Anyone have any recommendations ?
Colour - not so fussed about.
Amazon insists on punting
(Once again, if that's the limit of "AI" then we're safe for a few centuries).
I've ****ing had it with inky printers. They don't like once a month usage.
I have one of these. It seems quite solid, although I use it mostly for copying and scanning. It isn't my main printer.
doesn't matter if you can get fake cheap ink ...
I've had an HP laserjet m252n for a few years.
Had one cheap aftermarket cyan cartridge go stripy on me, that's all.
Laserjet engines are very standard and they are nice low power these days.
Ive never found an HP was a mistake.
As a printer, our HP Colour LaserJet Pro M283fdw
As a scanner, it is not too good compared with my ancient Epson Perfection
1200: dark tones tend to suffer from banding when scanning photos. For scanning line drawings etc to go in documents, that's not a problem. It also has a very shallow depth of field, so if you try to scan a large photo which is too big to fit on the glass, and which therefore has to stand proud of the glass by a few millimetres, the photo is out of focus.I'm still on the original toner cartridges that came with the printer (and which may not be full-capacity ones), and that's after two years' usage. Toner level is still about 3/4 full on the colours and about 90% full on black.
Ironically, even Canon can't do that at the moment:
HP bought Samsung's printer division a while back, so some of their machines are badged Samsung printers. Also decent printers - especially the colour ones, but beware that they are different print engines and use a different range of consumables.
Inkjets are much better than they used to be. I would, once, have said colour laser every time, but my Lexmark colour laser is going sick and I'm doing colour printing on my A3 Brother Inkjet. I shall go over to a refillable tank printer in due course. For mono, lasers are fine IMHO.
I have no issue with inkjet quality.
However, I simply only print once a month (if that) and have had enough of having to run a nozzle clean and all that ballache (with some rather random requests to recalibrate the thing) just to print one sheet of A4.
And my current - HP - all-in-one hasn't printed properly for over a year. Despite managing to gobble up £30 worth of cartridges.
If anyone knows of an inkjet (maybe bubblejet is what I should look at ?) that can sit unused for possibly months on end, then I'm happy to look at it.
Printing is getting to be one of those things that is done infrequently, but when it's needed, it's needed pretty much instantly.
My Brother A3 All In One (MFC-J6920DW) will certainly go a month without printing. It doesn't waste much time or ink doing cleans and calibrations. It has a reasonably reliable document feeder for scanning and does duplex scanning and printing. Using third party inks, it declares cartridges empty when they are still half full, but that is still cheaper than buying their own cartridges. It has a big black cartridge so is OK for mono.
Unless you do a lot of multi-sheet scanning (so need a sheet feeder) ... get a re-furb HP1320 printer from eBay and install one of the scanning apps on your phone
We had an Epson all-in-one inkjet and that suffered from the ink drying up, so I set a reminder on my phone to print a Windows test page every week. The Windows 7 page uses all three colours as well as the black (whereas the Windows 10 one only uses blue and black) so this made sure all the inks were used at least once a week. In the end, even that wasn't sufficient, and trying to clean the print head (repeatedly, in the hope that more and more nozzles will unblock) wastes loads of ink.
That's when we decided to change to a laser printer.
We have a couple of similar but larger versions here these lasers printers use ink cartridges rather than toner or it could be liquid toner, you can tell either by shaking the cartridges or the paper seems a bit damp/wet like you'd expect from ink but not from toner.
shit happens
Brother. They are, or were, the last holdouts against chips in cartridges. Instead they use a plastic 'toner reset wheel', which can be easily duplicated. Result is that aftermarket carts are cheap as chips (£35 for a set of 4 colours for mine). Everything else works... like a printer. No comment on scanning or faxing, since mine doesn't do those (HL-L8260CDW).
I hear that some of the more recent ones have started to gain chips, so it's worth digging around.
Also have an Epson inkjet (XP-970) and it's always going off in a huff about non original cartridges - I suspect it has some kind of random timer that goes off and makes it sulk, to make the experience as bad as possible. Turns out there's a big firmware downgrading/hacking community to resolve this, but mine isn't covered.
Theo
It depends on what you intend to print on and for. I have a colour laser
- an ageing Dell 1230c which when it came out was as close to photoreal out of a laser printer as you could get. It has been surpassed now.
The main advantage of it is that the toner never dries up and cheap clone toner cartridges were available not that long after launch. Watch the consumables - you don't want to be tied into usurious OEM toner!
Laser printed posters have the big advantage for me that they do not need laminating to survive on village noticeboards. They are enclosed but condensation inside invariably ruins any inkjet printed stuff.
Personally I would never buy and all-in-1 laser printed unless space was extremely tight. Separates will work so much better (unless you need to use it as a photocopier). I do have a small Canon all in one inkjet from when I needed to work away from home a lot.
HP All-in-One are about as good as you can get, though be careful some have VERY high ink cart costs.
I've used a laser printer for years for exactly the same reasons, but I also have an inkjet that I bought for a tenner, a few days before the first lockdown (I was already preparing and agreeing WFH with work, as my wife is vulnerable). I've not used it for a couple of months and it has clogged comprehensively.
Cleaning it (outside the printer) has partially corrected it, but it's not right and now it is showing a hardware error. I have to either find an affordable A3 laser printer or buy a new head and make better efforts to stop it clogging - maybe a cron job on my home server to print once a week. The printers are both left turned on anyway, as they are network printers and the kids use them for homework from time to time.
I've had an OKI MC342N for quite a few years, it "just works". It has a duplex document feed for the scanner which is *very* useful, and keeps the cat fascinated.
HomeOwnersHub website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.