My recent dealings with eBay have led me to believe that getting a printer might be a good investment. However, I very rarely print (though when I do, it’s usually at least somewhat important, which is why I’m considering getting one rather than being at the mercy of the local library), so a laser printer seems to make more sense than one that uses ink. However, I’m still trying to figure out if the purchase is worth the money.
If I do end up getting one, any suggestions on brands? I’m not sure whether I need other features like color printing or scanning/copying; the instances in which I need those seem to be even rarer than printing.
I would buy an inkjet. The drawback to the inkjet printers is the cost of the ink. But the printers are dirt cheap. Since you say that you will be doing very little printing, it strikes me that the cost of the ink should not be a major concern.
For light and infrequent use just go to Staples or Office Depot and buy a cheap Brother laser printer. You can get a printer for under $100 or for around $150 get a multi-function with scanner, etc.
If you don’t use an inkjet printer for a while the ink will dry out. For the kind of use you describe, a cheap laser printer will likely last you for years without needing to buy toner.
I completely disagree. We don’t print especially often at home, and a laser printer is a far, far better choice for us than an inkjet ever was.
If you leave a laser printer for a week or a month between print jobs, there are no consequences; it fires up and prints the first page with no problem at all. Try the same thing with an inkjet printer, and the printer will need to run through a self-cleaning routine before it will print. These routines basically clear out the ink nozzles by pushing a whole bunch of ink through them, which wastes a lot of ink.
The SDMB’s own Mangetout has a website where, some years back, he did a nice article, complete with video and pictures, discussing the dirty secret of inkjet printers.
I agree with Turble: get yourself a cheap laser printer. Most of them come with a “starter” cartridge that will print up to 1000 pages, and even though the cartridges are reasonably expensive after that, they are still much cheaper than inkjets on a cost-per-page basis, and you don’t lose a whole bunch of ink to the self-cleaning process.
Here’s a multi-function HP that comes with a 700-page cartridge for about $115. If you don’t need scanning and copying, you can go even cheaper. We have a basic Brother printer that cost about $70 a few years ago. The full-sized ink cartridges are about $45, but you get literally thousands of pages out of each one. Our current cartridge has been in the computer for over a year, has produced well over a thousand pages, and still prints as well as it did on the day i installed it.
[ul]
[li]Buy cheap and discard at the first problem or expensive refill.[/li][li]Or, buy a good business-grade one that uses large, cheap cartridges for reasonable per-page costs[/li][li]AND[/li][li]Use it at least a few pages a day so that it doesn’t clog and require cleaning cycles.[/li][/ul]
Lasers are great if you:
[ul]
[li]Want page 2500 from the load to print as fast and trouble free as page 1 did.[/li][li]Realize that most of the cost savings from inkjets go up in smoke from expensive cartridge/clog failures unless you follow rules 2 and 3 above.[/li][/ul]
Laser printers can also use cheaper copier paper whereas Inkjet paper needs to be coated to reduce absorbency, otherwise the ink can spread and go fuzzy.
Years ago I bought an HP 4p at a thrift store for something like $5. It came with an apparently newish cartridge. (I had used them at work for years so I knew all about them.) Later I found a ethernet-parallel adapter so it was on my home net.
We used and used and used that thing. Cartridges lasted quite a while and had become quite cheap, even for original new HP ones.
But … a couple weeks ago it started having trouble powering on. Other issues like print quality had been occurring. So time to replace it.
It’s astonishing how 22 years of tech advances have changed LaserJet printing. Incredibly fast print time. Brrrp and the page is out. But much slower “boot up” time.
If you want or can get by with just B&W printing, a laser printer is the way to go. Not a contest. It wins on both frequent, casual and rare printing loads. Plus the print quality and endurance is vastly superior to inkjets.
It’s only when you go to color that inkjets have some advantage in certain situations.
I went with this printer, listed on wirecutter as being the best bang/buck. The “starter” toner is good for 700 pages and you can get inexpensive name brand and off-brand toner for it.
It does front and back, it’s quite fast, it looks nice and holds a decent amount of paper - pretty much nothing bad to say about it. Combinations are a bad buy, if you need a scanner you should buy a separate one, because then if one fails you can replace it independently.
