I’ve got a fairly old HP Printer, an HP Deskjet 930C. It still works fine but it seems to get through cartridges pretty quickly. Occasionally the paper jams.
I’ve had both HPs and Canons and find lots of problems with getting it to suck up the paper. I have to coax every goddam sheet through, which, when you’re printing 100 pages, is a royal pain.
Eve, I’ve never had that problem with any of the HPs I’ve owned or used. You sure you don’t have defective paper?
I also have an HP Laserjet 4 and an Epson 2200. I clean the rollers on the HP at least once a year to keep the paper moving.
As for any inkjet, you really need to use them almost daily to keep the heads from clogging. At least a couple of times a week.
When buying an inkjet, you should look at the paper handling abilities as well as the cost of ink. The cost of a printer goes down over time if you can feed each ink color separately. I have a 7-color printer and 2 of the colors get used up at least 4 times faster than the other colors.
I’ve worked with printers since they were invented, and I’ve used most brands either professionally or personally.
IMHO, Hewlett-Packard make the best, in terms of price/performance ratio and general non-suckyness.
I own two Helwlett-Packard printers, a laser and a hi-res colour inkjet for photos and stuff. Both are essential for the daily smooth running of my business, and I reckon they’re as good as home printers get. The sting, as with most brands, is the price of the consumables and ink cartridges, particularly if, like me, you have learnt the hard way not to trust the substitutes and always cough up (through gritted teeth) for the brand-name supplies.
I have no commercial interest whatsoever.
I`ve had an Epson Photo EX for 6 years now and not one problem ever. I recently bought an Epson C82 (for speed and color fastness) and have not had a problem in a whole year so far. My brother has the Canon I960 and Swears by it. I think that will be the next printer I get.
Eve, you got some unlucky POS printers. I think every manufacturer can put out some shit, but all the bad ones seem to be floating your way. Maybe it`s time to renew your membership in the Good Karma Club. Good Luck.
You’ll never find an inkjet printer that isn’t crap, at least to some degree. In the long run they are all unreliable and exspensive to operate (page per page ink is far, far more exspensive than toner, plus it dries out but toner lasts pretty much forever) compared to laser printes. Also, in general, pretty much all printers marketed as “personal” or “home use” tend to be sub par. In my experience the best printers available are HP LaserJets marketed at business users.
You can find great deals on used LJ’s on Ebay, particularly 4’s. They are rated for about, I think, a monthly duty cycle of 20,000 pages, it’s quite easy to find used office printers that have only done about two months worth of printing for around $100. New toner for the LJ4 runs about $50-$70 and is good for 8K-10K pages. The most common problems with these printers is paper jams caused by dirty rollers, easy enough to clean with some rubbing alcohol and a rag. They’re very well built and quite user-servicable. For the price of a cheap inkjet and three or four ink packs you can get a business class laser that will probably break or even run out of toner when used in a home environment.
There’s quite a few in the $100-200 (or less) range thesee days, and I get the impression they are consumables. There aren’t too many shops that repair them.
My only inkjets have been an Epson Stylus 1500 (which I no longer have, but is still going strong at ~8 years of age) and an Epson Stylus 1520 which is about 4 years old. Whatever the current model is might be a bit pricier than the horde of personal printers out there (probably ~$400 or so), but the quality has been excellent and the only problem I’ve had with the 1520 is paper feed when using the large format sheets (17" x 22" and 11" x 17"); the letter size, legal size and envelopes have never given me a problem.
I’ve also used an HP LJII in the past and had an HP650c and now use an HP750c+. I doubt any of those are what you’re looking for, but that experience allows me to say that the upper end HPs have treated me well. I don’t know how their low-end stuff is.
Generally, it seems that with inkjets, the larger the cartridges, the better off you are, with longevity and functionality as well as with the long run economics. IMHO, of course.
I have the Canon combination thingy that has the fax, copier, scanner, printer action all in one. I hate it, but it isn’t the kind of deep, “don’t-make-me-pitch-you-out-the-window” hate I’ve felt for previous printers. It’s true…they’re all crap. Every. Last. One.
Our Canon desktop model at home seems to feed fairly well, although the occasional page will get stuck. I’ll check on which model it is tonite, although my guess would be the Momma Cass.
I’ve had nothing but problems with Epson Stylus printers - ranging from serious paper-handling faults through to rejection of brand-new ink cartridges - I will not buy Epson again.
My experience of HP inkjets has been generally good.
HP rules.
HP makes the best printers by far. I had a Canon Multipass that jammed and I always was replacing the ink cartridges at least monthly. I now have an HP Officejet, it copies, scans and prints. It has never jammed and the ink seems to last a lot longer than the Canon ever did. My advice is to spend a little more on the prinetr and then you will not be disappointed. You do get what you pay for when buying a printer.
Old HP printers rule. The newer stuff I have had some problems with. I had a 590 (one of the first all in ones) that wasn’t worth the effort that it would take to throw it away.
I have laserjet 4’s in several of my offices. Built like tanks, and bullet proof. I had a roof leak over one, the suspended celing got soaked and went splat all over the printer. Cleaned it up and the damn thing still works.
At home I got a Lexmark free with this computer. total POS. It would cause a system crash if I tried to print one than one piece of paper during a particular boot (yes I had the latest drivers)
I got a Cannon S600 and have never had a problem since. My only issue with the Cannon is that the instructions don’t tell you that if you have not printed for a while the printer will do a clean cycle before printing your job. So it took me a while before I understood why my first page took so long to print.
