Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Best SOHO Printer Choices?
rueger writes "I can remember trading up from a daisy-wheel printer to dot matrix, and can remember when Jerry Pournelle used to say 'Buy the most expensive HP printer you can afford.' Mine was a 4P. Times have changed, though, and I'm looking for trustworthy advice before buying a couple of new printers. Specifically, a B&W Laser with sheet feed scanner, and a color inkjet with a solid flatbed scanner for copying music. We want solid, reliable machines that will give a few years of small office service, that have reasonably cheap consumables, and that will "just work" with Windows and Linux. Network ready of course. Let me expand. These days there seems to be no market leader in printers — they tend to be cheap disposable items. Part of the reason is that it is hard to find any real user reviews of these machines — most of the comments on Best Buy or other sites are full of fanboy enthusiasm, or extreme negativity — nothing that can be relied on. Between those, and the sock puppets, and the astroturfing, there's nothing I'd trust. I do trust Slashdot, though, for things like this. People here are able to offer realistic advice and experience that can usually tell the story. So, I ask: who's making good printers these days?"
Kyocera.
They're not cheap but they just need toner, everything else lasts forever.
Nobody beats their price per page. I've seen companies who print 50.000 pages a month throw out new HP printers to replace them with Kyoceras because it saved them money after only a couple of weeks to pay for the 'old' and new printer.
I did a lot of doctor's office programming and I always included a Kyocera free with the apps because then I'd never get any calls about printer problems.
Rule1: You brought an inkjet and use it heavily, it would have been cheaper to buy a laser in the long run.
Rule2: You brought an inkjet and rarely use it. You now spend so much on cleaning the heads that a laser would have been cheaper in the long run.
I have in the past owned an inkjet, these days if I want a photograph printing, I use an online photographic printing service and get my prints delivered to my door printed on real photographic paper. By the time you factor in the cost of the printer, inks and paper it works out just the same for a better result.
Also anything without a ethernet port is a piece of junk not worth considering.
I can't comment on the cost of consumables, but the office where I work has had a couple of Brother MFC lasers. The Brother site has linux drivers and I've been able to do everything the Windows users can do. These 2 printers get used a lot and have held up well.
I'll second Kyocera. The drums eventually need replacing, but even then they're cheap to run and damn near bulletproof.
For the inkjet, I'd recommend talking to a local vendor of continuous ink supply systems about what they'd recommend. Continuous feed bulk ink systems are *much* cheaper than paying obscene amounts per cartridge.
I'm looking for a multipurpose B&W printer, laser, for home.
My current choice is the Brother MFC-7460DN , also good for SOHO.
It's a multipurpose B&W laser printer, 26ppm print; 35-sheet Auto Document Feeder; Duplex print, Fax, colour scanner.
It looks like people have less problems with this brand/model than some others, so I think I buy it
http://www.consumerreports.org/
and a color inkjet with a solid flatbed scanner for copying music
Forget about inket altogether.
Just use a colour laser, toner is much cheaper than ink, and most modern mid- to high- range laser printers have a good enough quality even for photos.
(If it's single pass, and has a high dpi, you're okay).
In addition of the price, there's a technical advantage of laser: you can print at any pace you want, as seldom as once per month if you want (or even rarer) all the way up to what your printer can mechanically sustain before falling apart (most printers can take quite some abuse, well within the needs of SOHO). Ink can dry and clog printing head or ink channels. Either you'll *HAVE TO* print at least a few page now and then to keep the ink flowing. Or you'll have a printer which will automatically run through a clean/un-clogging cycle (spitting some ink into a reservoir) or you'll need to replace completely clogged cartridges/printerheads. You can store a laser printer unused in you basement for as long as you wish, whereas an Inkjet will always cost some (expensive) ink, even if you don't use it.
If you really must buy a inkjet and cannot buy a colour laser for some obscure reason, at least try to go for a brand where the ink refill is just that: ink. (some Epson would be a random exemple). At least the refills are not too expensive, and because it's an open market, you can find a whole range of options. Including dead cheap no-name refills of dubious quality, but also refills from cheaper 3rd parties which are known to make good inks (and probably have been already in the ink business even back when fountain pens have been introduced)
*ABSOLUTELY* avoid any brand where you replace the whole cartridge (ink + printing head). There is a very small marginal advantage in that (new cartridge means a brand new CLEAN printing head, and shorter paths between ink and head means less risk of clogging). But in virtually every brand, the cartridge has some electronics built-in, which is used as a crude for or DRM and anti-tamper. That means that you're in a locked market (no 3rd party licensed to sell cheaper heads, difficult to refill your self and persuade the electronics that the cartridge is (again) new). And thus, such brands tend to pump up catridges' price like crazy, so much you'll wonder if their ink is made out of unicorn blood. (Up to the point that a whole printer refill could cost more than the printer and would probably have throw away a lot of the old ink anyway).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
First up, let's get this out of the way: all inkjet printers are cheap (and nasty) because they are loss-leaders for consumables.
