Looking for a new home printer - any recommendations?

[JustSetFireToIt]

Can anyone recommend a good quality printer that I can use at home?

I’ll primarily use it for printing documents, not photographs but I’d still like it to be colour, not black and white.

White and small would be preferable to a hulking black box.

I’ve had an hp multi-function printer for years but I’m tired of it holding my documents hostage if I dont subscribe to the monthly print cartridge scheme (I dont use it that often).

thanks.

Watching

If you don't need to print colour often, just get a monochrome laser printer cheap to buy, cheap to to run (if you buy OEM toner cartridges) and the ink doesn't dry in the nozzles. Mine is a Samsung, it's connected to the wifi and just sits in the corner and prints when required. I've had various ink jets, they've all had the same problems, expensive ink, then they clog up and stop working. When I want colour, I put the document on a usb stick and get the library to print it or if I want photo quality there's a local shop who will do it. Cheap colour laser printers I've no experience of.

Relevant (useful!) funny article: www.theverge.com/23642073/best-printer-2023-brother-laser-wi-fi-its-fine

Brilliant. If I was looking for a massive, black, mono-printer, that would be ideal (love the bit about hostage situations incorporated and ink supply). 😆

I have a 10 year old HP laser jet that I buy compatible cartridges for and it’s brilliant. It is multi function but the scanning function is very useful. It takes me ages to go through cartridges and I just buy them on Amazon. I’ve had epson and brother printers but they don’t keep going the way HP ones do. It is quite big though!

I suspect yours is problem free because it’s old, all the newer ones seem to be paralysed by subscription software.

Our Epson with the big ink tank doesn’t get glitches and works. Fast and reliable. Photos are excellent too. Very happy with it, and it’s not drinking the ink in gallons! More expensive to buy but cheaper to run.

I have the Epson EcoTank ET-2870, bought a year ago, and I have had 0 issues with it. It’s the best printer I have ever bought. In that time I have printed upwards of 3,000 pages and I still have ink left from the set included in the box. When I have to buy more ink I will do it happily. Mine is black and on the tankier side but they do come in white.

No subscription, great customer service, very reliable and so far no issues with it at all. I used to be stuck in the HP scam and I have spent less and printed more despite the higher price tag initially.

I couldn’t recommend them enough, Epson should hire me.

We have a canon ink tank printer, which is mostly house trained though needs a little work on obedience, like any home printer, and doesn't insist on an ink subscription.

The soft ware can be overcome! I got a chip easily enough from China, that told my Samsung laserjet, no you are not too old to function.. and on it goes…

I have an HP multifunction printer and I love it. You can buy the cartridges online as needed without a monthly subscription. I get the genuine HP cartridges on Amazon.

Thanks everyone, I think I’ll go with a Cannon.

@flowersplease Yes Eco Tsnk!! That’s what ours is. Not cheap to buy but the saving on ink and quality is just great. Our photos are superb.

Be careful. Some Canon printers are rubbish, particularly the cheaper ones. The cheap Pixmas used to be good (my last printer was one of these), but I wouldn't touch the current ones with a bargepole - some have poor print quality, others are very expensive to run (some manage to have both poor print quality and high running costs!).

Whatever brand you go for, ink tank printers are cheapest to run if you are going for an inkjet. They cost more up front than inkjets using cartridges, but the running costs are much lower. An ink cartridge printer can cost as much as £250 a year for ink, whereas a good ink tank will cost you less than £2 a year for ink.

Laser printers generally have low running costs, but they are less flexible than inkjets. Admittedly they never suffer from blocked nozzles, but that isn't a problem I've ever encountered. Most, if not all, modern inkjet printers have a nozzle cleaning cycle that will prevent them clogging up. For what it is worth, if you receive paper utility bills, bank statements, insurance documents, etc., they are all printed using high speed inkjets. Of course, these are industrial models, some of which are capable of printing over 100 pages of A4 per second as opposed to 10-15 pages per minute for a decent home printer.

I’ve got a HP Envy 6530 or something like that number wise. I have got an ink subscription, £4.49 a month for 50 pages which rollover if you don’t use them. Ink cartridges are so expensive that I think that £55 a year for both colour and black and white is reasonable.

Oh shit, maybe not the Cannon then!

Why is it so difficult to choose and why do all models provide such an overwhelmingly shit experience?

The same goes for all of the cheaper printers - they're basically just a loss leading gateway to getting you to buy the cartridges. Move up a rung or two and you start to get helpful features like automatic duplex printing and single colour consumables rather than an everything cartridge that always runs out of one colour well before the others and much better print resolution and quality and they become cheaper to run.

I would recommend the HP Smart Tank 7605 or, if you don't need to use thick paper over 105gsm, the cheaper HP Smart Tank 7305. They both come with enough ink for two or three years of typical printer usage. The 7605 is available for £239 on Amazon, while the 7305 costs £218

I replaced our old canon with an Epson earlier this year, does colour, was about £80 -100. It works well, very user friendly and communicates seamlessly with all our PCs laptops and phones to print (unlike any other printer I’ve ever used). I buy the cheaper generic ink, it works, I’m happy with it. It’s a bit bigger because I wanted one which does double sided, but still small enough on the corner of the desk.

@JustSetFireToIt They don’t. You are being selective. Epson eco tanks are good. Cheap ones do rely on buying ink all the time and often generic cartridges don’t work. Haven’t had a HP but the tank ink ones are better and our Epson certainly handles anything we throw at it!

I might go for a more expensive Epson. Thanks everyone.