And, yeah, color is useless in this day and age. The reason for a printer in this era is that some legal documents still force you to print out a page and sign it (as if someone couldn’t trivially forge your signature good enough to pass a casual glance), if you are keeping paper receipts as proof for tax deductions it can be convenient to print out all your online purchases so everything is in the same format (my thinking is the IRS is more likely to believe a big stack of paper than to do the opposite and scan in my paper receipts), and so on. Oh, return shipping labels, that’s another use.
Absolutely nothing needs to be in color. And for the rare things that do need to be in color and printed instead of e-mailed, you can have it printed on a photo printer at a drug store or online and mailed to you.
So, yeah. You want a laser because you don’t need color, and you don’t want the ink to dry out over time. You want a reputable brand and something that offers toner for a reasonable price, since realistically you’re probably going to have that printer for 5-15 years (I know people that still use HP laserjets from the 1990s because they still work fine)
Even this is dying out - tablets and other ultra-compact, reliable PCs are becoming more and more common. What’s the point in having a paper photo album?
Agree 100%. This series of Brother printers is very good, very cheap, and very easy to set up - even the WiFi - my 70 year old aunt did it in less than 30 minutes. If you don’t need wireless, the price is even less - ~$80.
I have a pair of Brother lasers (one of the little printer-only versions and one of the multi-function units) and have recommended them at least a dozen times in the past year: every single person who’s bought one has been pleased with the results.
Brother is a brand I’d never heard of, but it’s coming up a lot. There’s another model, the 2320D, on sale at my local Office Depot for $70. Not sure if the differences, but I’m leaning there right now… Hmmm.
Brother has been around for a very long time. They make a number of electronic devices. It’s more recent they decided to actively compete in the home consumer printer market, they’ve really shaken thinks up there.
Brother has been making printers for a very long time. I remember shopping at Office Depot in the 1990s and seeing them. Actually, come to think of it, my parents had a dot matrix printer in the 1980s that was Brother brand…
Despite my contribution about inkjets, I carried on trying to use them for years, attempting to mitigate the cost by using refillable cartridges and third party inks, but I still had major hassles with blocked ink nozzles and poor quality printing. The inkjet is a miracle of engineering, but not actually a good long term solution to printing.
I now have a Brother DCP9020 multifunction laser printer and it seems really good. Consumables are pricey but not bad calculated per page. More expensive per page than inkjet with third party refills, but with the distinct benefit that it just works.
I have some Brother printers. The high end black and white laser and the high end colour laser are bombproof and very low cost to run. The low end ink jet printers are embuggerances and expensive to run. When it comes to support, Brother has people who speak English, but even then it is crappy support for they deny blatantly obvious warranty coverage until you threaten legal action.
To keep operating costs down, I use toner cartridges that are both high capacity and refilled. In a couple of decades, I’ve only had one that streaked, which was refunded. I looked into the cost of refilling (including new caps/plugs) on my own, which is dirt cheap, but concluded that I just don’t have the time to fiddle about.
Your comment “. . . the distinct benefit that it just works” is worth repeating.
I really simple way of looking at printers is this:
If you don’t need color, always, always go with a laser printer over an inkjet. Cheaper color printing is not only inkjet’s biggest advantage over laser, it’s its only advantage over laser*!*
That’s good, but you might consider a multifunction/all-in-one device. It’s useful sometimes to scan or copy a document. And you might even want to fax something at some point. I have an older Brother multifunction printer and bought the same model for my mother (so that supporting her would be easier). I bought that after my first laser printer, an HP LaserJet 4L, needed a new toner cartridge after about a dozen years of very occasional use. I figured rather than spend the $80 or so on a new toner cartridge for a printer only capable of 300x300 dpi resolution, why not just replace it.
I’ll repeat the recommendation for a Brother laser printer. I’ve got an HL-2270DW that’s served me well for a combined total of 6 grad-student years. It’s gone through a case of paper, mostly double sided, with the starter cartridge and three high-capacity cartridges.
Total cost has worked out to be 5.5 cents per page.
Where do you get refilled toner cartridges that are reliable and backed up by a good refund policy? I’m due for another cartridge myself.