Yawn, yet another printer question

If you want permanency get a laser. been very happy with the HP 1525n

It does cost a bomb to re-toner, but that doesn't happen often. And the colors appear to be fast..

I haven't found cheap BCI-6 photo inks I was happy with either which makes them a bit expensive to fuel. Same with any inkjet. At least now there are some clone inks for it that work for anything but high end photo. Early ones were at best erratic and inclined to fail or be DOA.

OTOH the Dell 1320c colour laser is a doddle with cheap clone toner cartridges almost as good as the OEM but at 1/4 the price.

Two questions:

How much physical bulk can you live with?

What volume of printing a month does it need to handle?

Advice is the same find something that reviews at a print quality you can live with (which is almost any of them part from obvious lemons these days) and where the clone inks review at 4* or better on Amazon. The hardware is a cheap loss leader they get you on the consumables.

There are often good deals on slightly past it but otherwise high quality bulky printers at Morgan if you don't need it to work with Win8 and can live with the large office style footprint.

Cannon BCI-6 ink cartridges are one of the easiest of all to refill use some quality ink from

Only manual double sided and most of my printing is b&w so I have a laserjet 2300 dn as well.

In the good old days, I used to refill my deskjet cartridges with Quink (fountain pen ink).

In message , Broadback writes

Our Canon iP5000 printer finally died a couple of days ago having seen my son through reams of homework.

After a lot of time spent researching I've bought an Epson Workforce WP-4535 as replacement. Yes it's a big bugger and not cheap at £180, (from the local PCWorld - I did try to buy it at independents but none had stock), but all the reviews mention the low running costs.

And yes, it ADF scans & copies & can fax and it's ethernet & Wi-Fi connectable none of which I particularly need but they don't distract from its plus points. I may eventually discard the Epson 1650 scanner we have though for now I need it as I still have some old slides to digitize.

OK. Thanks very much for that. I have always been disappointed with clone cartridges and pretty much gave up trying them. These days I only ever use the i9100 for A5 posters anyway since I got the colour laser.

I know there are third party bulk ink systems for it but my print volume doesn't merit using them.

Broadback wrote on Feb 6, 2013:

A year ago replaced my 10 year old Canon with a Hewlett Packard Photosmart

1. it's wireless (or USB) so I can print from my laptop or my main desktop,
2. it scans and copies as well as printing very well,
3. it can print duplex (i.e. on both sides) automatically which I find useful for long documents,
4. It only cost £80 from Curry's