To want a printer that just fucking works?!

[BertieBotts]

I am sick to death of it. Printers are such bastards.

Does anyone have such a magical appliance that doesn't randomly uninstall itself, pretend it's offline, refuse to recognise paper, says ink is completely empty when it's half full, jump into life and print something that seems to belong to a neighbour, implement a completely pointless 5 minute wait between printouts, just stop halfway through a perfectly fine printout and have a tantrum, or any other shenanigans?

They all work fine for a month and then the printer gremlins move in. I don't want to spend loads on one because we don't use it that often. I don't need any fancy features (a scanner is nice) I just want it to WORK!

Any recommendations?

@Coogee

Can you please tell me which one you bought?

& anyone else with an ink jet that works!! I'm beyond caring what the Tiber costs as long as it works!!!

I lost my shit at our old, slow one during online learning with the kids. Seriously lost it.

Bought an HP officeJet Pro in a fit of rage and never looked back. Best purchase ever.

No jamming. Fast. Reliable.

I can an now print with wild abandon. Good times.

Damn phone is at it now!!

Tiber- the toner

Oh, and £1.99 per month and they send ink cartridges automatically when it's running low.

Really suspiciously ours has behaved immaculately and the cartridges last for ages and ages since we succumbed and signed up for HP Instant Ink subscription. Before that I was constantly buying ink, usually the wrong size or type, and it ran out after a few pages. Now two A level students in the house and two wfh parents using it and the cartridges suddenly last for months.

I actually smashed an Epson inkjet to pieces with a cricket bat in my parents back garden. I’d (foolishly) decided to print my PhD thesis myself and had to keep replacing the ink cartridges mid-job, even though they were full, as it kept malfunctioning. After about 2 hours and a small coppice of wasted paper, I lost it and destroyed it.

I have an HP officejet pro now and it’s the only printer I’ve ever owned that actually prints without issue.

@FWBNC

It’s a Xerox B210

I've thoroughly enjoyed reading this thread, had a very good laugh and made a note of several laser printers.

I hope I'm not jinxing it, but I currently have a Canon printer. In the first lockdown, and needing to do much more printing at home, I looked into buying DIY refill inks. They work and save a fortune in cartridges.
You peel back the top label (and might need to make a hole with the little manual drill provided), then inject the ink into the cartridge with a needle and syringe.
For less than the cost of two cartridges, I've refilled them at least three times and still have loads of ink left.

@LilithTheKitty

I've got a laser printer now. Only black and white, as the colour one was out of my budget, but it's brilliant. Prints straight away, no need to clean print heads and the toner lasts forever.

Same here wish I'd done it years ago

@HalzTangz

We use ours maybe 4 times a year. Works great first time. After that always get empty ink messages. They aren't empty but have probably dried out to a degree. We put our cartridge in a bowl of hot water for an hour, dry off and put back in the printer, it then works fine again until the next time when we repeat the process

That’s so primitive. A bit like grinding pigments or pounding the papyrus before you can commit your written word

We need to buy a printer for home and these threads - whilst I LOVE a good MN printer thread- make me tremble with fear....

YY to the OP re work MFDs though. Ours is an utter bastard. It has a delightful quirk in that it will suddenly start printing everything landscape. One of my team figured out that it does this when one of the various paper drawers is empty. Fill it, even if it's not the drawer you require paper from, and it will revert back to portrait.
God alone knows how she worked that one out. She's leaving next week and I'm thinking about keeping her on retainer just for her printer-charming skills...

I was quite good with the work MFD thing, people used to come and ask me how to make it do something.

Anyway DH has finally done... Something. It prints! Whole pages! Immediately! The fabled application has been sent, hurrah.

Thank you all for cheering me up during this very stressful time :o

Our is also very fussy.
Last time I tried to use it it my computer kept saying "Printer is in Error Mode" and wouldn't do anything.
However the printer itself had no errors. It was just being lazy. Thankfully what I was trying to print wasn't that important. I think it's gone into a sulk because now school lockdown has been over it's not been used.
We used to have a bubble jet. Apart from the Cat Litter incident it always worked well. Would still work well if some nutjockey from Cannon hadn't made it so the drivers don't work any more. Now we have Epson El Fusspot.

Canon. Ours is great but the ink is expensive.