Printers

[Englander]

I started uni properly this week and it has since occurred to me that it might be a wise investment to purchase a printer for my room, rather than having to pay 5p/page at the campus. I know nothing about printers so thought I'd come here and see if there are any recommendations of brand/model. It just needs to be small and cheap and capable of churning out a few pages (largely b&w only).

Any thoughts?

Michael

[nibbler]

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Brother-HL-2...5943590&sr=1-1
Black and White only, but it's cheap and prints fast. My parents have one, and it... prints.

[Saracen]

If it's B&W only, I'd certainly suggest laser not inkjet. They're a bit more to buy but a lot less to run, and don't have some of the other issues of inkjets, like blocked nozzles.

If you need occasional colour and don't need photo quality, there are some cheap colour lasers and some good deals, but be careful. Some come with "starter" toner cartridges with minimal age life, and a full set of replacements can cost more than the printer did. But there are some good deals around.

On the other hand, with a half-decent colour laser and a bit of enterprise and initiative, you might even be able to offset the costs by doing some printing for fellow students. Just do the maths right and get your costs and pricing right before going down that route.

If you need photo quality colour, then you're in a very different game from the one outlined above and outside of some specialist machines, inkjet is where it's at.

[ChaosSystem]

If you are going down the route of ink jets, look at the Kodak range, they seem to be sensible with the price of their cartridges. Also look at the "Which" as I've seen them do a ink cost per page price breakdown.

[peterb]

I quite like Brother printers - I have the bigger.. er.. brother of the one mentioned.

As a very general rule of thumb, the cheaper a printer is to buy, the higher the running costs.

There are some reviews of the cited Brother printer here along with the cost of consumables.

I have used this company myself, and can recommend them for good CS - and pretty good prices - but as always it pays to shop around - especially for consumables.

The site I have linked to has a good range of other printers too.

[merdat]

Go laser as it will work out much cheaper in the long run especially for mono.

[aimey]

My suggestion is to buy a Lexmark printer, since it is cheap and can be refilled easily.