I bought my duaghter a Epson CX5200 all in one for college (print scan copy) so far it is excellent
I worship at the altar of the HP LaserJet II. Those printers are just the shizzle, no two ways about it. Sam Stone isn’t exaggerating when he said there are plenty of them still in service after 15+ years. They are a really fine piece of equipment. At home I have gone through two Canon POS Inkjets which both cost me ~250 bucks each and were still both far and away much better printers than most of thier competition. I went through the BJC420 and am currently nursing along a BJC6000. Someday I’ll fork out the cash for a laser printer, but that day is not today.
I kind of hesitate to take the side of the printer-makers, but have you considered what they’re up against? The modern inkjet/bublejet printer is an absolute marvel. Imagine a machine which can put 1200X1200 individual little dots in a single inch of paper. Get out a ruler, mark off a 1-inch square and go at it with your pen. Get the finest-tip pen you can find and try again. I bet you don’t come anywhere near 1,440,000 dots in your square before you start overwriting some of the ones you laid down before. Even if you manage it, I bet your square would smear if you touched it within the kind of timeframe you normally try to pick up paper off the printer in. Now if you managed to get all those dots in that tiny area and used a high-enough quality ink that it dried and didn’t smear, how about you try to do that over the entire surface area of twenty three pages in a single minute.
As much as they suck compared to more reliable products, the modern inkjet is still a fantastic piece of work. An ink which stays liquid in the tank but dries in a fraction of a second without drying on the print head and causing clogs is a marvel in and of itself. An ink which has to look good even if printed on crappy paper. A machine which can switch all those nozzles between several types of ink at millions of squirts per minute is just mind-boggling. Here is a discussion of the inkjet printer which focuses on the precision of this machine. Microscopic ink jets which are self-cleaning. Absolutely brilliant.
The average monitor? It lays down somewhere between 72-100 dots in an inch compared to the 1200 the average modern inkjet is capable of. Did you ever wonder why people who work with graphics need such huge screens and such high-quality monitors? It is because printing is capable of SO much higher quality than monitors are that they need to narrow the gap between what they see and design on a screen and what will print as much as they possibly can. Something that looks great on a screen may look like utter crap when printed.
So in my more lucid moments when I’m thinking about an inkjet printer, I’m inclined to cut them some slack. They’re doing an amazing job. Like a juggler who is riding a unicycle on a high-wire while juggling flaming torches mixed in with razor-sharp machetes which weigh twenty pounds each. If he can keep that up for more than a couple of minutes then he’s a god. These days when I think of what a printer is actually DOING when I hit “print” I tend to see that juggler. I’m not willing to go back to the dot-matrix days, or daisy-wheel days, so I’ll take my lumps and be glad that when the juggler finally misses a torch or takes a machete in the jugular that replacement jugglers aren’t nearly as expensive as they used to be.
Enjoy,
Steven
Um, yeah, get an HP 
Do you want or need a color printer? Do you care about printing photographs? If you just want to print documents, go with this
http://www.compusa.com/products/product_info.asp?sid=3FF8A90040FF617F&product_code=305555&pfp=cat3
If you do want color, go with a modestly priced inkjet, but check the price for refill cartridges, before you buy. Some of those are expensive. For about 200 bucks, you should be able to get a decent printer.
I suspect Eve is printing documents, and long ones at that. That being the case, a laser printer is the way to go. A laser printer is much faster than an inkjet, the toner cartriges last at least 20 times longer than ink carts (not to mention that they don’t dry out if you don’t print anything for two months, nor does toner smear if it gets wet), and the paper capacity is higher, so you won’t have to reload unless you’re printing well over 200 pages (in most cases).
Now for the anecdotal story: before I started law school back in 1999, I bought a HP Laserjet 2100M. It was pricey, about $700 at that time, but it’s performed like a champ in the years since. It’s doing even better since I upgraded the memory recently (from 8 megs to 24 megs, cost me about $20); it had been choking on some multi-page large TIFFS I needed to print, which means it would sometimes spit out a blank page. Not a problem anymore. I only wish I could afford another paper tray so that I could keep it filled with envelopes constantly.
Anyway, if you don’t need color, go with a laser. And if you do need color, think about shelling out for a color laser instead of an inkjet; in the long run, the stress you save is worth the money you spend.
I fully agree about HP LJ II’s. That was my first, and probably best, laser printer. I used it for years, and then donated it to my nephew, who used it for 4 more years of college. If it hadn’t been stolen, I’m sure it would still be working for him. That thing was built like a tank (weighed like one, too) and just kept on working, time after time.
I replaced it with an HP 4p, which was indeed a piece-of-crap printer, and almost turned me off HP altogether. But now I have an HP 6P, which seems to work even better than the LJ II (though I doubt it will last a decade like that did).
I have a friend who buys HP LJ II printers whenever he can. Often gets them very cheap. Then he refurbishes them and sells them to businesses for use in dirty, dusty factory environments. They like them because they just work reliably in these locations, and when they stop, a good cleaning gets them going again. He says in many years of using HP LJ II’s he can only recall a small number that actually ‘wore out’. I can see why HP had trouble selling replacements for them!
I had a Canon BJC4100.
I hated and despised that ^^#%$$%$^ing printer with every fiber/bone/cell in my body.
The miseraable %^%%&^%^%ing thing.
Last year I bought a new printer.
I LOVE and ADORE my truly wonderful and always sweet HP2210
printer,fax,scanner,copier.
I can download all my digital pictures with it too.
Somebody did GOOD.