Colour printers - which to get?

[Yorkiegirl]

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Without some constraints, the universe of possible solutions is too large.

(1) Budget
(2) Colour / B&W
(3) Just for home use or for shared use
(4) What will you be printing, and in what %
ie. 90% b&w text for college / homework, 20% snaps of family
or maybe you have a B&W laser so it is 100% colour photos...
(5) Any special features required ? (Wireless, card reader, portable, Mac / PC / Linux, scanner / fax features etc.)

www.pcpro.co.uk run an 'A' list of most recommended products out of their labs testing... usually excellent opinions, and you can also read about all the different models etc.

do not get a c82
grrrr
shower of useless defectation IMHO

Just realised that one of my printing scenarios yields a usage rate greater than 100%, which is rather interesting.

Dh has an RX420, seems happy enough with it. (I've got a Canon i865, so I only use is for 'photocopying'.) Do you want to know anything specific about it?

dh is a computer head and I have often heard him give advice on this subject.( mostly i blank it out!!!)
The thing he always says is buy a printer that takes the least expensive ink refills.The main financial outlay with a printer is ink and some cartridges cost up to £30 to replace!

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Hi Yorkie, OK, I've got some unexpected suggestions for you:

I'm not fond of inkjets for printing long documents, or for professional b&w documentation, in my opinion they're very very good, but not quite perfect enough.

I would therefore suggest you consider a laser printer to cover your b&w needs. The market has developed so much in the last few years that you can now buy truly excellent lasers which cost very little.

I would suggest that The Samsung 1520 might be good for that. Output will look stunning, it'll run for thousands upon thousands of pages without requiring cartridges and it will be mind blowingly fast. £100 inc VAT.

For colour photos, there a couple of good, cheap printers out there that I found on PCPro. Best value:

I expect the Canon IP 3000 will give you fantastic high quality photos. 80 quid inc to you.

If you wanted a more general all purpose colour inkjet, how about the HP Deskjet 7540 at just £65 inc.

Finally, you mention that scanning would perhaps be a useful extra. The HP psc2355 does scanning / photocopying and colour inkject output and costs £140 inc VAT.

Post any comments / queries and I'll help out as best I can. I know it is a bit of a head f*ck choosing these things, and I'm sorry my recommendation isn't simply an Epson X.

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Hi Yorkie, you don't ask much do you.

I couldn't find a cheaper price. Buy from comet / pcworld / dabs.com / uk.insight.com or whoever else you trust.

If you were going to go for an all in one, it might be worth spending 1/2 hour seeing if there are any others which might be even better / have cheaper ink / better reviews etc. I wouldn't like to be held responsible for a dud purchase.

But maybe you're not as anal as me, and you just want to sort it all out tonight ???

Ref: PC.

I've given up on PCs and turned to Apple Macs instead. You can run Office, they are more stable and they don't get spyware / viruses. They are very different beasts to what they were say 5 years ago. I was a total PC / Windows guy - building boxes, installing software, troubleshooting etc. but just got sick of the pile of shite that is Windows, IMHO.

I wouldn't hesitate to recommend a Mac, and would be happy to talk to you more about this on this thread or by e-mail or phone. (I don't sell them. You can buy them at the Apple store in London, local dealers or from their Web site. They have just brought out a 'Mac mini' which reuses your PC screen / keyboard / mouse to keep the cost down. I think it's £350 in the entry-level spec.

If you only want a PC, try dell.

I have just bought an HP Officejet 6100 for the office - very good, scanner etc all in one (slo-ow photcopier though). AND a Xerox phaser printer -amazingly fast and good quality but expensive.

At home we have a canon i550 - very pleased with it.

Hub2Dee, thank you for your broadband advice - we have decided to bite the bullet and get three different monthly accounts as the building we work in is Grade 1 listed and has thick walls (so wireless a no-no) and we cannot take floors up to put cables underneath - sigh...thanks.

Hope it goes well for you, Enid.

If you haven't found an ISP, Andrews & Arnold are small enough to be able to talk to, and they might give you a price break / some special arrangement for three lines.

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There's a coincidence, YG!

We are quite happy with ours, (Epson stylus photo RX500) but with DS2 doing loads of school research and DD2 looking up loads of uni stuff it uses a lot of ink (at c£8.50 per colour) - have already replaced the black, yellow's nearly gone and the others are at 30% or less. A full refill of all 6 colours is over £50.

You can get much cheaper substitute refills - cheapest I found were about £3 each - but DH was told it's not worth buying the cheap ones, dunno if hub2dee has an opinion on that?

Would agree with your (totally lovely) dh, JanH.

I've found the substitute ones not significantly greater value given the increased fudge factor (refilling, plus some printers used to have chips which refuse to accept non-manufacturer carts. Not sure if this is still done). However my dad continues to run an old HP with refillables and is very happy with them, so perhaps it is down to finding a decent supplier.

I would repeat that a laser will tend to be more economical and useful for many homes. OK, so the cheaper ones are all black and white, but the pages come out super fast, and the toner covers 2,000 - 20,000 pages (depends obviously on model).

DW is a teacher so routinely prints out 30 copies of her worksheets etc. and we couldn't do that on an inkjet and stay sane.

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If you've got an OK laser, than yep, just jump for one of the colour inkjets you were looking at.

BTW, when they grab more than one paper, what you need to do is:

open it up, remove the toner cartridge (careful nasty black stuff: toxic / staining). Put it somewhere darkish, or at least ideally not under bright desk lamp.

Get some cotton wool ear buds plus isopropyl alochol / meths / nail varnish remover (at an absolute push), and clean all the little roller bits which grab / guide the paper through the mech. Do the ones inside the printer, and also the ones on the underside of the input tray. You might want to turn it on momentarily to spin the little rollers (if they can't be spun by hand) so you get to clean its entire surface. If you've got a long mane, hold it clear .

Put cartridge back in and see if this has made a jot of difference.

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I also get confused when people send me lots of long documents.

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I'm gonna have my dd dis-assembling computers when she's 2.

Actually, old computers are probably quite fun to play with and perfectly harmless except maybe the heavy metals in the circuit boards and the mains power supply, and the tiny screws which taste delicious. Cheap as chips these days.