Help me choose a new color printer?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

My old color printer seems dead and I want to replace it but none of the options are very appealing. Thoughts?

I want it for occasionally printing photographs, up to 8" by 10". It’s not for text (I have another printer for that). My use is light and I don’t care about printing speed. I want to be able to not use it for weeks and then have it work right when I need it. I’d like nice photo quality but I’m not sure I’m that picky, or that good a judge of print quality. I don’t mind paying up to around $300.

My old printer is an Epson Artisan 50. Its print quality was absolutely beautiful, but what I don’t like about it is the fact that the inkjet print head is built in, not part of the replaceable cartridge. I was worried that it would quickly clog up and not be cleanable, and replacing it would be difficult and expensive. But people reviewed it highly so I took a chance on it. What happened was that it quickly clogged up and I read online that cleaning it is difficult and replacing it is so difficult and expensive it’s not worth doing. What I also read online about actually using this printer is that you should fire it up every 2 to 3 days, or if you’re going to be away longer than that you should rig up some kind of timer on an outlet to fire it up every other day. Jeez! So I don’t want to buy another inkjet printer with built in heads (which seems to be every Epson).

It seems like it might be nice to have an inkjet with a replaceable head, and easy to find cartridges. Hewlett-Packard printers have replacement cartridges available on every corner, but I’ve been so frustrated and disappointed with flimsy HP printers and their paper jams that I’ve promised myself to never buy another.

I have a separate laser printer for black and white text, and I love it. It’s a Brother HL-S250DN and it couldn’t be nicer. In looking for the closest thing to a color version of this, I find the Brother HL=3170CDW at http://www.amazon.com/Brother-HL-3170CDW-Digital-Wireless-Networking/dp/B00BQU141C/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1419629489&sr=8-1&keywords=brother+color+printer and at $232 it’s in my price range, but it’s a laser or LED printer that uses toner rather than an inkjet with inks. I read in various places that of COURSE you wouldn’t use a laser printer to print photos so I wonder if that’s a non-starter?

There is also a dye sublimation printer in my range, but all the reviews I read about it say it’s a good choice if a dye sublimation printer is what you want, as if we all knew that dye sub printers are their own whole unique category for some reason. Is a dye sub printer what I want?

Can somebody recommend a direction for me, or tell me if it’s true that a decent photo printer necessarily has to be inkjet based?

Thanks!!

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I have the Brother DCP-9020CDW and can confirm that the colour photo printing is nothing special. But really, if you’re going to be printing photos that infrequently, why not just use a print shop?

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Hi Quartz – yeah, that’s an option too. I’ve never used one before - any recommendations? If you really live with haggis, I guess I’m asking for global chains…

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This. $300 buys a lot of prints. I haven’t had a printer for years. I just email photos to a local place and pick them up in an hour, or take my memory stick to the college or Staples and have it printed there. Done and done. I don’t have stock paper or ink or worry about whether it works. Ever.

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Many places like Walgreens, Walmart, CVS, Target, etc. have websites where you can upload pictures and pick them up at the store in about an hour. You’ll get great quality and the prices are pretty low. I would tend to think they would have industrial-quality inks that would be better than what a typical home printer could use.

When you pick them up, you can check them out and you don’t usually have to pay for the ones you don’t like. Before you buy your own printer, try them out and see what you think.