Printer recommendations

[scgt1]

MODS If this is in the incorrect location please move it. I didn't see a printers/scanners section or anything that this topic would really fit in other then GEN HW

Ink Jet Only no Laser Printers
Well looks like our Officejet 8500 is heading out finally after 5 years. Started to leak ink out the rear right corner. Has been doing it for a while because there was a nice puddle. I'm going to tear into it and clean the waste container and buy us more time. We have had to replace numerous printheads with it.

The thing I have never liked about it is the fact it just randomly does it's own thing with cleaning the printheads when it want's to while it's just sitting on the desk with nothing printing. Probably why it collected so much ink in the waste compartment in the first place. If there is a problem with a print head you can't use the scanner either which I'm going through right now. Exchanging the black/yellow head tomorrow.

Not so sure I want to even venture back into the HP realm unless there is some solid backing that they have changed.

Don't really need a fax as we don't have phone service but print, copy, scan are a must. My time sheets get scanned and emailed in so a scanner is a must and my fiance copies things from time to time that she has to fill out so she has her own copies.

If HP isn't junk still I was looking at the Officejet Pro 8610. Also looking at the Canon MG5620. I have a ton of bulk ink so the cartridges would be getting replaced with refillable/auto resetting chip cartridges. Our current 8500 has a CIS cartridges from Inkproducts.com but there stuff is just too damn expensive. The CISS for the 8610 is $130 and the 5620 is $119.

I think we are just going to go the cartridge route from ebay this time around. We don't print as much as we used to so a more home/home office setting printer is best for our needs now. My fiance used to print hundreds of fliers for a business she used to do. She still does her own business but it's different and she rarely prints any fliers for it.

So boils down to wanting a good quality printer that doesn't randomly waste ink for no reason, is serviceable, must scan both color/b&w, must copy color/b&w, have decent print speed and print photos. Don't really care if it has a memory card reader. 5 years we have had this 8500 not one memory card has gone in it nor has one document been faxed. We both may work from home but I don't have all day to wait for something to print. LOL

Would prefer a closed paper tray like the 8500 has we have 4 cats so floating hair is a known thing. I know the Canon I was looking at doesn't have a closed tray and that is one downside to it.

 

[rive22]

I switched to laser a while back and love it. The Samsung Color laser printer is good for any kind of documents at all.

Perfect text, no ink run off, fast, reliable, efficient.

Anything that is photo quality related I just get done professionally, personally.

 

[Tyler-Durden]

Brother MFC-J870DW

It's less than $100, compact, wireless, prints/scans/copies very well, and ink is cheap. I'm very satisfied with mine.

 

[Deleted member 88227]

I've got a Epson 3640. Does color really well. Has two paper trays that hold 250 each and well.. it works.

http://www.epson.com/cgi-bin/Store/jsp/Product.do?sku=C11CD16201

 

[scgt1]

Brother MFC-J870DW

It's less than $100, compact, wireless, prints/scans/copies very well, and ink is cheap. I'm very satisfied with mine.

Interesting. Didn't look at specs yet just looked at the warranty 2 years. That is like unheard of in a printer.

 

[Motley]

Canon has the highest quality printers.

I just got the MG6620 and its really nice. Got it on sale at Best Buy for $79.00

Can't beat that. The photos it prints are amazing. And love the wireless too.

 

[Deleted member 126051]

Question, do you require COLOR?

If not, just about any mono laserjet'll do ya.

 

[scgt1]

Question, do you require COLOR?

If not, just about any mono laserjet'll do ya.

Yes

 

[StoleMyOwnCar]

I went through a small chain of new printers recently. Frankly it was kind of an impulse buy at Office Depot since they were supposedly having a sale; I just needed something that worked. I don't print much. I totally regret this now because they lied to me about their exchange/return policy. It's actually a totally pathetic 14 days instead of the 30 days like the cashier told me.

Lesson noted: Never buy anything at Office Depot/Max. Ever. If it's avoidable, don't do it.

Anyway:
First was an HP Envy 5530; 75$. Out of the box seemed to work fine (though it was slow), but then I found out that it duplexed things badly. On the other side, things were cut off. On the upside, HP doesn't need special drivers to duplex. I connected it to my router and wifi and all worked perfectly.

Second was a Brother 2380 laser; 99$ that I exchanged it for. It worked fine for printing text but honestly that's about all it did. Printing B&W images had some kind of crosshatch pattern on it (inordinately noticeable). The scan quality was terrible, with rainbow artifacts on things. Worst of all, Brother FORCES you to get their software in order to duplex. The printer just literally refuses to duplex things (even if you set it on the printer itself) without a sizable software install. It went back. I was forced to do an exchange, because I was at 15 days instead of 14 days. Load of BS but whatever.

