Can't repair home office printer, so need a new one

[HeyBob]

I prefer color laser so my vote goes to Brother HL-3170CDW

[Ed Pawlowski]

They are 3X as fast as they were years ago. Ink does not dry up as fast either from my experience.

I agreed with this 10 years ago when they cost $500. At $79, who crs if one function craps out?

The OP wanted color though.

Great if you have the flat surfaces to put them all.

[Pavel314]

I just bought a Hewlett-Packard Envy 7645 that prints, scans, copies, and faxes. Works well for me, although I haven't bothered to hook up the fax option. This was to replace a similar HP that I had for five or six years that started to malfunction.

Paul

[TimR]

Now that the kids are grown and not doing school work, we don't print enough color for an ink jet. They dry out or something over time.

I have a Canon black and white laser printer that also scans, and does both well. The OEM toner cartridge is unaffordable but the nonOEM replacements are reasonable and work perfectly.

The only issue is that drivers for old printers are eventually not available especially for new PCs. This one will be obsolete long before it stops working.

When I really need color I email the file to Walmart or Staples and pick up the printouts next time I'm by there.

[Art Todesco]

I have a cheap Samsung laser (ML-1865W ~$60) and it is a workhorse. The only way I'll replace it is if it dies. I like it because you get a new drum with each toner cartridge. When the "replace toner cartridge light" comes on, you can continue printing for a long, long time and still get good quality prints. The only features lacking are auto duplex and ethernet connection. I don't use the wireless feature as it didn't seem to work well ... whenever there was a power failure, I would have to re-setup each of the PCs to work again, but frankly, it might be that I was doing something wrong. The newer Samsungs have ethernet and auto duplexing and even have a smaller profile because of the paper drawer, but of course, cost a bit more ... but not too much more!

[Frank]

Bought my wife an HP Envy 4500 series printer that prints and scans but lacks fax function. It was very easy to install but lost wifi connectivity a few times and puzzling to get working again because, as I mentioned elsewhere in thread, a paucity of instructions comes with the printer. Nice thing about the wifi is that we can print from her laptop, my desktop or her iPad with it.

[Don Wiss]

This isn't quite correct. What the printers now do is every 24 hours they clean off the tips of the ink cartridges. So if you never use the printer, it will still run out of ink in a couple years.

Don.

(e-mail link at home page bottom).

[Don Wiss]

Before I retired, when I really needed color I e-mailed to the office. I know exactly how old my color laser printer is. I bought it when I retired and could no longer print at the office.

Don.

(e-mail link at home page bottom).

[Don Wiss]

How often do you fax?

There is one downside to scanning with an all-in-one. They do not scan to the edges. The printer cannot print to the edge, and they only scan where on the page they can print.

Don.

(e-mail link at home page bottom).

[DerbyDad03]

sh*t). It has never jammed in 6 years and we use it a fair amount for chur ch and technical stuff. 3-color does excellent photo printing and they're n ot dinky cartridges. *****5-stars

I, too have an Epson Workforce. I believe it's in the 3600 series...I'm not home to check. I paid $149 a few years ago. Love it!

2 sided printing and copying, document feeder, rear feed for one-off paper sizes, 2 drawers for different papers. Flatbed and document feeder scanning/copying. Separate ink cartridges for each color, high capacity cartridges available. It warns you when a color is getting low and gives you the option to print anyway, adjusting the colors slightly instead of refusing to print.

It's wireless so we can print from our PC, iPads or Android phones.

I use an free app called NAPS2 (Not Another PDF Scanner 2) for scanning docs to PDF. My two daughters list my house as their home address while they are away at school, so I often have to "forward" mail to them. Scan, save, email, done.

[DerbyDad03]

*Most* people throw their printers away when the ink runs out? Really?

Do you have any stats that back that up?

Have *you* actually done that?

[DerbyDad03]

In my case, never, but the FAX feature is built in to most (all?) all-in-ones so the question is kind of irrelevant.

How often is either of them an issue? (That's a real question) In my use, I can't recall a situation where either of those have been a problem.

[Mayayana]

"Muggles" wrote

| I'm going cross-eyed looking at ads for home office printers.

