I love my HP printer. Always prints when I ask it to every few months, uses third party toner, 0 issues whole time I've had it. Of course it's a laserjet from 2004 so it's built a bit different. I wouldn't recommend a new HP though lol.
If you want to print in oversized, I can readily recommend the Epson ET 8550.
It's a 6 tank A3+ photo/poster printer for under €800. If you got the use case for these (say as a photographer or an artist or you just want to print your own posters) then it's a really good model.
Unlike it's closest rival in the semi-professional market from Canon, the tanks make ink very cheap to operate, the vast vast vast majority of the printing cost is going to be the paper. It has a damn good printing quality even on mostly dark prints, it's quite fast for documents spitting them out in 3-5 seconds each so for personal use it's not meaningfully behind a laser. Quite variable, too, you can take the back off and feed whatever material you want in there with a huge clearance for thick plates to print on.
Sure, it's not something the average user ever needs but if you are looking for something like this, I can recommend it.
Interesting. What's the total price per sheet on decent paper? I do a few hundred A3 prints a week.
It's difficult to say as a lot depends on your specific use case and what you print and on which paper.
For my main use case, I bought a 100-pack of relatively inexpensive satin a3+ poster paper (so only 280g, but eh, they get put on the wall with something like poster strips or tack, I hardly need them to be thicker) which comes down to ~78cents per sheet. Ink usage is difficult to measure because my prints differ wildly in how much color is on them but my average so far seems to be ~50 cents per max quality a3+ print. So ~€1,30 per full size print if I want to be slightly pessimistic about it. But some of them were probably more like 85 cents total. 😅
The ink bottles really last a long time. Check your local prices but over here they cost €22 a bottle to replace, the printer has two blacks (one is pigment based for documents and stationary and so on), CMY and a 60% Gray, they all cost the same here but might be different for you. And then of course depends on what you print.
What I sadly cannot say is what A3 would cost, but scaling down you should be looking at roughly 20% less ink costs per print for full-size graphics prints, and then of course the paper you're printing on. But that's just mathing it down from my A3+ prints.
Thanks for doing the math. I have a deal with a commercial printer for slightly less, so it appears I won't be changing. Rather not have the hassle either, in fairness.
Oh that's quite fair, plus at that volume it helps to not have the risk of the printing process on yourself on top of everything else. 😅
Brother.
Nope. They’re all shit.
Partially because ink/toner scam.
Partially because fuck you, I bought the damn thing. If I am ok with stripy printouts until I squeeze the last molecule of toner from your hellcartridge, imma do it and you can’t stop me.
Ex. I bought a $30 printer off eBay. Burned thru the toner quickly. Bought cartridge.
Turns out that this printer counts pages - and only pages - and hangs itself at an arbitrary number of the same.
Twenty pages of the cartridge were lettter sized.
Ten were A4.
The remaining pages? A fucking 5.
IOW, I printed thirty total pages of US letter. And the remainder were half-letter.
Printer doesn’t care, a page is a page.
Admittedly, printers have to sol e a fairly difficult MechEng problem - grab one and only one sheet, pull it just right, and don’t wrinkle it.
That doesn’t give the mfg the right to extort us. I literally should have 2x the A5 pages I’ve remaining bc by def each one is half of (roughly) a full page.
I’ve gone from printing general templates for my day to day, to developing things that feel native to me to draw - but I’m also a fountain pen hobbyist and truly care about paper quality, etc.
TL;dr - I just want some damn lines to color between, as I organize and journal my life. Printer manufacturers have abs ruined that. There are zero good ones.
Srsly I’d rather spend the time to carefully develop a template for day to day use and trace it (max 1 hr, tracing it then takes zero time to speak to) than deal with printers.
But that’s just me, an IT guy who values organizing in an analog world.
Oh, also, a 40ish IT guy who remembers LaserJets that were nearly bulletproof and still weren’t worth screwing with.
Interestingly, here in Asia some inkjet printers are sold with huge (like 500ml per color) external ink tanks that take very cheap 3rd party ink. They're not terribly expensive. I see all the print shops and some businesses using them, they seem to work OK. I don't have one personally, but recently I've been tempted to get one.
If I do, I'll post about it somewhere. It sounds like it's nearly worth physically flying all the way over here, buying one, and carrying it back. If you're a small business owner and print a lot or something.
Looks like my next printer will be from alibaba
Worth a shot. Let us know how it works out!
