have gone through several printers and an incredible number of ink cartridges in the past few years.

current one is a HP ink jet. seems like every time i want to print i need to replce the ink.

i don’t need to print often. very rarely if ever in colour.

laser vs ink jet? don’t much care about the concern of bad/poisonous air as we rarely havce to print anthing.

any recommendations for an occasional use home printer?

wireless would be good.

scanner would be good.

cheers!

Definitely laser. Mono are very cheap now and the supplied toner will last ages even though it won’t be full. Even colour ones are much cheaper these days. I wouldn’t bother with a combined scanner. It limits your options a lot. Just buy a separate scanner or use your phone

Epson WF-2750 with cheap as chips replacement ink from click

i don’t need to print often. very rarely if ever in colour.

Nowhere nearby you can use a printer? Shop, library etc.

Plenty of copy shops around but when I need to print off an invoice,plane tickets or plans in the evening or on a weekend they are closed.

(this is Germany where shops close at 7-8pm during the week and many smaller shops don’t even bother with weekends…)

A local print shop is handy for photos, saves you buying and maintaining a photo printer but for casual printing of documents and tickets you might as well have your own. A £40 laser will save you hassle and last ages

Not printing often is a recipe to kill an inkjet with drying up cartridges and clogged print heads etc.

Laser printer.

I know you’re not bothered about colour, but for about 90 quid you can get a continuous ink system bundle (ink and printer) with scanner and WiFi.

Excellent value.

CISS Kits

Been through most options and separates work best for me. A cheap simple laser for most work related stuff. A cheap simple inkjet for occasional bits of colour, mostly for the kids. And a separate scanner.

Had the exact same issue with a Canon printer and got sick of it earlier this year. Seemed like everytime the thing got switched on it wanted a new cartridge, would change the one it said was empty and by the time it had primed that one it had emptied another one..!!
Main issue was, as stated above, not using it regularly. Inkjets are great if you are using them all the time but ours would sit for several weeks and then be needed to print of a 50 page presentation for work.
Anyhoo, we changed it for an HP M252dw colour laser as a friend had the multifunction version and rated it. It’s been great, startup and printing is way faster and it’s still on the starter set of toner after 1200+ pages printed.
Toner is a lot more expensive than ink to replace but going off-brand helps a lot, and I don’t mind so much if it lasts as long as it seems to..

I have had that in the past. Current printer is an HP Envy 5664 and it works rather well. Doesn’t get dried up and need endless head cleaning (which is what wastes ink). They do a monthly sub where you can pay something like £3/mo for less than 50 pages and they’ll send you cartridges before you run out. But our last lot lasted so long we haven’t done it yet.

We print about twice a month, and it doesn’t dry out. It does live in a cupboard though.. I wonder if that has an effect?

Adding to this, any experiences with a not too large multifunction device that has a decent scanner?

Picked up an Epson WF-3620 when we needed to sort a lot of paperwork for the house ASAP. But the scan quality is poor, so I find myself constantly carrying documents into work to scan them.

Six months ago I would have recommended my Brother DCP9020CDW multi function (huge) laser, but it’s gone bad and won’t repeat print without fading and PDFs are very erratic. I’ve thrown a full set of toners and drums at it but it’s still not right and getting binned. Will be replacing with another colour laser mfp that takes remanufactured toner. Watching this thread for a recommendation. Scan quality was good though.

A basic laser printer is the order of the day. I have 2 in my house. The original is an HP P2015 … must be 10years old if not more … it sometimes sits for months going unused, then gets the odd print and it works everytime. It has never failed, and is consistently decent quality.

The other is a bit newer and is a HP LaserJet 200 Colour. A few years old too, but it was a hand-me-down and for the sake of a set of non-OEM toner cartridges, its up and running fine. Plugged into a powerline adapter which can see the wifi router and now any computer in the house can print to it. Again, it can sit unused for weeks at a time, but will switch on quite happily and run out perfectly acceptable prints.

Inkjet in your circumstances is a waste of time.

Adding to this, any experiences with a not too large multifunction device that has a decent scanner?.

My experience is to use a scanning app on my phone. I use Scanbot which is much quicker, easier and better quality than the multi-function device I used to scan with. It’s one of my fave apps. The same company have an app called Unfade Pro for scanning photos, but not got much experience of that.

I still like to have a multifunction device with scanner, but the scanner is mainly used for copying rather than scanning.

I’ve just subscribed to HP’s “Instant Ink” subscription service. It looks good on paper (see what I did there?) but it remains to be seen if it works out cheaper/better. One advantage is that the charge is per page, not how much ink you use. That means I can print off the odd photo to keep the print heads from drying up without worrying about costly ink.

We have had a canon scanner/printer for about 5 years, some times gets loads of use, other times not used for a few months.

We just buy cheap cartridges (fraction of Canon cost) and they have always been fine.

We just buy cheap cartridges (fraction of Canon cost) and they have always been fine.

Just to put forward the other side of this, my HP printer worked fine for years, and only started to go wrong when I tried compatible inks in it. Had to get rid of it in the end.

But the scan quality is poor, so I find myself constantly carrying documents into work to scan them.

I’ve never had a scanner that was too poor for documents. They’ve always been pretty decent imo. Are you sure you have the right settings?

Thanks for this, I’m liking the look of the HP M252dw

I’ve never had a scanner that was too poor for documents. They’ve always been pretty decent imo. Are you sure you have the right settings?

I suppose they aren’t necessarily too poor, just poor. I used to have a client send me copies of drawings he’d marked up on site. They were usually A0 and he’d fold and scan them in bits. There was often bits I couldn’t quite read. One time to get the job done he just sent me a photo with his phone. It was 2-3 times better. I could zoom in and read everything. Obviously much quicker and easier for him too.

A scanner with the DPI turned up should be detailed enough I’d have thought – but dunno. Check settings.

I’ve never had a scanner that was too poor for documents. They’ve always been pretty decent imo. Are you sure you have the right settings?

Not too poor to read, but just poor quality, often bleeding through from the other side of the page, off white, noise etc. If you printed it, it would probably look like it’s been photocopied 5 times.

I tend to archive as PDF and shred all but the most important documents to keep the amount of paperwork I store down, and then just print something off if I need it. But the quality from this scanner is miles off something like what I’d been used to from networked photocopiers. Or even my old canon p-150, but wanted something with a decent document feeder.