Advice on color printer

[Mrs. M A V I C]

Hi all.

Today I started on the journey of homeschooling our 5 yr old. I'm interested in possibly getting a color printer. Thought I'd hit you all up for some quick advice. I'm finding I have a lot of things to print in color for our lessons, projects, etc and it would be great to do it all at home and not have to use a service somewhere. MAVIC also had the thought maybe we could use it to print pictures at home so I'm curious about that too.

What are your suggestions? We have a great B&W laser but I'm guessing the laser color printers are gonna be pricey. Do I even need laser?

I appreciate the input.

[pdq]

Personally, I got fed up with color inkjets a few years ago. The nozzles were always clogging, and the carts seemed to be outrageously expensive.

Maybe they've gotten better. But I think color lasers have gotten cheaper, and they won't dry out. (Carts are probably still outrageous tho)

[raz]

The two big things with color inkjets are the cost of consumables and the near constant clogs and cleaning cycles.

I've had better luck with HP with regards the latter, but that's just one data point.

As to the former, the cost per gallon of printer ink when you scale up from the few drops they sell you is criminal.

[DavidS]

raz wrote:
I've had better luck with HP with regards the latter, but that's just one data point.

I have an HP Officejet that I was very happy with until I tried using some Costco ink refills. I've been dealing with recurrent clogs to the printhead over the last 6 months. I've had to remove it and manually clean it a few times. I've probably wasted more ink on cleaning cycles and reloading it than I have on printing. However, when it is working, the picture quality is great!

[Black]

I have a Canon all-in-one that's been great. Cheap aftermarket inks, no problem.
If this one dies tonight it's going to be replaced with another Canon.

[pdq]

I'd watch our ol' stompin grounds, Dealmac, or similar sites, for a deal on a color laser, like this one (that unfortunately expired last week).

At $135 for laser color, ethernet and Wi-Fi, I would be hard-pressed to buy an inkjet. But you should always check out costs of consumables before you buy.

[Billybob]

The upfront cost of color lasers have come down. I purchased a Samsung about 2 years ago for $200 (I think I saw the sale notice here miley-signs001, and recently I purchased an HP AIO color laser for home office use for $350 (it, m476nw, looks like it's down to $344 now).

The cartridges for these things are not cheap. They each take 4 cartridges, and a full set of replacements can be over $400. They also seem to play the same games that the inkjet manufacturers. My Samsung is finally asking for new cartridges, but it's not clear which one is empty. Two years may seem like a long time, but I have been a very light user of color printing relying mostly on black and white.

The output is very good and prints much faster than inkjet printers. However, the Achilles heel is that the output is no where near adequate for photoprint quality. They do print photos and they are good, but they lack the vibrancy that we expect from photos. For quality photo printing you still need to use inkjet printers on inkjet paper.

[August West]

As mentioned, consumer color lasers are not for photos. If your child (Where the heck does five years go!) is just doing graphics and drawings, it might be reasonable.

[Sam3]

We have an HP 8500 that is working well for our needs. One reason I went with this particular inkjet series was the lower cost of consumables when compared to lower end color laser printers. We haven't tried printing photos, so can't comment on that aspect. The current 8600 series adds e-print, which I wish ours had so that we could print from our i-devices.

[space-time]

1-Get a Brother which uses UNCHIPPED cartridges, such as 825/835 as an example, those models are now discontinued and selling at a premium on Amazon, but you should be able to find the current models on sale now and then, or Black Friday is just around the corner. A 5 year old can survive till BF without color printer.

Make sure you find compatible ink on Amazon for under $1 per cartridge.

2-Then get a Canon/Epson for Photos. Look at current models, again check cost of genuine ink. Do not use generic ink in this, keep it with good ink for Photos. I like Canon (I also had an Epson once). My latest MP 560 is 4 year old and just finished the second set of Canon cartridges, I print very little but never a clogged head during this time. I have an MX870 waiting to replace this 560 when it dies.

Watch for sales if not in a hurry. You should be able to find stuff at 60% OFF MSRP.