They had the HP Officejet Pro 8610 there for 99$. So I picked it up. I wasn't really expecting much, considering the apparent quality of modern budget printers. Thus far, it's been working fine. I set it up for wireless without any issue. My computer was able to print images and text with good quality. Then I took those printed images and scanned them onto a flash drive that I put into it with no issue (using the auto document feeder). Scan quality was great. Duplexing worked without any special software installs. The printer stays consistently connected to wireless. There does seem to be a pause during printing if the printer has not been engaged in a while, though. I'd have to test this further, but I'm kind of tired of wasting paper testing these printers. I'm not exactly a hippie, but I don't like cutting any more trees than is necessary.

Thus far the 8610 is working amply, so I'm intending to keep it. However, I am not certain if I can actually recommend it... I did read a lot of Amazon reviews that were lambasting the thing. I can't tell if most of them were DOA or what. Then again you can read a lot of Amazon reviews about any budget printer having all these issues that you might never see. If there's any lesson it's probably that you just maybe shouldn't bother with a budget printer these days. At 99$ and under, you just get what you get. It may work, it may not. For color laser all in one, you should probably take that number and multiply it by 3.

 

[defaultluser]

Brother makes solid inkjets and laser for a low price that last forever. They also have second-to-none wireless connectivity, and have had the kinks worked out for over 6 years.

I have two brother Wireless printers on my network, and they work together just fine.

 

[StoleMyOwnCar]

^ That's part of the problem with budget printers. Their operational status is luck of the draw, pure and simple.

We had one Brother that was actually a little over 100$ that we got from... Microcenter I think (this was for my parents, not me)? I remember we had to return it because it was bad out of the box. Either the paper was jamming or the ink cartridges would not be properly detected (perhaps both). Meanwhile I have this thing that many people say totally messed up on them yet it's working just dandy for me. You can't really just blanket recommend a brand in the budget range. It's like the silicon lottery, but worse.

For the record my parents finally went with an Epson Workforce (forgot the exact model).

 

[scgt1]

Well I had fun today starting at 7:30 am tearing the Officejet 8500 apart to get the Service station out and flush it and the absorbent pads to make this thing last longer. Hell it's gone 5 years so far with just print head replacements.

What a fucking mess this thing was. The main board that controls the printer sits vertical on the right side of the printer. The lower edge of the board was saturated in ink. It's no wonder this thing didn't short out. How the fuck HP can not have a warning system in place to say your printer needs service when the service station is full of ink. That way it doesn't short out the board and leak out all over your desk.

When all was said and done I had a Wal-mart shopping bag full of saturated paper towels which was just from wiping the inside of the printer down. Don't get me started on how much water I used cleaning out the service station and the absorbent pads. I didn't take a lot of pics. The ones I did were mainly for me to remember where things went. Once I removed the main board and the service station the area below the service station was a soupy black mess from hell. You can somewhat see in the pic below.

While in the printer I was checking things out and found the notorious HP paperfeed gear starting to split. This gear causes a paperjam error yet there is never a paper jam (I known issue and HP did a recall on these a while back not sure if they still will fix it or not and I wasn't having the problem but it was cracking so I contacted the guy locally that I was going to today to swap black/yellow print heads out since the printer was saying it had a problem) He had one available and I couldn't find the dang thing online anywhere.
It's the white gear in the middle of the black sleeve in the middle of the pic.

So got the printhead swapped for a new one and got more then I bargained for on the $15 gear. He gave me the whole lower assembly and paper feed of another HP printer minus some external parts but the whole center paperfeed section was there along with the gear I needed undamaged.

Swapped the gear out and put the printer back together along with installing the new printhead and it's working great so far. Finished it at about 7pm this evening. That's with the hour and a half round trip to his house and stopping at cvs in the middle of the day. I figure I'll run it till it dies and then purchase a new one so keep the recommendations coming.

Stolemyowncar keep me filled in on that 8610 if you have any issues out of it. Also curious if it randomly does it's own thing or just sits on your desk as a good printer should. This 8500 since day one has always just randomly went into maintenance mode which is more then likely where all the extra ink waste has come from.

 

[StoleMyOwnCar]

Is ink actually conductive? I'm just curious. I tried to google it but I couldn't actually find any confirmation on modern ink conductivity (because google sucks. Google ink conductivity and you get a bunch of links about specifically conductive ink...). If it's not conductive, buying a sensor to detect overflows may be expensive. Budget printers and all.

