Anybody know what's a good printer to buy? Has to be:

Cheap(ish)
Not extortionate come cartridge time
Mainly for word docs etc but the ability to print the odd photo would be nice

If I just go buy one I know I'll guff it up as I know sod all about them really

Any advice would be appreciated! Ta

Edit: my laptop is wireless so I guess one that was wireless would be cool

[Edited on 16/2/09 by Stott]

I've found Epson and Lexmark to be pretty good. My current Lexmark cost about £90 and has a built in scanner and will also photocopy which can be handy.

Cartridges are about £35 a pair (colour and photo) and give good service. I've tried remanufactured cartridges at half the price, but TBH they're rubbish and end up failing very quickly.

Im a canon fan.
- We have a small fleat of (three) iP4000's and they seam to work well.
- Will work amicably on repro carts, and if all goes to pot they have a user changable printhead* although we have taken to running them on canons own ink becuase the colours are a little better for photo printing.

*never had to do this, but did wangle a spare out of canon foc

Also, i bought the last one via ebay from canon as a factory reconditioned unit. So that might be worth looking at.


Daniel

I've had plenty of printers over the years. They ALL had problems with the ink drying up and needed cleaning every time I used em.

I then bought a cheap laser printer for £40-ish and it just works, only in black and white but it works first time every time, much recommended

With inkjet printers never buy anything other than HP last Only week I installed a cheap 30 quid HPin place of a 130 pounds Cannon Inkjet that a client had bought against my advice 13 months ago. client is delighted with print quality and speed.

Yes HP cartridges cost more but with good reason -- if you use genuine HP high capacity cartridges the print quality will be as good as the day it was new --- our home office networked HP 2575PSC printer has according to its intranet page now printed 52,000 sheets.

Some of the supermarkets have HP Pronter/Scanner/Copiers as low as 30 pounds.

With laser the choice is wider HP, Cannon Samsung and Brother all make good laser printers

Take a look at this Samsing
http://www.morgancomputers.co.uk/shop/detail.asp?ProductID=4964&CategoryID=99&SubCategoryID=199

[Edited on 16/2/09 by britishtrident]

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Originally posted by UncleFista
I've had plenty of printers over the years. They ALL had problems with the ink drying up and needed cleaning every time I used em.

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I recently got an HP Photosmart all-in-one C4480 from Comet for under £50. Great bit of kit and carts are not too expensive.
100% better than my previous Epson.

there are a lot of fairly cheap printers around these days and finding a good deal isnt too hard.

there are several things to consider though

most importantly what do you want to use it for? are you going to rpint a lot of colour?
will you be printng photos? do you need to print to think card?

Other things to consider are if you want it to perform any other functions like Fax/photocopy/scan. Also how it connects? do you want to connect it directly to your PC or would you like to put it on the network? or even wireless?

one of the most important factors is running cost so you need to check cartridge prices (I have found them cheapest in tesco! or online). some printers use 2 cartridges 1 for black and 1 for colour. problem there is that if you use all the red then you must replace the whole acrtridge even though you have plenty of yellow and blue (I know the real names but I am BLOKE and therefore only do primary colours! ). If you intend to do a lot of colour printing then it may be worth investing in a printer with seperate cartridges for each colour.

I actually bought a great wifi multifunction printer/scanner/fax this w/e. Excellent deal from - of all places! - PC World!
Now i would never normally recommend these people but they do have some good deals from time to time.

I bought the Epson which has seperate inks, a good resolution and is wifi so no need for wires currently on sale reduced from £166 ish down to £97
there is an HP similar device reduced from about £160 to £69 but that has a single multi colour cartridge and the paper path is torturous so difficult to print on thicker card/photo paper.

HTH

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Originally posted by britishtrident

quote:

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Originally posted by UncleFista
I've had plenty of printers over the years. They ALL had problems with the ink drying up and needed cleaning every time I used em.

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Just isn't a problem with HP printers -- the nozzles get replaced with every new cartridge.

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All cheap printers use the Gillette sales model - very cheap printer, very expensive consumables.

The printer I've had least trouble with is a Samsung ML1210 laser, but obviously it doesn't do photos (I use http://www.photobox.co.uk for those - which are better quality than any inkjet, even the posh 6 colour ones)

Epson make great Dot matrix printers ---- they are so good I don't anybody else tries to market l dot matrix anymore -- but basically the make awful inkjets despite the fact they were the very first in the inkjet market.

HP printers have no problem with standard photo paper for heavy card most models have seperate slot to feed the card or envelope in.

HP printers just keep printing and printing and printing --- our network 2575 PSC has had a handful of jams in 50,000 sheets ---- that is a pile of new printing paper 25 feet high .

Any printer that hasn't got the nozzles built into the cartridge is eventually going clog up the number of fairly new Cannon & Epson printer have seen binned because of clogged nozzles must be close to 100, In contrast HP printers only die when the feed mechanism wears out.

quote:

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Originally posted by britishtrident
Epson make great Dot matrix printers ---- they are so good I don't anybody else tries to market l dot matrix anymore -- but basically the make awful inkjets despite the fact they were the very first in the inkjet market.

HP printers have no problem with standard photo paper for heavy card most models have seperate slot to feed the card or envelope in.

HP printers just keep printing and printing and printing --- our network 2575 PSC has had a handful of jams in 50,000 sheets ---- that is a pile of new printing paper 25 feet high .

Any printer that hasn't got the nozzles built into the cartridge is eventually going clog up the number of fairly new Cannon & Epson printer have seen binned because of clogged nozzles must be close to 100, In contrast HP printers only die when the feed mechanism wears out.

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