Printer suitability?

That's reassuring considering the use you're putting the printer to.

Agreed. Also if they need stapling and folding then a print shop can do it while you're there doing it by hand with a stapler.

However there is a spot where the volume is too much for a pay-per-page printing at your local library/etc (where you might go to print boarding passes or parcel labels or whatever if you don't have a printer) and too little to be economic for a bulk commercial printer (who wants a print run of several hundred flyers or booklets). There is a niche here for DIY printing especially for a laser with low running costs. The OP would have to enquire but I think their volume could be in that ballpark.

The 'glossier the print the more you pay' rule applies equally at print shops as it does for home printing.

Theo

Give it a go. However, inkjets are often sold on the razor blade model - the printer is dirt cheap but you pay through the nose for the cartridges. So a 'free' printer may just be a route into dependency on expensive cartridges.

However at this point you've nothing to lose, and you could look at it as a temporary stopgap to get a feel for your use case - eg say you'll spend max £50 on consumables and then reassess your needs. If in that time you decide that this printer is too slow and awkward, or too expensive to run, upgrade to something better. If everything is acceptable, then stick with it.

There's a good deal to be said for just starting going with what you've got, and then making a purchasing decision once you understand what you actually need later. Applies equally to other kinds of purchases like power tools.

Theo

When we needed to do a 200 run of a folded A4 flyer, we simply bought a laser printer for less than the cost of getting it printed.

Loss leader. The new inks/toners cost more than the whole printer did when they ran out!

I ditched my A1 inkjet plotter because it was a monstrous bitch to keep running and took up space.

But it did all the plans for the house I was building so paid for itself in spades...

On 16/05/2025 11:13, Mike Halmarack wrote: colour to the printers.

It /might/ help. Isopropyl alcohol didn't help with my Epson inkjet and resulted in a lot of staining mess too!

I have a Canon inkjet. Having not used it for a while (its A3 and I normally use my Samsung A4 laser printer), I cleaned the nozzles multiple times, even removing the head and soaking it in IPA. Nothing worked. A couple of months later, I printed to it to see if it had got worse ... and it worked perfectly. I can only assume that the fresh ink from the cleaning cycles had eventually dissolved the blockages.

Water used to work with my old HP plotter

Canon scanner/printers allow you to override this 'feature' by pressing the stop button for 5 seconds when a low-ink warning appears -