OT Printer

[Mr Pounder Esquire]

I do very very very little printing. 500 sheets of paper has lasted me the best part of 10 years. Most of that paper has been used for shopping lists, notes etc. My very old gifted Epson Stylus Photo R300 is now printing very poor black text, even with a new cart. Colour is fine. But I have Never needed to print in colour. I've done everything that can be done with the software. I'm planning to take it apart - gulp - and clean the printhead. Google is my friend. Then I saw this:

I will not be printing 700 pages even from beyond the grave. Should I mess around or just give Tesco 30 quid?

[Richard]

Buy the laser.

[Mr Pounder Esquire]

Yes.

[GB]

I bought a very cheap Ricoh laser printer a while back. An SP100e. I have found it very troublesome, with lots of misfeeds. It was also, for some reason, very difficult to install the drivers. Fortunately, it's running out of toner, after only about 300 pages, so I can throw it away soon!

The one you spotted on Tesco is £3 cheaper on Amazon, btw.

[ss]

I would agree laser, but possibly a better secondhand on ebay maybe £40

eg

[R D S]

I've no experience with Ricoh but as others have questioned it I thought it worth adding that i've had a few small cheap mono Brothers (HL2xxx) and they've been OK.

[newshound]

Certainly would not waste time on the inkjet.

I find it hard to imagine how anyone would do as little printing as you do. Tesco option sounds pretty low risk given SOGA. I've had a few second-hand HP laserjets off eBay, they have generally been fine.

These days, duplex printers are cheap and reliable, personally I would not touch a single sided one for general use.

[pamela]

You will only get about half that 700 page rating.

After that, it's about ?24 for a copycat cartridge.

[Bert Coules]

I have a Brother b&w laser printer which cost around £30 last year and is perfectly fine for general use. It's a sobering thought that when I bought my first laser printer it cost me well over a thousand pounds. OK, it was more substantial and better built than the Brother but even so...

Bert

[The Natural Philosopher]

I got a small HP color laser

Perfect and cheap

[Adrian Caspersz]

A friend is on the point of buying a brother colour laser printer for £99.

I've had a look around and cannot fault this model. By reports it's well built, cheap to run, only that it's single sided, but ...

[tabbypurr]

Lasers are massively more reliable. Inkjets hate occasional use.

NT

[The Natural Philosopher]

Just spend the money

[newshound]

I have a Brother A3 all in one; prints and scans duplex, it's the dog's whatsits. About £160 from Amazon iirc.

[newshound]

Would have said this once, but they have got much better. That said laser is no brainer for OP.

[Dave Liquorice]

If the OP is happy with "win printer". It'll *only* work with Windows, it's just a print engine. All the processing to convert a document to the data stream require by the engine is done by the windows host PC.

[Davey]

And again. Mine sits there, doing nothing, for as long as I want to leave it, then when I need it, it just works. My old deskjet is now a doorstop.

[Nick]

I got a HP duplex scanner/laser print. It works but the scan sheet feed has a tendency to grab multiple sheets and scan a bit crooked.

[Bob Eager]

I have an HP Laserjet 4M+ that I was given in 1997. It's done about

100,000 pages for me. I have another that cost me £3.50, and that's done about 30,000 pages.

I moved away from a Lexmark Optra+ (rebadged) inkjet for colour as I only used it occasionally and it was costing a fortune in dried up cartridges. I have a cheap Samsung colour laser instead.

[Bob Martin]

I recently bought a Brother HL-1212W (b&w) from Argos for £50. Excellent print quality and toner cartridge does 1000 pages and costs £15 on eBay. It's WiFi so I can print from my Android phone.