NSR: New Printer

[char]

I'm in the market for a new printer. I'd like to spend less than $150 on it. I've had an HP for 10 years, but I've finally noticed the print quality is dropping off when compared to newer printers.

It will be for home use, printing the occasional photo, but mostly text. Wireless would also be a plus. Copy/print/fax would be nice, but not really necessary. Any thoughts? It seems they suck you in with a cheap printer and then bleed you dry on ink for profit.

[Snow Dog]

I like Epson because each colour has it's own cartridge and you're replacing the ink, not the print head so they're cheaper. Epson uses pigments so they're more water resistant. (Dyes have better colour but fade faster. Pigments last longer and are water resistant.)

[toast2266]

I have an HP 6500 all-in-one thing. The two things I don't like about it are: 1) It seems to take forever to get itself sorted. There's about a minute of spinning back and forth and aligning things before it actually prints the first page. 2) It goes through ink really fast, and ink isn't cheap.

[stuckathuntermtn]

They're all shitty now. IDK what happened at HP, but they have turned into Epsons: slow and noisy. Might take a look at Lexmark?
Whatever you do, throw out the CD that comes with it. Whichever printer you buy. Just download the drivers. FIND THE PRINTER SETTINGS AND SET IT TO BLACK/GRAYSCALE ONLY. Otherwise it just burns up color to print text. I'm serious. And don't use high quality. Normal is fine. Sometimes, even low.

Faxing? fuck that shit. Scan it and email it.
And I don't think any printer's wireless networking is easy to get to work. It might work once, then it doesn't again. It's fucking dumb.

[iscariot]

I have an HP 6500 all-in-one thing. The two things I don't like about it are: 1) It seems to take forever to get itself sorted. There's about a minute of spinning back and forth and aligning things before it actually prints the first page. 2) It goes through ink really fast, and ink isn't cheap.

Yup. Same experience here with the HP 6500.

[admx]

I used to be a big HP fan but their newer printers suck, and their consumables are really expensive. Plus side is you can almost always find HP stuff around.

If you live in a town with an office supply like store I would really consider Brother MFP products. I picked one up; wireless, with Fax, scan and printer for around 150 dollars and it's really nice. The colors are all different cartridges so you can replace what you need. IMO if your not really techie their setup doesn't install a lot of junk software like HP seems to now.

It also works great with MAC or Windows (if that matters to you).

[El Chupacabra]

Watch the deals at slickdeals.net for a week or two. Printers are always on sale, and Black Friday is coming up soon, so if you can wait till then there will be tons of techy deals.

I'm currently using a Canon Imageclass all-in-one printer/copier/scanner (and fax too, I think, but I don't have a phone land line anymore), black ink laser, which was only about $150 a year or so back. I expect they've gotten even cheaper since then.

[ACH]

Nothing but good results with Epson, I've used them in the home and office for a long time. That said, I've always paid a little more to get functionality and network compatibility (10/100 ethernet) so the level of quality in these machines has been better than average. Currently, still have an 11 year old 1520 that works like a charm, is pretty inexpensive to run ink wise and shows no sign of giving up any time soon. The only reason I've brought in a new printer is due to the difference in print quality for presentations and proposals that require something non digital (read PDF as apposed to hand out).

FWIW, In this case I'm talking about larger format printers so, we're talking inkjet. If I was only needing 8.5 x 11 I would probably have gone with a color laser instead. They've come down in price a lot in the last 10 years, depending on the make and model can be reliable and the cpp is less then inkjet.

[jfost]

I second the brother rec. from above. They have been nice for us in both home all-in-one and office use. We had to do a new drum unit at the office on our big all in one, but the admins use it for ALL copying tasks, instead of driving to kinkos, so ymmv. I spent a day or so costing out all the options and it really seems like 5 cents per page is about what you get for home/small office machines.

[jondrums]

The bottom of the line Brother MFD All-in-one is very nice if you're willing to drop 4 bills.

Personally, I will never get rid of my HP 5000, but its not for everyone.

[oldnew_guy]

Thread resurrection.

Somewhere along the line I ended up with a Canon Pixma 9...something. It is finally getting ready to die.

I was at Best Buy the other day and the sales guy was pushing HP pretty hard saying they had sort of come full circle on their products and that Brothers were constantly getting returned and leaking and Canon is having issues procuring DRM chips for their ink.

I moved away from HP because their ink costs was insane and the wife for some reason wanted a printer that had semi decent picture printing.

Flash forward and I'm looking for an all in one printer-scanner-fax(LOL, is that still a thing?). Like most people I've moved into the paperless-ish world, so don't use a printer alot and home use only, no work use. I need color. I seem to scan enough stuff that and ADF is nice.

Thoughts?

I've been looking at this: https://www.hp.com/us-en/shop/pdp/hp...y-6455e-all-in

At this point I assume these products are disposable after a few years.

[Flyoverland Captive]

Epson. HP printers are ok, but their drivers are finicky as hell. Epson just works.

[stuckathuntermtn]

So much has changed since 2011. I have a Brother monochrome laser printer that works pretty well. Even on wireless. Laser is nice since I print so little, the ink would dry out long before I used it up. I think it even has 2 side printing. The toner was pretty cheap and I'm still on the starter one.
If you use WPS on your router, that can make wireless setup fast, even without a lot of screens or buttons.
Brothers can be slow, but they are mostly reliable. Or the least least reliable IME.

