Thread: Home printer question

Originally Posted by BradC

I'd go as far as to say if you don't need "photo quality" colour then get a laser.

Colour lasers can be had for cheap, and while the toner generally isn't, it never dries out. I have a number of lasers and the thing I love is I can not use one for a year, fire it up, print 2 pages and turn it off again.

Zero maintenance or hassle. My wife has a $99 HP inkjet I bought from Officeworks last year, and in 12 months I've spent more on ink than I've spent on toner over the last 10 years for the A4 lasers (the A3 laser toner is $2k/set but that's another story).

Every one I know with a inkjet hands over $$$$$$$$$$$. Wife brought one. Its dusty down stairs in Micky mouse condition. I would not be so nasty to give it away

I have a fuji xerox monochrome (black and White) 3 in 1 printer. After the original toner cartridge ran out, I have just used $16 ebay cheapies with no problems what so ever. - they do up to 12,000 pages It does continuous scan, multiside printing and is wireless which is just graet. I had Canon inkjets and an Epson for years, but got sick of the jets blocking up through lack of use. And it was cheap at $93, but it is now discontinued as Fuji and Xerox have parted ways.

Maybe what not to buy.

Canon makes 'all-in-one' printers that refuse to scan when out of ink, lawsuit claims

Gave away inkjet printers years ago. Bought a Brother colour laser in 2017 and never looked back. It come with 'starter' toner cartridges. So far I'm still on all the original 'starter' colour cartridges. Which maybe just means I don't print much colour but the point is it prints colour when I need it, first time, every time, even with long rests between colour prints.

Originally Posted by pop058

..... Main use is for Nan's scrapbooking stuff with a couple of customer invoices a week from me.

.....

If Nan's scrapbooking stuff equates to photo quality, then inkjet.
If near photo quality is good enough, like BradC said an colour laserjet is the better option.

I've had Canons' before and many either cost too much to refill(using aftermarket refills) or just break. Never again(even tho they do print out great photo quality prints).

Many years ago now(maybe 2007-ish) I needed to print out a lot of legal paperwork when going through separation and stuff .. and that's when my final Canon died and went to the recyclers!

Got a networked HP colour laserjet(from Officeworks). Didn't think I needed a networked printer, but time showed just how handy they end up being for 'ya.

Mine is a HP CP1518ni(the 'n' usually denotes networking capability).
You probably think to yourself, you dunno nothing about networking and you will never need it .. but once you have it and use it, you'll understand why it's so handy and zero knowledge of networking is all you need to get it up and running.

W10 helps with all of this.
Once the kids grew up a bit more and wanted to print this and that for school, having the printer shared via my PC became more of an annoyance than the printer not working .. I preferred that it stopped working so I didn't have to fire up my PC and let the kids print some of their stuff back then.
But once the networked HP was got, I showed the kids how to find the printer, they saved it in their own computers as a printer device(obviously at dads .. not mums!) and they left me alone. They printed out stuff like crazy too!

The disadvantage of the laserjet is that the inks(toners) are expensive when you need to get a full set(usually 4 of) but you get so many thousands more printed pages than any inkjet ever will .. you just forget that after 10 years(and 8000 pages) you haven't replaced the toner cartridges, and forgot how to do it.

On my HP I haven't replaced the colour toners for a good 10 years now. The toner cartridges that initially come in the printer don't last as long .. maybe 1000-1500 pages or so. The manufacturer cartridges aren't worth the money. All 4 toners will cost 4 times what a printer cost .. so cheaper to get a new printer again.
I get refills online, and the full set + one extra black cost $120 or so delivered. Quality is on par(but I don't print photos). The colour prints are good enough for say a colour flyer or magazine page or something like that .. just not photo quality.

The Brother colour laserjets look like decent value for money.