point you to a particular brand/model but I know that as long as you don’t need perfect quality & speed you can find some decent models for around 150$ (I’d stay away from models priced under 100.. just to be safe). So together with the Inkjet it will cost you more upfront, but in the long run it’ll be worth it.