Inparticular, one that can fit a black cartridge and a colour cartridge at the same time for printing a lot of text with the odd picture. I’m not printing a lot of stuff, just occasional bursts of pages for assignment, but even so I’d like something that doesn’t burn a lot of ink.
Better still is there one that has separate cartridges for the primary colours of the coloured ink? I always thought them to be cheaper to run in the long term.
And finally something that’ll be acceptable to Windows XP too.
Any ideas?
We have a Canon i550 attached to an XP home box and like quite well. And we don’t have that ‘won’t print to the edge of the page’ problem we had with the HPs we had. (actually still have, but not for business).
They’re all pretty much the same on the inside these days, when people ask me for my preference (I’m a computer geek for a large ad agency) I always tell them that the cheapest one they find will do. They break easy and the ink refills cost as much or more than the printers themselves. Buy something you won’t feel bad about throwing away in a year.
My advice would be the cheapest laser printer available for b+w, and a cheap inkjet for those pages that need colour. Lasers will very quickly pay for themselves compared to replacement cartridges. And not churning out page after page of assignment is likely to keep the inkjet funnctioning for longer.
I got a Lexmark z605, dual cartridges, cost about 35 bucks at Walmart. It repalaced a different Lexmark that needed a cartridge, and will be replaced when this one needs a new cartridge.
If you do a lot of b&w printing, I’d take Gorilla’s advice and get both a laser printer and a cheap-o inkjet.
I’ve had an HP LaserJet 4L for years. Darn thing just won’t break. Since I couldn’t justify buying what I really covet - a kick-ass laser color printer, I recently threw in the towel and bought a fairly cheap inkjet and now I use both. Acc. to the guy at BestBuy (insert obligatory spit at the name) they don’t stock any HP inkjets with the individual color cartridges so I didn’t buy an HP because tri-color cartridges are a huge money maker for them. So I went with an Epson CX6400 for about $140 after rebates. It has individual color cartridges and replacements are reasonable at ~$13 a pop. It also has a flat bed scanner/copier, which I’ve actually used quite a bit. Who knew how handy a little copier could be? This particular copier also has slots where you can insert SmartMedia, etc., and print pictures but haven’t used it yet so I can’t vouch for the quality of prints.
I’ll bet you could pick up a used laser jet cheap on e-bay. Like I said, my HP 4L has been working fine for about a decade. The laser toner isn’t cheap (~$75) but they last forever and in the long run ends up being much, much cheaper than an inkjet. Also, if you get the paper wet, the ink doesn’t run.
