Printers

[dennis thompson]

Several people here on the Creek have endorsed Brother brand printers in the past. I too am about to start printer shopping and the Brothers will be at the top of the list.

I have two Brother laser printers, a black & white and a color and am very happy with both of them. They are reasonably priced too.

[Curt Harms]

Several people here on the Creek have endorsed Brother brand printers in the past. I too am about to start printer shopping and the Brothers will be at the top of the list.

I'm one of the Brother fans. We have two, an inkjet MultiFunction and color laser. I don't recall when I bought the inkjet, it had to be 10+ years ago. How many inkjet printers last 10+ years? I have refillable cartridges in it so my ink costs are insignificant. One complaint about Brother printers is that they don't produce very good photos. I've heard the newer ones are better are better but have no experience with them. I also have a niche need in printers, I'm a Linux user. There are two printer brands that are Linux friendly IMO, HP & Brother. Canon and Epson have Linux support but they seem to be more hit and miss.

[mike stenson]

We've had two brother laser printers. One was a business class multifunction that lasted about 15 years. It actually still works, but getting the toner cartridges is getting to be cost prohibitive (mostly because we're no longer printing in anywhere near the volume that made sense). The single function we replaced it with is just slightly slower and the cartridges are about half the price.

For photos, I've yet to see anything at home that was really a good printer.. so for those, I send off to pro-labs.

[Dave Cav]

I have had at least three Brother laser printers. The two current models are both multifunction models. The older one (about six or seven years old) is in the shop office, the newer one is in house. Both use the same toner cartridge, and cheap generic toner cartridges purchased on line have always worked fine.

[Kev Williams]

I have a 2005-ish HP Laserjet 3050, just black, does copy & fax (on hard landlines, voip fax just don't work), has a separate flat tray above the main paper tray for labels & such, and I CAN NOT find a new machine with the same second tray setup. It prints at least 20ppm, and when you hit the 'print' button on the computer, you'd best have paper ready, I've never seen a printer that actually STARTS printing so quickly. I've been using $12 toner cartridges in it for years. Sadly, for some reason its driver has been causing blue screen crashes and reboots on the computer. I completely uninstalled and reinstalled the printer and software from the original disk, and 2 days later the computer crashed again. It pains me to think I'm likely going to have to replace it soon...

I also have a Samsung ML-1865W laser printer, paid $60 for it many years ago, works great for a zero-frills machine, only slightly slower print and initial-reaction speeds. Only issue, the wireless quit working about 3 years ago, but the ethernet connection works fine.

As to inkjet printers-- the wife gave me a cheap Canon color printer with a copy scanner for xmas some years back. It was really irksome in that I had to change at least 2 cartridges for every ream of paper, at $14+ a pop. So one day I took a chance, got on amazon and found an el-cheapo ink dealer, and bought some ink from them. This machine uses 4 small cartridges, one is black, and one large black. The 'kit' I bought included THREE of all five cartridges, for under $13 to my door (They're still $12.68 for the kit), February 2016. The next September I bought another set, and in May 2018 another set...
I still have this many left:
DSC08735.jpg
Seems I use more Cyan than anything else!

$39 spent on ink in 4 years, I used to spend more than that every 2 months for Canon cartridges. Bonus: I'm not refilling anything,they work great, have more ink than the factory cartridges, and I've only had ONE cartridge fail, it just didn't work (none have leaked).

I don't know how many types/brands of machines you can get cheap ink for, but it's worth checking into...