Is there any printer for home use that isn't a complete POS?
This is where I am with mine:
I have a Canon M490 inkjet. I can turn this POS on and 2 minutes later it's still whizzing, and whirring and buzzing and clicking, ratcheting, and well whatever the hell printers do before they finally decide to STFU and print. Then, literally in the middle of printing a page, it will sometimes just shut completely off, as in no power. Getting it to actually print a page successfully is like asking Whitney Houston to lay off the pipe for a day or two. Good luck.
My previous one was a Brother 2140 laser, and it LIED to me and told me my drum was out of toner, gave me an error light, and refused to print. Well guess what, cover up the two sensors on either end with tape, and like magic, it starts to print again, just as dark as you please. I kind of knew that about 100 sheets of text should not drain a toner cart, so I researched and found out this was a scam on Brother's behalf to get you to throw out half a cart of toner and buy another one.
I f*cking hate printers. Seriously, I really do. I want them to die. They are slow, noisy, and ink refills are one of the biggest scams on the planet.
That said, unfortunately I need one, and since I'm about to go Office Space on mine, I was wondering if such a magical beast as a decent printer actually existed.
Does anyone have a home use printer they don't want to kill with fire?
I hate printers. I've never come across a printer (in an office or home environment) that wasn't a buggy piece of junk. They can all die in a fire.
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Nope. They all break. Sadly.
MilkmanDanimal wrote:
NSMike wrote:
http://steamcommunity.com/id/garion333
Well, at least we can commiserate a bit.
Steam
Thank you! My experience with printers are like abusive relationships. They start out really nice with soo much promise. At first it does everything you want and more so you actually think this is the one, finally.
After some time it begins to start with maybe a stall print here, a mangled page there. However for the most part its really nice and as long as you don't do anything to mess with it you'll still be able to print your pages. Then it begins demanding more and more ink. Didn't I just buy you a full set of cartridges last week? Why did you print those web pages with the full border and color? Can't you just print the text?
Then you find yourself just pleading with it to print for you this one time like it used to because you really need to have this document printed. You repeat this cycle untill you finally conclude its not healthy for you and you drop him for the new printer and start the cycle all over again.
....man I need a drink.
(I hate printers too. Glad someone else feels the same way)
I love my HP Deskjet 5550. I've had it for over 5 years and no real problems. great photo quality. My only source of ire is the fact that ink gets more and more expensive, but has less and less yield. Not the machine's fault, though. Due to it's age I've had the occasional issue of striation for multiple prints, but usually adjusting the print settings to a slower, finer print for the rest of the job will resolve it. Not sure you can still get this model, though.
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I've been on my HPLJ4000 for seven years now and on my third toner cartridge. I am sure HP killed this line because they were too good.
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Steam: Bordone
Come to think of it, I had an IBM laser back in the late 90's and that bastard never ran out of toner. Also a dead model now, I'm sure.
Steam
I've got an HP PSC 1500 that works really well. There was an issue with the 64 bit drivers that caused it to print a test page everytime you turned it on, but that got fixed. I've had it for 4 years or so and running.
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That brings up a good point. You're talking about color, right, Jeff?
MilkmanDanimal wrote:
NSMike wrote:
http://steamcommunity.com/id/garion333
Yeah if you are willing to ditch the color, there are some pretty decent entry level laserjets that problably wont drive you nuts. Did this myself, and when I need the occasional picture printed, I just send it off to Shutterfly and pick it up from Target.
I may be going to hell in a bucket, but at least I'm enjoyin' the ride
I couldn't care less about color. 95% of my printing is simple text. occasionally the text will have pictures, charts, etc, but nothing that has to be in color.
So if you have some solution -- fire away. Just don't say "Brother" anything. I won't listen.
Steam
I could hug all you guys.
I went all Office Space on my last printer, a relatively spendy HP photo printer, and then went to Wal Mart and bought the cheapest, sh*ttiest printer they had. It works fine. When it stops working, I will give it a savage beating and throw it in the garbage.
