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| What's a good printer for minimal usage ? |
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| kaz911:
--- Quote from: nctnico on February 05, 2023, 04:33:40 pm --- --- Quote from: kaz911 on February 05, 2023, 11:57:02 am ---my favourites are Brother Laser MFC's. Silent when not running and drivers are not full of junk (just a little bit of junk not a massive pile of sh*t like HP) --- End quote --- The trick with HP printers is to scroll down and download the drivers only. Their software is a pile of junk indeed. --- End quote --- yes but with the basic HP driver - you don't get scanner drivers or SW. With Brother you get it all and it is not full of crap - and it just works. I have a very cheap Brother MFC in our vacation home - but that is an inkjet. But I solved the issues with inks drying - by keeping it turned off - and turning it on once a week as it goes through a cleaning cycle when turned on. So at least it has worked until now. |
| themadhippy:
--- Quote --- In my experience an inkjet just doesn't work for incidental printing. Been there, done that. Heads get clogged and/or ink dries out. --- End quote --- Wot he said. A replacement genuine cartridge works for my printer out at £0.027 a page,even if a tank inkjet works out cheaper per page for the ink you need to factor in the 20 new printers id also need to buy to produce the same amount of print outs in the same sort of timescale |
| paulca:
At least at the level I bought (£230 Full Colour laser). The toners are 5,000 pages and the black 10,000. Unlike inkjets where a FULL cartridge is good for about 200-300 pages if you are lucky. The 1/4 full "intro" cartridge in the printer when you buy it is good for sod all too. Lexmark are prime examples, the printer + intro ink is £35. The full set of cartridges is £135. The thing is... aim just high enough to be buying "SOHO Office printers". That market WILL NOT and DO NOT accept that inkjet ink subsription non-sense. They just won't. Not when it has to print day in, day out without breaking down, ideally. |
| nctnico:
--- Quote from: kaz911 on February 05, 2023, 05:03:57 pm --- --- Quote from: nctnico on February 05, 2023, 04:33:40 pm --- --- Quote from: kaz911 on February 05, 2023, 11:57:02 am ---my favourites are Brother Laser MFC's. Silent when not running and drivers are not full of junk (just a little bit of junk not a massive pile of sh*t like HP) --- End quote --- The trick with HP printers is to scroll down and download the drivers only. Their software is a pile of junk indeed. --- End quote --- yes but with the basic HP driver - you don't get scanner drivers or SW. With Brother you get it all and it is not full of crap - and it just works. --- End quote --- Just get a seperate scanner. Works much better. Having a scanner + printer is nice if you need a copy machine. Scanners are so cheap it just isn't worth bothering with the software. I'm using Linux where scanners & printers work right out of the box anyway. |
| tooki:
--- Quote from: nctnico on February 05, 2023, 04:33:40 pm ---I doubt that. I always buy the largest B&W toner cartridge that fits the printer and it takes me years before it is empty. --- End quote --- You doubt that laser could be more expensive than inkjet? Don’t be so sure! The toner cartridges for the cheapest black and white lasers are very expensive. For example, for HP’s entry level models, that’s $45 for just 950 pages. There are many cartridge inkjets with ink cheaper than that (not entry level, but not expensive, either), and ink tank printers are orders of magnitude cheaper to run. With color it gets worse: $50 for 700 pages for HP’s entry level. Per color. (And just to make sure you can’t call me out: I am NOT saying that entry level lasers cost more to run than ALL inkjet printers. That is not true, some inkjets use crazy expensive ink. But it’s also incorrect to think that ALL laser printers are cheaper to run than inkjets!) Now look at, say, a $400 color multifunction. With laser (looking at a Xerox for example), high capacity toner is $70 per color, for 2500 pages (3000 for black). For $400, you get a nicely equipped Epson ink tank inkjet that uses ink that costs $10 per bottle, and lasts for 4500 pages black, 7500 pages color. When I said you could waste HALF the ink on head cleaning and still come out cheaper, I wasn’t exaggerating even a tiny bit. Heck, you could waste 90% of the ink on cleaning and it would still be less than half the price per page than the entry level laser! But you don’t even need to choose an ink tank to find inkjets that are cheaper to run than the basic lasers. You could also look at, say, a $250 HP cartridge printer, and discover that the high-capacity cartridges are $35 for 1600 pages (color) and $60 for 3000 pages (black). I’m in the market for a new printer, so I’ve been checking things out, and it’s absolutely shocking how expensive the supplies for cheap lasers are. But as I said already more than once: for someone who prints very little, and very sporadically, that can still be the right choice, since you won’t waste toner on head cleaning. |
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