printers

shade2u2 · Feb 1, 2002

Anyone have any recomendations or preference regarding printers?

The important items for me are reliability, photo quality, ease of use, minimal clogging, low maintenance & hopefully under $150. I have an Epson 640 that has been ok & prints pretty good when not clogged. I know that I am probably not using the utilities enough, but it seems that I can spend more time messing with that stuff than actually printing. Right now it won't print at all./w3tcompact/icons/frown.gif
I convinced my wife of a nice dig-cam 2 years ago, and not being able to print half the time does not go over well. /w3tcompact/icons/frown.gif
I guess that I will either get a good 35mm again or a functional printer.../w3tcompact/icons/smile.gif

smilingreen · Feb 1, 2002

Most HP's are very good and reliable printers. I have a 1120c wide carriage injet that I have had for about 3 years. Couldn't ask for a better color printer for photo quality and dependability. It does up to 11" x 17". I have it for CADD drawings that I do.

tpaulson · Feb 1, 2002

I have had good luck with the HP 960C inkjet. I have one at home and two at work all get used daily printing photos. All have been reliable. They have excellent photo printing quality when printing digital camera photos. Expecially for a printer running about $200.

Computers4Sure
<A target="_blank" HREF=http://www.cdw.com/shop/products/default.asp?EDC=274311>CDW</A>

looch · Feb 1, 2002

I agree. The executives at our company have 960's on their desks and I rarely get help calls. Nice, fast, quiet printers.

I like black and white myself, I'd probably buy a small laser printer. Prices have come way down. I could be wrong, and it won't take long to find out, but I believe laser's are cheaper per copy than ink.

MikePA · Feb 1, 2002

Ditto on the HP InkJet recommendation. Great printer, great quality, duplex printing, great photo printing. I have the 990c. The last non-HP printer I owned was a Panasonic 9 pin dot matrix printer /w3tcompact/icons/laugh.gif so you knows it's been a while!

MossRoad · Feb 1, 2002

A friend of mine works on printers for a living. He says average cost per print on inkjet is about 20 cents and average cost per print on laser is around 2 cents. That's for BW. Color laser is outrageous.

I had a Lexmark ink jet printer that I bought on sale for $29.00. Worked great until it ran out of ink. 2 new ink cartridges were $70.00. They had a newer model Lexmark, with ink cartridges, for $69.95. I hated to do it, but I threw the old one in the basement and bought the new printer. That's one of the things that are wrong with this country. It is more cost effective to throw something away that still works fine. Maybe I'll find some ink cartridges on sale sometime and put the old one on my kid's PC.

TerryinMD · Feb 2, 2002

I would suggest a HP Inkjet or Officejet printer.

A laser printer is great in an office environment but for home use, I'm not very sure. Laser toner cartridges are very expensive to replace.

My first printer was an HP deskjet. Black and white and economical to use.

We then moved up to HP Officejets. It is a multi-functional printer that provides color printing, faxing, and scanning capabilities. A little more expensive than a Deskjet, but a lot more in capabilites.

The determining factor for the OfficeJet for us was that my wife needed the extra capabilities to perform her mechandising job. Being able to make copies of any document (except a book) is great.

Terry

DVerbarg · Feb 2, 2002

I like both inkjet printers and lasers. Each has their own sweet-spot. Currently have a HP laser (HP4 w/PS) Epson Inkjet (Stylus Scan 2000), and an HP OfficeJet. Generally speaking the inkjets cost more to run then the laser. The toner cartridges for the laser cost more but last much longer. Of course this laser is only B&W.

On the other hand the Inkjets are able to print color, but hate buying those tri-color ink cartidges when only one color is gone/w3tcompact/icons/frown.gif. If I were looking to buy an inkjet printer today I would be looking at the Epson Stylus C80. Ink cartidges cost around $15 and are separate for each color (CMYK). The separate color cartridges amy initially seem to cost more (4 x $15=$60) but in the long haul will save an estimated 40+% in ink cartidge costs over the typical tri-color cartridge since we are no longer throwing out a cartridge that still has ink for two colors but is out of the third one.

Just my $.02

glennmac · Feb 2, 2002

For reviews and opinions, check cnet.com and epinions.com...........For prices, check pricegrabber.com, bizrate.com, and dealtime.com .......... I think HP and Epson and Canon have the best reputations in injet..........For laser, HP, Brother, Lexmark, Samsung (very inexpensive), GCC all are good....Lasers are way faster, so if you are creating lots of very long documents, you will be unhappy with a cheap inkjet.......Injets have the obvious benefit of color.......They used to say that lasers would create sharper and crisper text than injets. But my new HP inkjet (1200 x 1200 dpi) is sharper than my old 300 x 300 laser for text. Maybe new lasers are even sharper than new inkjets, but we would be at text sharpness levels that are irrelevant to me........Brother injets also have separate color cartidges......A good compromise for people who need text and photo reproduction is getting an inexpensive laser like the Samsung ($199) and also a quality inkjet photo printer from Epson, Cannon or HP.......Some of the photo printers now have media slots where you can insert media card from the camera directly. No downloading to a computer first is necessary. No involvement of a computer is necessry for the basic manipulation tasks they build into these media ready printers. Kodak also makes these media ready printers.

DVerbarg · Feb 2, 2002

Re:<font color=blue>Lasers are way faster, so if you are creating lots of very long documents, you will be unhappy with a cheap inkjet</font color=blue>

Generally I would agree with this statement (I'm laser biased)and I have no personal experience with this particular printer but the rated top speeds for some of the ink-jets are getting pretty quick. The Epson C80 is rated for up to 20ppm B&W. Of course that is "up to".