It’s a minefield of expensive inks and poor outputs. Tempted by the cheap canon pixma at £40 as I could ditch it if the output is rubbish before the sample inks run out. Anyone had any good experiences of printers?

Much happier since I made the switch to laser. A little more expensive to start with but much better at doing the job when you need it.

I bought one of these before Xmas. Perfectly fine for a simple home printer.

http://www.hotukdeals.com/deals/hp-envy-4523-one-wireless-printer-with-3-months-instant-ink-34-99-argos-free-c-c-2618865

Happily we bought a Kodak after many years of expensive other males, ink is still cheap with genuine cartridges. Not sure what’s best now.

Decent
cheap
printer

Pick 2

It’s sad that printers are a disposable item, more so that they’re actually cheap just because they’re subsidised by the ink prices. If they were actually sold for their real value and ink prices dead cheap, people would be less likely to throw them out every time something jams up or heads clog. Sadly the manufacturers also don’t design in maintenance so they’re hard to fix.

Though thing I’ve found about ink printers is you either have to be using it frequently or you waste half a cartridge cleaning it. Most my ink costs are in cleaning rather than printing.

Tempted with a laser to be honest, but I do have a nice all-in-one office kind of ink jet (Epson), including sheet feed scanner, wireless, scans to PDFs, and even has a fax(!) in it (useful for the one awkward still stuck in the 80s company that insists I send by fax, though very rare now). I like it, but just the printer part is annoying because I don’t print a huge amount and it endlessly needs cleaning.

I’ve owned several canon printers recently and have been impressed with the output of all of them, relative to their cost. My Pixma MG5xxx printed very acceptable 7×5 and A4 size prints, easily as good as Snappy snaps.

My Pixma Pro-10s can print A3+ sized gallery quality Giclee prints. I’ve compared the output to a high end photochromic c-type lab print (basically a digital file printed to light sensitive paper) and I honestly preferred the inkjet (though that was partly because I could select a specific type of paper)

Obviously I’m not suggesting you buy a £600 printer but honestly the Canon (and I’m sure the epsom) ranger of budget home printers are really very good indeed.

Bought one of these as an emergency replacement for my decade-old Epson R200 last month:

Cheap Canon All-In-One

Print quality is fine and it’s really quiet. I use it to mainly print out the odd letter, claim forms and maps from Memory Map for route planning so it needs to be decent for the detail. For £30 if it lasts longer than the warranty I’ll be happy, ink is reasonably cheap online too.

Laser printer. I wish I’d bought one years ago rather than spending so much time and frustration on inkjets.

After a couple of cheap inkjets, I switched to laser (Samsung M2020) and never looked back. Laser printers work, they can be left alone for long periods without anything clogging, and generic toner is cheap compared to page output.

buy a used “office spec” (rather than domestic) laser for peanuts and run it on refilled toners from eBay.

Cheap to run and they don’t dry up like inkjets, print quality nicer and print is more waterproof.

munkyboy, what are you printing?

Canon is good if you want photo quality. HP is fine if you want supermarket quality documents (I have a £30 Asda special) but for everything else, I outsource.

print is more waterproof.

100% more?