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[i]I got us a new one back in Christmas of... 2007? It's an HP C6280 and I couldn't be happier with it. It has a network port, and it is so insanely easy to add it our Windows machines, simply "Add Printer", "Network","Locate", and it shows up and installs very easily.
It is the type with the little cartridges (5 + black), and it even has a useful LCD screen. At most we reboot it once a month, and it does great quality printing and decently fast B&W.
I couldn't recommend this thing more.
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Well, you gotta realize, there's two broad models in the printer market. One is to sell you a very cheap printer, possibly at below cost, and then charge megabucks for the ink or toner. Your upfront cost is lower, but your ongoing cost is much higher. HP ink costs more than human blood, literally. It's like $10,000 a gallon or something insane like that.
The other model is to sell you an expensive printer at a good profit, and then not murder you on replacement supplies. Typically, if you want a printer that doesn't cost a lot to run, and is more reliable, you'll have to pay more for it. But you can keep it longer, and don't have to spend as much money on it.
Neither approach is always better, it depends on what you do. If you don't print a lot, the cheap printer/expensive ink solution may cost you less. If you're high volume, then buying a good one is usually a better bet.
Elewis17 wrote:
Oh, and, for specific recommendations, try calling a couple of local printer toner refill places, and see what they like. They'll know what's easy and cheap to refill, and should have a pretty good idea on reliability.
Elewis17 wrote:
Had my HP Deskjet 950c for almost 10 years now. I stopped using it for color some years ago as I didn't care to test if it was a printer or cartridge problem since I didn't have the money to waste like that. I never need color prints now anyways.
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Disclaimer: I used to work for Canon. I did buy into their products well before that, though. At the risk of sounding like a sales guy (and I was in consumer marketing!), my experiences with printers:
I use a Canon Laser Shot LBP-1120 for all of my black & white stuff and a Canon Pixma ip4300 for my color stuff (mostly photographs). I have been very, very happy with the Laser Shot. It's now an obsolete model, but I believe I'll get a color laser printer once this one has run its course. It's still on its first toner cassette after many years and the price of prints is negligible. As it's getting older, the prints are getting worse, but this is more than five years old by now.
The inkjet color printer does need new cassettes and quality paper to work well. Even though the cassettes are expensive, the price of a single photograph is still around 10c (in Euros), including the photo paper. I think that's cheap, personally, and the quality of these things is really phenomenal these days - I don't miss physical photos, because I get to make them at home. I haven't had any issues with the printer.
I also have a Canon Selphy ES2. It's a portable photograph printer, kind of like having a Polaroid camera. It's cool at parties, since you can see the printer working its magic. The prints are considerably more expensive, though, at around 20-30c (Euro).
I wouldn't touch a cheap, 50€ printer. You just can't have quality for that price. The same goes for cheap paper and inks. You should really think about the page cost when you're deciding if the supplies are worth it.
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We bought a couple of OLD HP Laserjet 6M/6MP printers (used, $5 each) about four years ago- they are rock-solid and you can still get toner for them.
True they are just B&W, but they have ethernet jacks and sit nicely on our network.
Malor, good analysis- like the razor/razor blade model (cheap razor and costly blades).
"Eat Keel, Hellbug!"
Canon PIXMA MP600 is the best home printer I've ever owned. Scans and copies too. We did our save the dates, wedding programs, and thank you cards on it and were very pleased with how professional everything came out.
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seth wrote:
This Samsung ML-1630 laser looks kind of cool.
Amazon link. The user reviews make it sound like it might not totally suck.
Steam
I've been using a Lexmark E232 for about 6 years now with no issues. Of course, I don't need to print color, so going b&w laser wasn't much of a sacrifice.
LobsterMobster wrote:
I do so little printing at home it's pathetic, but I'm with Eezy. My traffic department has HP 4000's that are around seven or eight years old and they absolutely punish the things. Maintenance kit every so often for a new fuser and rollers, toner as needed. Still going strong.