[Rideski]

Subscribed. Upgrading from a brother mfc 6800 black toner only machine. Got a lot of use out of the printer and scanner, and back in the day fax. Had a dedicated fax line at one time lol. Probably ran a decade before the blank paper didn't want to feed right.

Bonus was every time the toner ran dry you can just take the cartridge out and shake it and will last another month. If not for the feed problem I'd just keep it. I keep cleaning the drive wheels with alcohol but tired of it.

[old goat]

I used to hate HP printers, but the last one I bought about 3 years ago, model in the 6000's was plug and play, and has been trouble free. No more reinstalling drivers, print jobs stuck in the queue, the computer not seeing the printer, etc. The ink is still expensive. Scanning is easy. Couldn't say if the fax works.
My wife still prefers an old Canon for photo printing.

[XXX-er]

IME the ink dryed up in my all-in-one inkjet printer & I never could get it to run again, unless you actualy need a inkjet printer just get a black & white printer with a toner cartridge, faster with cheaper supplys that don't dry out

we used to call the ink jet printer the "spray n pray "

[Pinned]

I've had Brother laser printers for at least a decade now. They work really well - no weird issues. Even the $15 off brand toner cartridges for them work well for a few thousand pages. I wouldn't bother with a color printer at home - it's much cheaper to just go print good photos at CVS or Staples if you need to than dealing with an inkjet printer.

[Snow Dog]

I've had a Brother multi-function network laser printer for several years that's had no issues. I only use Brother cartridges but they last for years. I'm not printing much these days.

My next multi-function will have a two sided document scanner because merging even and odd pages back into one document is annoying.

When I need colour I send the documents to Staples and pick them up.

[old goat]

IME the ink dryed up in my all-in-one inkjet printer & I never could get it to run again, unless you actualy need a inkjet printer just get a black & white printer with a toner cartridge, faster with cheaper supplys that don't dry out

we used to call the ink jet printer the "spray n pray "

I had that problem with all previous HP printers I've had but the latest seems to have an automatic maintenance cycle that so far has kept clogging from happening. BTW I'm not pushing HP printers or ink jet printers in general--just relating my experience with mine.

[XXX-er]

Its been awhile but as I remember some LJ's had the print head IN the cartridge which i think makes the cartridge more expensive and some cartridges were just full of ink

SO I seem to remember shopping for a printer that didnt have the print head in each cartridge for lower supply costs

but then all the ink dried up in the lines going to the print head and it was junk

an AUTOMATIC cleaning cycle is a good idea for sure, there was a manual cleaning cycle but by the time you try to clean those lines they are facked

IME just buy a lazer printer instead of an ink jet

[TexasGortex]

+1 laser.

Got a Brother several years ago. It was ~$100, prints (black and white), has a feeder scanner, is wireless, and takes off brand toner/drums. I haven’t had any significant failures or even annoyances (like having to reconnect to wifi). Can’t ask for much more. Was more than happy to give up color printing in exchange.

[oldnew_guy]

I used to hate HP printers, but the last one I bought about 3 years ago, model in the 6000's was plug and play, and has been trouble free. No more reinstalling drivers, print jobs stuck in the queue, the computer not seeing the printer, etc. The ink is still expensive. Scanning is easy. Couldn't say if the fax works.
My wife still prefers an old Canon for photo printing.

This was one of the points the sales guy was making. HP just uses native print/scan drivers on the OS now and doesn't have a proprietary interface. Or so he said.

[XXX-er]

+1 laser.

Got a Brother several years ago. It was ~$100, prints (black and white), has a feeder scanner, is wireless, and takes off brand toner/drums. I haven’t had any significant failures or even annoyances (like having to reconnect to wifi). Can’t ask for much more. Was more than happy to give up color printing in exchange.

also a lazer is WAY faster than an ink jet so if all you ever do is print text don't fall for the LJ which is gona have more functions/ but also problems you don't really need

[oldnew_guy]

I have kids and a wife that are going to demand color. I can probably get away without an AFD. I’m debating going really cheap with a smartphone scanner app. Not likely that printing to the local print shop is going to pencil out when time/gas/etc is considered (pencil out as in: “I need this printed now, why didn’t you buy a color printer!”)

To me these devices are 3-5 year throwaway expenses. I’m not printing enough to justify the upfront cost of a laser.

Last one it was the feed mechanism consistently screwing up, now it’s something related to the head and the AFD isn’t feeding a bunch.

I should probably just throw a dart and move on, LOL.

[RShea]

Still holds if you want to stay inkjet- at least get one that uses separate ink tanks for the colors and black. So Epson, Canon, usually are the leaders. Price out the ink and figure the per page cost (or visit a web site that gives the total cost of a page. HP has scooped up Samsung printer division and Lexmark got out of inkjets. Kodak at least used to claim lowest ink costs for their printers. https://www.ldproducts.com/blog/most...kjet-printers/ (LD sells after market toner and ink cartridges.)

If you can find a used (but not abused) laser printer all in one, that would be another way to go. Had a Dell that the toners were pretty cheap, only thing it did not do was double sided duplex printing and the scanner was only flat bed. After market toners were less than the price of most inkjet cartridges sold and good for a whole lot more pages. It finally after a few years got a grinding sound and broke. Dell is out of the printer business now (at least selling them still under their name)- but I think that unit was made for them by Lexmark.