As far as I know, no this does not go into random service modes. That is if you mean it randomly starts whirring up with nothing printing. At the very least, I haven't yet heard it do so. That process is usually very loud. If that happened at night, while I was trying to sleep, it would very likely piss me off.

Mine does have the issue on the second review of these comments though:
http://www.amazon.com/HP-Officejet-Wireless-A7F64A-B1H/product-reviews/B00J9E68B8?pageNumber=2
The horizontal lines on images thing (mine were like light off-color lines).
http://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Printi...ints-on-my-hp-officejet-pro-8610/td-p/4948437
I tried doing the fix in this by setting the image quality to best in MS image viewer before printing. It did work, and the image printed out with really great quality, but you can't do that on do that when copying scanned images in the document feeder or MS Word. Apparently that reviewer had to go through many steps to correct it on common printouts. Something to keep in mind. Might get you to try something else. I'm kind of worn out from all this, so I'm just leaving it alone since I probably don't need too many documents with HQ images embedded.

 

[scgt1]

Something that can also cause lines in your print is the clear strip that runs from left to right inside the printer. This strip goes through the print head carriage. If it gets dirty (over time of using the printer) or if it got something on it IE: oil from your hands or the technician who built it etc it can cause the printer to make lines on your documents/photos. That strip has lines across it and the print head carriage reads it's position via that strip. This can be cleaned with paper towel and windex. I had the stripes on the last several docs we have printed but after pulling the printer apart and having to clean that strip it's now gone.

Funny how that review complains as to how much the 8500 wasted ink during head cleaning. It takes a good while for the 8500 to go through any of those maintenance tasks (head cleaning/alignment/calibrate paper feed etc). Sounds like the 8610 sucks some ink also. Or it could just be the fact that new printers have starter cartridges that yield jack for the amount you can print.

The 8500 wasn't a cheap household printer though. Probably one of the reasons I've tried to keep it going for so long. With that being said I'm surprised there wasn't a sensor for the service station ink level. I can understand it not being on cheap $150 or less printers but a $400 printer should have that piece of mind built into it. Hell it complains for everything else.

 

[jssaylor2007]

Samsung makes some really good lasers. I personally use a black and white Samsung, and have used it for about 4 years. I would recommend it because toner is still readily available, and reasonable, which is something you most definitely will not find in HP printers.

 

[scgt1]

Samsung makes some really good lasers. I personally use a black and white Samsung, and have used it for about 4 years. I would recommend it because toner is still readily available, and reasonable, which is something you most definitely will not find in HP printers.

Not looking for a laser. And I wouldn't buy another Samsung product to save my life. Went through a hell of a time trying to get my $3500 4k tv repaired. Their support is a damn joke.

 

[scgt1]

Going ahead and picking up the Canon MG5620. Really can't refuse the deal. Then order some $18 refillable cartridges with smart chips on ebay since I have a ton of bulk ink. Then stick it in the garage and wait for the HP to fail again.

I'll pick up a $14.99 3 year Square Trade warranty so it's still under warranty when the time comes and it's in use. Wish I would have with the HP. Didn't know about square trade in 2010. Not sure if it was even around.

Will end up spending $54.57 which is still the cheapest I've seen it and won't have to purchase ink or worry about it after a year.

 

[PliotronX]

Samsung makes some really good lasers. I personally use a black and white Samsung, and have used it for about 4 years. I would recommend it because toner is still readily available, and reasonable, which is something you most definitely will not find in HP printers.

Agreed, I also like the equivalent Brother lasers although they tend to be noisier and seem to have lower build quality than Samsungs, they have treated me well. No going back to ink. Walmart has a machine where I can pop in an SD card and print out while shopping for groceries. Ends up being cheaper than running an inkjet printer at home with less headache. #laserforlife

 

[MrGuvernment]

Hey all, just looking to get a multi-fuction myself.

I do recall that Epson has the print heads in the ink cartridges wile HP has them in the printer?

I would like something semi decent for scanning / printing day to day, i would love a color laser, but then i want to be able to scan things as well though and maybe fax once in a million years for government agencies vs snail mailing it...

Something like this looks nice, i do like my Canon Camera's..

PIXMA MX922 All-In-One Color Inkjet, Printer, Scanner, Copier, Fax w/ Wi-Fi, Ethernet, USB 2.0
http://www.memoryexpress.com/Products/MX50614

Nice part is it also does Disk's it seems, but ink is like $20 a pop and it holds 5 cartridges.....ouch!

 

[Deleted member 88227]

My Epson's printer has the print heads in the printer itself. The ink cartridges are just ink.