You can pick them up online for around $100. If they've done the maintenance kit and put a toner cartridge in it you should be set for at least a year.
Unfortunately that was around the era when all the guts turned plastic and cheap. They've kind of been downhill from there.
Xerox makes decent stuff, but the printers and consumables are both expensive. Some friends have been happy with Konica-Minolta color lasers they purchased for around $400 five years or so ago. Don't have any current experience with them though (although their B/W lasers are workhorses. We use them to print scripts and they handle thousands of pages a day.)
EDIT: It just occurred to me re-reading this that our script printers are Kyocera's, not Konicas. Brain fart.
Hypatian wrote:
If I ever replace the printer I have in the house I won't be reenacting office space. I will be setting the little bastard up on a tree stump and blowing holes in it with bullets. The biggest ones I have a gun for.
Then the pieces will be gathered and melted together with a blowtorch, and the ball of plastic and slag that results will go to a trash compactor.
At that point I might be done. It's hard to say for sure though. I might want to shoot it again.
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By the way, I have an old Epson AIO unit, and I despise the printer. The scanner part's not too bad, but the printer itself is awful. It looks good when it has fresh cartridges, but if it's not used constantly, the nozzles gum up and stop working. The only reason I keep it is for the scanner.
I also have a Dell 3100, I think specifically 3100PS, and it's been pretty good, but I don't put many pages through it. It was hard to argue with $350 for a color laser four years ago. I wish it had a duplexer, but they charge a mint for those, so I skipped it. I think the cost per page on the toner is very high, but I haven't printed enough pages for that to be an issue. If I ever run out of toner, I'll probably just buy a new printer.
Only real downside to the Dell is that it's a very large and heavy unit, but the prints still look excellent after four years, no degradation that I've noticed. And it's very fast, has a network port, and speaks Postscript.
Because of those last two features, it works very nicely on my network of mixed Linux, Apple, and Windows machines. Dell only provides the driver for Windows, but you can extract the files in the Windows Postscript driver, and then use the .PPD in a Mac or on Linux.
(.PPD is a printer description file, which tells the computer what options the printer has installed and how to access them. It's a universal driver for any Postscript engine on any system. But Dell only provides it buried in the Windows driver.)
Elewis17 wrote:
For B&W, my Dell 1710N has been a workhorse. We got it free about 7 years ago when we ordered a laptop. We've had to replace the toner cartridge once.. no, twice. It's been plugged into our wireless router since we got it and the only complaint we have is when the power goes out, the router gives it a new DHCP IP about 75% of the time, so we either trial and error try to figure out it's new one or waste 2 pages of paper on the printout you can make the printer do that has its IP on it. But that's really a complaint about DHCP, not the printer.
I can't believe I'm recommending a Dell product, but it just works.
Maybe you can find the actual maker of that printer.
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I *think* they are mostly rebranded Lexmarks.
Do you ever walk alone like a drifter in the dark?
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Steam: Bordone
You should be able to set DHCP up to give a specific IP address to a specific MAC address. If you do that for your printer, it will always have the same IP address. I've done it for my networked printer plugged into the wireless router.
Not all routers will do DHCP reservations, but it might be worth digging through the setup to see if yours does.
The printer should also have a method to set a static IP address; you configure it once, and it will stay there until you change it again.
Elewis17 wrote:
Was in love with my Konica Minolta Laserjet B&W. Until we upgraded to Vista/7 and THEY DON'T HAVE ANY DRIVERS FOR THE DAMN THING. If it's not one thing with home printing, it's another. Eff em all I say. *spit*
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"We know who Troy is. He's that cheap guy."
I have a Canon MP610 that has been fine. It does the light printing I need, a the copier function comes in handy. I never use the scanner or fax functions at all. I hate slots for memory cards that you can print off of, buy I've never used that either.
I bought it because it was the right price and had decent enough reviews. And it has been headache free for more than year.
Amazon has it for $90 now.
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