Home printer recommendations please!

Especially if you have only infrequent use. The modern ones use ever finer dots to get closer to photo real which means more deep cleaning.

There are LED as well as laser printers now. If you have the space then getting one of the cheaper but big and ugly refurb office grade printers from the likes of Morgan is one way to solve the problem. Might be overkill if your printing needs are such low volume though.

You can get duplex monochrome laser printers now for about £80. And at such low volume you won't really need to worry about consumables cost.

That's less than my daily paper consumption!

How far are you from a library ?.

They will have a photocopier that can print from a usb stick, my local ones do, or use the library user computers to print your documents on the laser printer that they should have on site.

Frankly I seem to use the printer itself less and less. I dumped my inkjet A1 plotter too. No one wanted it, it was massive and if I do need an A0/A1 sized print the art shop has one and its next door to waitrose.

A basic Brother or Samsung is 70-80 pounds and should have cheap consumables. They're more compact than the colour lasers too.

Theo

Look on eBay for a refurb HP 1320

If you do make sure you use an 'inkjet' regularly - say at least once a fortnight - clogging shouldn't be a problem. But will be if your average is done in only one month of the year. ;-)

I have a reasonablr modern inkjet which is probably not used ( as a copier) more frequently than every three months. In the 3 years I've had it, I haven't had a head clog - but then I use OEM inks.

Assuming that the firmware in the printer isn't crippled to identify non-genuine ink and refuse to play.

I have varying degrees of success myself, it's a bit of a lottery.

But inkjet issues aside, Brother are at last doing a machine with refillable tanks. It's not particularly cheap but you'll never get the 'replace cartridge', 'cartridge not found', 'reinsert cartridge' bollocks that often comes before a lot of faffing, stained fingers and a trip to the tip.

I'm using an Epson ET-2650 (Tank). About 50% through the black tank and no noticeable problems so far. Not cheap! and does at least 20 pages/week.

Are they even allowed to do this by law?

I've got an Epson XP-610 (probably much more modern than the 245). It complains when you insert a non-Epson cartridge, and asks if you're really sure you want to use it - but then it simply carries on as normal.

Are the LED ones notably better n terms of print quality or power consumption?

Yebbut this means I'll have to get and set up a Waitrose and frankly I don't have the time.

I might start printing the odd photo, that'd do it. I've been thinking of that for a while anyway but I had my heart set on one of the Canon Pixma dye-sub for 6x4 prints. Hmmm...

Don't suppose you've got any comparative experience with Canon inkjets have you?

This is a great idea, cheers.

Just the same as my XP 415. Nags, but works.

Not really - quality is OK just marginally cheaper. Their price advantage has largely vanished now that laser diodes are mass produced.