I'm no expert on this, but have owned several printers. For what it's worth: At one point I switched to Epson because HP ink was so wildly overpriced. The Epson was much worse. Ink was cheaper but cartridges were tiny. Ink dried out. The Epson absolutely refused to do anything once it decided that ink was low. It seemed to calculate some combination of time and usage to arrive at that decision. My older HP would always still print when ink got low, and I knew it was low because the printing would be faint, while the Epson just decided it was low, despite still printing fine.

So I'll never buy an Epson again. Though I should point out that my ladyfriend is a photographer and uses a high-end Epson for printing photos. It's considered to be among the best for that task and does a beautiful job. But it does require 8 colors of those tiny cartidges to work.

My current printer is an HP Envy 5660. $80. All the stores claimed it "normally sold" for far more than that, but they were all selling it for $80. :) I only use a printer on an irregular basis, mostly to print contracts, business stationery, return address stickers, etc. So far the HP has been fine, aside from irritating nags about how I should claim online coupons. (The nags seem to be built into the printer software, so I'm not sure that I can stop them.)

I'm afraid all printer companies are getting more sleazy while also becoming more clever about cotrolling the device through software. Epson seems to not be breaking any laws by actually preventing me from using the device I bought as I see fit. So what can one do? On the bright side, the prices are relatively low. It's almost cheaper to just buy a new printer every time the ink runs out.

As for the scanner, I've always been happy with those, since the first scanners came out. My new HP is somewhat of a scanner for dummies, in therms of the software. The newer WIA interface that replaces TWAIN tends to come with dumbed down utilities. But the options it provides are serviceable.

[Don Wiss]

As I wrote earlier, Brother has a two-in-one B&W laser that I use as my main printer. Nice flatbed scanner/copier. No feeder. I haven't sent or received a fax in years.

Scanning to the edge is very important to me. I often have things to scan for my websites that go right to the edge. For most scanning I have a Canon Canoscan. It scans to the edge. When I need the 11x17 scanner I have 1/8" x

1/4" plastic I-beams that I put along an edge, so the piece to be scanned all gets scanned.

For things even bigger than my 11x17 scanner, I use Microsoft's free Image Composite Editor to automatically stitch together.

Don.

(e-mail link at home page bottom).

[Don Wiss]

You shouldn't toss printers into the garbage. Here in NYC it is illegal to do so. You must take all electronic waste to a place for recycling. A good move. I simply take to Staples, which is less than a mile from me.

Don.

(e-mail link at home page bottom).

[HerHusband]

Ed,

I'm sure there have been many improvements to the newer inkjet printers. However, the inkjet printers I have seen are still limited to 5-10 pages per minute. Laser printers usually print 20-30 pages per minute.

And the ink still bleeds when wet, and/or requires you to use special paper.

You get what you pay for. A $79 combo printer/scanner is not going to match the quality of a $200-300 dedicated flatbed scanner. If all you do is scan text documents, it may not matter. But if you scan photos, negatives, etc. the quality will be subpar at best.

Thus my recommendation for the Xerox 6022 color laser.

Agreed, that's the one advantage the combo printer/scanners have.

I have two laser printers, but a single color laser could serve most needs.

If you don't need high resolution scanning, a combo unit might be OK.

Anthony Watson

[HerHusband]

Tim,

My color laser is handy when I need to make a quick color printout, such as a map for hiking, or a last minute birthday card I forgot to get at the store.

However, when I need prints of our photos I order them online from my local Office Depot or Fred Meyer store, and pick them up when I run to town. The quality is much better than anything I can print at home, and I don't do it enough to justify a dedicated photo printer.

Anthony Watson

[HerHusband]

Do you scan photos? I would think the edges would get cut off unless you position the photo in the middle of the scanner. Then alignment is more difficult, requiring software rotation after scanning (quality loss).

Anthony Watson

[bob_villa]

Never had any issues like this with Epson...they would bitch if you used a "compatible" cartridge, but still print. My 1st Epson I was refilling (free ware to reset the chip), but Epson ink is high quality and water resistant. I used to repair Epson dot-matrix POS printers...brilliantly engineered.

[notbob]

It's why I have a 2nd Brother printer (FAX2840). The CA Franchise Tax Board (state level IRS) will accept a document no other way. Before I bought a FAX machine, I hadda pay a local printer send 'em a FAX. This about 4 yrs ago.

nb