I used to swear by HP but they've started this nasty habit of discontinuing ink cartridges after about three years, forcing you to buy a new printer because you can no longer get "original" cartridges for it.
On Windows I like Canon printers. But forget about trying to use the CD/DVD-printing Pixma series on Linux - while you can print on paper and labels just fine there is insufficient adjustment in the printer driver config files to allow proper alignment/registration when you wish to print directly on a CD/DVD, meaning you have to plug it into a Windows machine and use Canon's crappy CD Label Printer software that looks and behaves like a Windows 3.1 reject.
I'll be due for a new printer as soon as I can't get cartridges for my current HP OfficeJet. And this time I'm seriously considering a Samsung laser printer, or perhaps a Kyocera.
Several years ago, I moved from an inkjet printer to a (color) laser printer. At home, for private use. I've never looked back, and these days I have no f&%$! idea why people buy injket printers.
It's got higher quality, it's cheaper per page, a toner lasts forever, and I can fire it up after not having used it for three months and it'll print - no cleaning required.
I personally own an OKI and am happy with it, but I agree with you that there is no true market leader. Online reviews can't be trusted, so I went with the technical data. Maybe that's a workable approach for you, just go for the facts?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I found this link ( http://theoatmeal.com/comics/printers ) from the comments section of this ( http://www.howtogeek.com/174232/htg-explains-why-is-printer-ink-so-expensive/ ) article. Hope it helps.
Also, I've seen SOHO Kyocera laser printers with a flat bed scanner under the document feeder. You won't need both types. [But stick to their proper network printers. There's a newer range for small offices, and many functions may not work properly over a network, only 1:1. Whether that means Kyocera is starting down the path of shitty consumer models, I don't know.]
If you print a lot of non-photo colour, pump for a colour laser. If you only print a bit of colour, occasionally but on demand, buy a cheap consumer inkjet or photo-printer every 3-12 months depending on use and plug it into a spare laptop, not the network. (I've had reasonable luck with entry-level ($50) Canon MFPs not drying out from lack of use. But cheap Epsons and HPs can't seem to handle not being used regularly.)
"Must last several years" is the wrong thinking with inkjets. Treat them as disposable, save yourself grief. If you get more than 12 months out of it, bonus. If not, who cares.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
Get something with PostScript support. That pretty much guarantees the thing will print, now and later, certainly any Unix, any other OS probably too. Can get away with very simple lpr configs too.
And it's available on pretty cheap printers these days, though obviously not on "winprinters" that depend on the driver to do all the lifting bar the putting stuff on paper part--you don't want those anyway as they might not work with the next version of windows either.
Apparently various "linux" (in casu freedesktop) apps now produce pdf instead of postscript, but that's no matter, since the printable part is a subset of postscript; the same stuff with loops and such removed and compression added, and so trivially convertable to postscript for printing. For that reason it'd be extremely strange to find a printer that would print pdf but not postscript.
Personally I picked the hp 2200d (and ended up with a dt), which is the last model in (that market segment as hp sees it) with unchipped toners, is hp so likely to have toners available for a long time, was available cheaply second hand, does postscript and has a duplexer, and has an EIO slot for a jetdirect. Extra memory and a jetdirect would've been nice, but it does USB and so works well enough for the few times a year that I need it.
But the niceties aside, the one thing that really matters is making sure it does PostScript. Even if you only ever install the thing once, the difference in hassle is worth it. That this requirement mostly wipes out the oh-so-cheap-but-screwing-you-on-the-ink inkjets is just happy coincidence, I'm sure.
Agreed on Kyocera. Once we moved to them for the majority of our clinic's printing, we had a measured 90% decrease in printer problems. It also is a good idea to find a local printer maintenance company that specializes in Kyocera printers as I have found that when there is a problem it is generally a worn out part that is causing it. Which speaks volumes about the quality of the printers as they wear out before they break something. I have never seen them fail to the point of disabling the printer without having printed well over 10000 pages first. Our current Kyocera with the record for the most pages printed is somewhere above 1 Million pages printed.
Communism will never work. People LIKE to own things.
The question did not limit recommendations to printers in production.
If my color laser printer came from Goodwill and it works, I'm a happy camper.
No brain, no pain.
Wildly overkill for SOHO when the submitter is talking about the level of inkjets.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
amazing that no one has mentioned Lexmark printers. and that should tell you all you need to know about them.