The realistic costs for low-page-count color is about the same for laser and ink jet, once you factor in the waste of an infrequently used ink jet. A color laser with the original cartridges will serve most home/very small office users for close to a year and every page will be faultless until the toner runs out.
Another thing to look for in an inkjet is commodity cartridges - the smaller and ‘specialer’ the printer, as many home page/photo/scanner/fax/Keurig/streaming video/nannycam models are, the more likely it uses carts that fit a select number of printers and are correspondingly expensive. Find the ones (usually the bottom tier of office-grade stuff) that uses the big, cheap, heavily discounted carts like HP88s.
I have never had good luck with refills on either inkjet or laser, and I’ve tried refill/refurb cartridges many times over the years. Far more hassle than the savings are worth, but I know mileage varies.
I’ve been using a Canadian outfit out of Vancouver for almost a decade, but I have not had to return one to them (they have a one-year return policy). The one with the streaking that I returned was in the 80s that was through a computer repair shop in Kitchener, Ontario.
We have a Hewlett-Packard P1102 laserjet printer. Black and white, no color. Perfect for our needs. I can recommend that model, assuming the number is the same elsewhere.
I have exactly the same model of colour laser at work and it developed a fault after a few thousand pages (the thermal roller overheated and got scored and pitted). I got it repaired under warranty, but they made me read out the 20 digit serial numbers of all the toners and roller carriers before processing my claim. Clearly they would be hoping to wriggle out if I had been using third party consumables)
The first time I replaced one of the toner cartridges on mine with another OEM cartridge (I had bought an extra when I bought the machine) a few weeks after I purchased the machine, the counter would not reset, which in that model prevented the machine from printing. Various technicians from Brother Support could not figure out how to reset it, but despite the machine being under an on-site warranty, they refused to send someone over to fix it, and insisted that I bring it to a service depot. Since it weighs 70 lbs, I was not interested. They then offered to ship a replacement to me, but their proposed replacement did not have the the features that I required. Over the months they proposed a replacement that did not have a legal size platten, another that did not have duplex, and another that did not have a large paper tray. After three months, I sent them an email stating that I would commence a claim against Brother if they did not send a repair person within two weeks, and asked them for their address for service of the claim. That did the trick. They had a fellow from a general repair shop in my town call me. He popped by, poked about for a few minutes, then pulled a reset code off the internet which solved the problem.
Based on that experience, I do not trust the competency of Brother support technicians, given that simply finding a reset code was beyond their ability, and I do not trust Brother’s warrantee, given that for months they refused to honour it’s on-site clause and instead tried to pawn off inferior replacements on me.
So…who do you recommend going with instead? Consumer product warranties are usually bad as you describe. I have wondered if the “no hassle” extra warranties various companies sell are worth it. I mean, I know they aren’t worth it on an actuarial sense, but if they will actually fix your broken product instead of giving you the run around…
It sounds like Muffin is describing an experience with a business-class machine in a professional setting. The OP was asking about purchasing a consumer-class machine for occasional use. Those problems may never occur in a situation of very light use, and when the machine costs less than $200, I might rather just replace it if and when there are problems.
As it is, I don’t have any particular recommendation, for I’ve been satisfied with high end Brother lasers over the years (although not their low end inkjets). I just assume that although they boast about their support, they don’t deliver as promised and go to great lengths to avoid fulfilling their end of the contract. I can’t say that this it much different from other manufacturers, for I’ve heard of similar sort of complaint concerning their competitors, and have had a few conversations with a couple of general repair technicians over which manufactures weasel more than others. When I purchase from any manufacturer, I base my decision on the quality of the product, and assume the warrantee isn’t worth the paper that it is printed on.
Also, the embuggerance factor is important for me. Whether or not a warrantee is honoured for a printer, the simple fact of the matter is that I can earn enough to buy a new printer in less time than it takes to deal with the hurdles put up by manufacturers’ warrantee processes. If a product came with a warrantee that was “no-questions asked, we’ll forthwith drop off a new one and pick up the old one,” then I’d bite, but the industry seems to treat warrantees as an unwanted cost to be avoided rather than a valuable feature for potential customers that would give the manufacturer a competitive advantage in the market. In the mean time, warrantees do not factor into my purchasing decisions.
That’s why once a machine has been working well for a couple of toner cycles, I start using refilled cartridges, despite that voiding the warrantee. I’d rather have low operating costs and no warrantee than high operating costs and a useless warrantee that will cost me more to get honoured than simply buying a new machine.
Consumer class, low usage, black and white? IMHO, get a laser. For two or three hundred bucks, consider an HP or an OKI. If you want a basic workhorse, up the ante a few hundred bucks and get a Brother. A low usage ink jet could end up drying up on you and have to be replaced, and the ink cartridges ain’t cheap per page anyway.
Important note: if you need to print Postscript (you know who you are), these cheap laser printers have something called Postscript Emulation and it is really… terrible, as in useless. Always read the specs.
I always thought that laser printers were better at pictures than inkjet. Am I confused? (I’ve never had my own laser printer, so, I can’t really remember properly.)
Clog failures can be avoided by buying an HP or Lexmark printer, where each ink cartridge comes with its own print head. (Needless to say, Lexmark and HP ink cartridges are more expensive than other companies’ printers’ cartridges.)
Laser printers produce discrete, well defined dots for each pixel whereas an inkjet produces a ‘cloud’ of really tiny spots. As a result lasers produces better defined edges on text (given a well designed font). Text from inkjets tends to be a little less sharp but for photographs they can blend adjacent pixels to give smoother images.
Sorry. These clog just as much as the ones with separate tanks and heads. They’re just easier to fix with a new all-in-one cartridge, and probably work longer-better because the head is replaced each time.
But I’ve clogged/cleared/cussed/tossed plenty of AIO carts. The most reliable inkjet I have is an HP K550… which uses big, cheap carts and a separate head unit.
