Need to buy a home printer - what features are important?

[NigellaWannabe1]

I need a durable printer for occasion al printing but which can also handle card printing (for greeting cards). I know most printers out there should do both but I just can’t work out why some cost £40 and others £250. I don’t imagine the cheapest will be durable and perhaps they lack features I’m not thinking of.

Any advice?

Following . Just going to work . Need this thread

We had an old Epson XP-800 that acceped any cartridge for years but eventually it started objecting I guess after firmware upgrades.

The 8500 holds a fair amount of paper in a flat tray filled from the front and has an extending tray that the printouts land on so they don't fall off the table. Because it has a flat top we keep the rest of the ream of paper on there.

Also heard horror stories of HP . If you cancel the subscription they block the printer from working, even though the ink is full!. Those stories came out US so not sure if that is legal in the UK

I work for one of HP's biggest customers.

They are incredibly arrogant and dictatorial about how we market their products. You would think they were the customers not us. Yet we spend millions of £ with them.

If you need it for cards - then check this feature first.
I have a printer I'm happy with - Xerox laser (it's wifi connected, does double sided prints, scans, works reliably, doesn't require monthly ink changes because it's not colour) but it won't print on thick paper! Not even card - just, say 180gsm

I'd suggest decide on you strict requirements, then optional features, and then ask chatgpt.com for advice. And then ask humans for feedback on specifics, just because card printing is not standard

Epson Eco Tank. Much cheaper to run.

Double sided! Mine was marketed with ‘double sided’ as a feature but in reality you still have to manually take the pages out and reinsert them to be printed on the reverse. So I guess you need ‘automatic’ double sided or something along those lines!

I think the more expensive ones are normal speed and not too noisy whereas the £40 are slower than you could ever imagine and very loud.

ours does print wirelessly so I can send something to print from my phone which is now how I use it most of the time. That’s a feature I didn’t know I needed until I had it.

Just bought Epson XP 8700 3 in 1 printer. Cheap compatible cartridges. Prints great on card. Very happy with it. Tray at the bottom for the paper which I prefer.

Epson XP 8700. I hate it too when the paper curls. This printer has a tray. Separate inks too which are hard to find.

Separate colour and black cartridges, so you don't have to replace the whole thing every time one part runs out

They are all shit, TBH. I don’t know why.

This. My current one is an HP Envy. It's probably the least shit one I've had, but I still fairly often want to throw it out of the window.

Just asked DH we have had printer 2 years, the black tank is half full but we still have a second bottle we got free when we bought it. The other colours are near full.

If scanning as well, it's so handy (essential even) to have a document feeder, so it grabs pages without you having to scan them one by one.

My HP takes refilled ink cartridges. Much cheaper that way.

I went through this last year after my budget one jammed on every third card. I ended up finding a used Konica Minolta that worked like a dream, especially after digging into the accurioprint service manual to tweak the settings for thicker stock. That manual saved me a headache!