Sort of depends on what type of printer you're aiming towards. At work we've been mainly using HP Laserjet (the more expensive business class types with multiple trays) & those things are workhorses, they do last a good while. I also did work for a guy whose office still runs an ancient HP Laserejet from probably 20 years ago & somehow the thing still works (old enough to still have a parallel port on it haha).
On a related note more recently I've been testing a Canon MegaTank color inkjet to replace our dying Lexmark color laserjet, so far everyone in the office hates the Canon.
Same. We have dozens of M477s and M479s in production and few issues. Recently started deploying 4301s and so far so good. I bought an M479 on a good sale a few years ago for personal use and never had a problem. No mandatory subscription, hp account or any of that mess, and the toner lasts a long time. Not sure if it even will expire.
Many years ago we maintained a fleet of 4050s and 2200s (had to purchase parallel port add on cards to use those…) Those were rock solid for many years and very repairable, but at a certain point part availability and time lost doing repairs adds up and we had to move on.
I love my cannon megatank
I’m pretty happy with my Canon GX7021.
It’s pigment based inkjet, so no bleed, and it also prints thick card stock that lasers can’t. And way cheaper than lasers.
Otherwise ticks all the boxes, double side print and scan, Ethernet etc
That's interesting & somewhat surprising, we are currently testing a Canon MAXIFY GX5020 and everyone in the office hates its color output. It's in the same MegaTank family that your Canon is in.
I'm trying to figure out if maybe Canon sent us a bad printer or if these Canons just don't do colors that well. If you have a chance can you do these two color test prints & let me know how yours does?
https://cmyktool.com/cmyk-test-print/ (download the PDF and print it)
https://printtester.com/#print-color-test-page (download the Color Test Page PDF and print it, the one with the color wheel)
What I've found is that our Canon does fine with the CMYK Test Print but doesn't do as well on the Color Test. For us in the color wheel when the colors blend from Blue into Red (e.g. the dark blue / purple / dark red) the mixed colors look sort of dull and generally off. So any images with purple or around that color come out sort of darker/dull compared to our old color laser printer. I can't really explain colors that well but you get the gist :D
When we first received the printer magenta was barely printing so all the colors were especially bad, after doing the printer maintenance functions that color at least started printing but I wonder if the printer heads are just screwed up on this one, hmm.
I don't have anything to directly compare against, but it seems fine to me! Then again, I bought this for productivity (not photos).
Canon laser, no question.
I believe they manufacture for other brands including brother, but I just woke up and I'm too lazy to reference. You like doing online research like this anyway, so you're welcome.
Have one of the last decent HP printers.
I've gone from being able to easily and happily recycling my laser printer cartridges to HP - print off the label and send free post - to going through some convoluted account sign-up bullshit pictures of my inside leg whilst upside down. Yeah not happening.
Eventually my toner is going to be too expensive to support and the printer scanner will break.
Thank-you for asking this question.
92 comments huh? Well without even reading I'm sure about 90% of them say the same thing: Brother Laser Printer. This is the way. Join us Brother.
Just got a Cannon laser with a scanner for less than $100 can't beat that.(d570 I think)
Had an old Samsung laser that was amazing.
But only get laser and only B/W. And F HP!
I had a really bad experience with a $30 hand scanner and Brother support (they included the wrong size calibration sheet in the packaging and refused to replace it, and were assholes/user blaming about it). I definitely did not want to deal with that for a $400 printer/scanner combo. I went with Xerox 6515 instead, which has been going solid for 4 years - black toner is at 25%, the rest are mostly full. I have never used it with USB, only Ethernet (plugged in network). Works great with Windows, Linux, and Mac. The scanner does great work.
Cheap printers are cheap because they make up the cost with ink. If you want something decent then bite the bullet and fork over more cash upfront. A printer designed for corporate/office work will typically be more durable - but buyer beware, may have "features" that only look good on a sales presentation. Do your research, avoid cloud storage/fax/etc.
I also got my godmother an Epson Ecotank, due to simplicity. It has been going swimmingly. Their "innovation" is (massive, mind you) refillable tanks in the printer, you must buy bottles of ink. That makes ink DRM impossible, but their ink is cheap enough that bootleg ink is unnecessary.
If you can't afford a more expensive printer right now then take trips to your local FedEx/whatever and put some money each time you do towards a decent printer. DO NOT get a temporary cheap printer, ink will easily cost you the same as a decent printer over a short period of time.
I have a Cannon laserjet and it's amazing, cheap to operate, and has worked great for almost 10 years
I like my Xerox Phaser 3020. No complaints so far, doesn't even require installing drivers, and cheap non-OEM toners are widely available.
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