Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
In my experience, inkjets are junk and are a ripoff. We would never use one in a business environment. They may fine for occasional home use but then guess what? the ink dries up. I've never had a positive experience with one that I can say and I've been in I.T. a long time. Remember dot matrix or daisy wheel?
As I said before, you get what you pay for.
Spend the money on a decent laser and if you must have it a color laser. Or you could, get a cheaper RELIABLE b/w laser and get a cheap disposable inkjet for when you must have color but then again if you don't use it often enough, back to the same problem, dried up ink.
And if you think inkjet is faster than laser, you don't know what you're talking about. There may be some exceptions but as a general rule, no.
This is what I would recommend for a color laser. $250, reliable, duplex and wifi capable, 22 pages per minute. It's 600dpi, enough for most. The toner WILL NOT dry up, it's dry toner. If you need photos go down to walmart and be done with it. It's not worth it to print your own photos, ink, photo paper etc. If you only need to print b/w you only change the black toner for a whopping $40, good for 3500 pages, that's 1.1 cents per page plus the paper.
I've never had issues with my HP laser printer. No color, no inkjets, no nonsense. Just simple elegant printing in a way that's been used for years, by an old standard. I know that's boring to some, just black and white, but I mostly do text work. And you can't beat the crystal-clear resolution with the laser approach, even down to tiny fonts (used when necessary).
All the others are part of the obsolete over the years to me: dot matrix, bubble jet, inkjet. Been there, done that, moved on.
Last edited by Thoreau424; 03-07-2019 at 09:33 AM..
The Printer is controlled by the driver. If you tell it to print in greyscale (not color) in the settings it will not "try" to use any of the color ink. When you do this you are effectively turning the printer into a b/w printer. Once you get new color cartridges you can change the setting back if you want color. What model of printer had this issue?
I have a Lexmark now that won't print, even in black, because it thinks there is no magenta cartridge. I've tried cleaning (cartridge and printhead), replacing with new cartridge, every trick in the book. It has nothing to do with attempting to print in color or greyscale. When you turn it on and it goes through it's internal boot process and instead of going into Ready state it goes into Error - Magenta Cartridge Missing.
i dont use any proprietary drivers, which leads me to think it isnt just the driver. its probably drm in the circuitry itself. if it were the drivers, someone would probably crack them. ive never heard of a crack for a printer driver though. (then again, i never really looked for one.
Exactly. A google search makes it evident that millions are complaining about this. You would have people writing 3rd party drivers to bypass this and making miillions.
The other inkjet scam going that hasn't been mentioned is the automatic ink reordering programs.
Exactly. A google search makes it evident that millions are complaining about this. You would have people writing 3rd party drivers to bypass this and making miillions.
The other inkjet scam going that hasn't been mentioned is the automatic ink reordering programs.
Oh yes...I noticed this when I bought my new HP - their program is called "Instant Ink". A complete rip-off, but it might be LESS of a rip-off for those that do very little printing - I dunno.
I've had decent luck over the years with Canon inkjets. No issues with using 3rd party ink, which is about half the price of Canon's. If I can get 5 years from a $100 printer there's not much to complain about.
Me, too. Mine is now 9 years old and still going strong.
Have you used a modern inkjet? They are faster these days. Look at the HP Officejet X series... or any of the HP pagewide inkjet series. You won't find a laser printer that reaches those print speeds at the same price. These printers print at nearly 50 ppm in professional mode and the higher end up to 75 ppm in everyday business mode (hp pagewide inkjets).
The ink for these inkjets are also cheaper than the official hp toner for the printers you linked to (i see you linked to generic). You can google generic inks if you want to, but the official HP ink comes to 1.2 cents per page.
again tho cost has inched up as these seem to be in 150-200$ range for cheapest but if you NEED to print photos at home
i did a project some years ago for a big bank and we took out perfectly good Xerox units and put in HPs...we removed a whole semi-truck full of toner cartridges lol
so even in business the emphasis is on printer "management" as the selling point was the HP software that ordered ink at the "correct" time
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
