Looking for a printer

[Roboxrr4]

I am a looking to get a new printer, preferably something less than £100 and with good ink economy.

Any recommendations?

Benefits of laser over inkjet, dont really mind if it is monochromatic it will be used to mainly print stuff from excel and word.


thanks in advance.

[tusker]

The main benefit of laser over inkjet is the lower cost of consumables. Even a monochromatic used relatively little will soon pay for itself. My personal experience of trying to keep costs down by using compatible inkjet cartridges is not good (blocked heads etc). Putting more toner into a laser cartridge can be a relatively simple affair, and does not seem to have the quality issues associated with refilling injet cartridges or using substitutes. About a year ago I bought my son a small Brother mono laser which has worked okay via USB but proved tricky to set up on a network.

I recently bought myself a Kyocera from printware.co.uk and found them to be an excellent company for online purchasing.

[mrochester]

I've been using Canon printers for a while now, and I've been pretty happy with them. The cartridges are a reasonable price, and seem to last a good long while. I too have had very bad experience in the past with 3rd party cartridges, which probably ended up costing me more money than just buying the originals in the first place. I used to constantly have to clean the print heads as they became blocked frequently, which wasted a lot of ink and paper, and the 3rd part cartridges didn't seem to have as much ink in them to begin with.

I'd definitely recommend looking for a duplex printer, which really helps to cut down paper use for documents where it doesn't matter if it is double sided.

[tusker]

I would agree with the comment about going for a Canon if you decide to go down the inkjet route. I now always buy original cartridges and get them from a well known Jersey based company who sell them for a significant discount compared to the UK RRP (they have recently stopped charging separately for P&P which means that you can order cartridges singly as required).

[kmac]

For a cheap mono laser printer I would look at:

1) Brother
2) Samsung
3) HP

Probably in that order as HP tent to focus on the higher end of the market.
I had a Samsung Ml-1750 (now discontinued I belive) for ages before I had to replace due to a rubber bit wearing resulting in pages not being picked up properly.

Now have the ML-2850ND which is above your price range but has the advantage of being network compaitable and duplex priniting capable. (the N and D in the model)

The mega cheap (about £60) Brother HL-2140 gets very good reviews but I think might be a bit noisy ( may not be an issue for you but is for me).

Advantages of the brother macheines is you can change toner and drum separately which reduces cost per page (if you have to replace the drum it is cheaper to buy a new printer at the lower end of the range)

[mrochester]

I would agree with the comment about going for a Canon if you decide to go down the inkjet route. I now always buy original cartridges and get them from a well known Jersey based company who sell them for a significant discount compared to the UK RRP (they have recently stopped charging separately for P&P which means that you can order cartridges singly as required).

I think I use the same Jersey based inject supplier

[Roboxrr4]

Thanks for the advice guys. I was looking at some epson inkjets earlier, it seems alot of manufacturers overstate the number of prints per minute thier machine can do, i will have a look at what you guys have suggested.

[Saracen]

A critical question, to my mind, in determining "economy" is how many pages you'll print over the life of the printer.

It used to be that colour lasers were so expensive as the be right out the this type of budget, but it isn't so any longer. There are several around, or even just under the £100 mark. But .... check out consumables, because replacing them might well work out about tte same as replacing the printer.

So ... how many pages do you print? If it's 10 pages a week, then at 500 pages a year, a colour laser with a 1500 to 2000 page capacity will give you three to four years before you need to worry about consumables. When you do think about consumables, be aware though that some printer designs require more than just the toner cartridge to be changed so you MUST know what bits and user-serviceable, and what their life expectancy is to get a fair grip on average page cost over the life of the machine.

If you're a low-volume user, a laser might be an option and colour laser is certainly possible. If you're printing too much for that, then I'd also question whether inkjet is a sensible choice because the cost per page is typically high compared to lasers, unless you must have colour, and even then it can be a close-run thing.

There are some inkjets that are relatively cheap to run, but they're targeted at business workgroup usage and are way outside the £100 budget. That general principle holds true for lasers too - the cheaper the machine to buy, the more expensive the consumables.

So I;d say you need to think quite carefully about how much printing you'll do, because if total cost over the life of the machine is important, and your post suggests it is, then the choice will depend on how many pages you'll do and that determines whether a cheaper machine up-front is false economy of not.

For what it's worth, I bought a "cheap" mono laser three or four years back. It's an HP Laserjet 1320. It cost me about £130, but has built-in duplex (print both sides of the paper), good quality text, is pretty nippy and has never so much as hiccuped let alone given me any grief. And, a couple of times, I've hunted down new, sealed and in-date HP cartridges on eBay at about £15 a time instead of the £60-£70 stationery suppliers want.

That machine is, I think, superseded now but there ought to be an equivalent, but for a mono laser, it's been an absolute dream of a machine. And a friend was impressed enough to buy them for his company, though on the network-ready "n" variant.