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Laser or good quality Inkjet Printer in 2021?

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beanflying:
The last printer I brought was about 6 years ago and the Canon Pixma MG7160 has served me well under light duty (maybe 500 pages a year at a guess) and one of the things I use a fair bit is the flat bed scanner end of it. Ink usage on it has been good unlike the bottom of the barrel inkjets.

However it is dying and a good clean of everything and I am still getting error issues so I am calling it dead or close to it.

Tempted to have a go at a colour Laser maybe or do I just go back and buy another good Inkjet? Scanner is more or less essential too.

Sensible sub $3-400 USD or even less options for home/shack use?

gmb42:
I'm also a happy (Windows) user of Canon printers for a long time.  I have a MG5500 inkjet, mainly for the scanner but also used for odd things where inkjet just seems to be better, and a recently purchased LBP663C laser for speed and longer print jobs and I'm happy with both.  The 663 replaced a LBP 5050 that was fine, but started showing signs of needing the imaging drum to be replaced and the Canon cashback offer on the 663 at the time made it a no-brainer .

The Canon scanner software "Image Garden" isn't the most usable piece of software, but I know how to drive it and I'm happy with the results.

iJoseph2:
I've got an Oki MC363 multifunction which I am very happy with. It can scan to USB stick (so it's an independent scanner) and I like how it retains the scanner settings as default and you can twiddle with on an ad-hoc job then go back to defaults when you finished. Can do photocopying as an independent machine. And it's a colour "laser" (actually LED) printer. I'm on Fedora 33 and the driver has all the options when you give it the PPD file.

However - consumables are VERY expensive. Especially if you only print one page at a time (I think single page print jobs count as three drum rotations so it's better when it's a multi-page print job).

So I have a second laser printer a my main work horse printer - a 20 year old HP 4100. Although mine has issues jamming (I think related to spring tension on one of the flags and/or a roller issue in the page registration assembly - I'll have another look at it one day but it works well enough for now). On Fedora 33 the postscript driver has all the features but can be very very slow to print, but the CUPS driver is pretty quick.

fordem:
I suggest you look at the cost of consumables - lasers generally have the lowest cost per page, but the highest "unit cost" for consumables, and in my experience, unless you need laser quality color for business presentations or similar, it's hard to justify the expense of a color laser.

I should mention here that as a warranty support tech, I rarely buy printers, but I do have to pay for consumables, and I have had multiple, fully functional color lasers lying idle on the shelf, whilst doing all of my color printing on a business grade inkjet - my black & white print needs were handled on a black laser which I paid for.

westfw:
I prefer lasers because I print things so seldomly that inkjet stuff is prone to clogging or drying up.  A couple years service out of the starter cartridges of a cheapish color laser is fine, and then you buy a new one instead of replacing the toner  :-(
Second choice is the inkjets with the print head built into the cartridges, so if they do get clogged, you can make a valiant attempt to clean them at only “moderate” cost.
I’ve been optimizing “has refillable and/or cheap 3rd party ink/toner” over quality for a few generations now; not sure what the current status is.  I’ve noticed quite a few “reduced consumable cost” printers on the market recently...

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