Santa needs to get student son a printer compatible with his macbook (some don't like macbooks I'm told),just a budget thing for uni work essays, reasonable cartridge costs (if such a thing exists). Any recommendations,good deals out there, fed up of searching, cheers
There were ads in the paper yesterday for HP ones, around the £50-60 mark which would be ideal, look for AirPrint compatible ones, then he can print direct via wifi.
Any AirPrint printer will work, it's Apple tech, so it's price, as much as anything, that dictates your choice.
I have a cheap HP Photosmart 5510, cost about £50 works fine with my MBP. Supports AirPrint so you can print from any iOS device also cloud printing, HP give you an email address you can send documents to and they will print on your printer.
Trouble with most cheap printers is the ink, printer cost £50, inks cost £20ish for the low capacity ones.
AirPrint is for iOS (I think, maybe recent OSX can connect too). No need for AirPrint. I use a Canon pixma ip4700 with my MacBook. I'm sure it's well outdated now but the pixma series seem to work well and it was pretty cheap.
Budget to buy or budget to run?
Budget to buy is gonna be a inkjet printer.
Budget to run is gonna be a (colour) laser printer.
We've got a couple of macs here and have never given compatibility a second thought, just walked into local box shifting electrical shop and bough whatever printer looked good. There are air print compatible printers that you'd need to print from an iPad but I've honestly not heard of any issues with printers not working with mac laptops.
Trouble with most cheap printers is the ink, printer cost £50, inks cost £20ish for the low capacity ones.
My HP is practically mothballed because the inks are so expensive, the colours are together on cartridge (so you have to junk usable ink just because one colour is empty, and because even though it configure a file to print using only black ink the printer refuses to operate if the colour cartridge is absent or empty - it only gets used as fax and scanner now and I bought a second printer for printing.
As above- you'll (or he will) spend more on ink than you will on the printer so give some thought first to what the printer is being used for - picture printing or text? Maybe look at printers that have separate black inks for pictures and text - my canon has two black cartridges, one only get used as the key in colour images and the other is a bigger, cheaper one for text only. Also avoid having all the colours combined in one cartridge. Then look at the cartridge costs. Choose a printer on that basis and have a google to see if anyone moans about compatibility with macs but I doubt you'll find any issues.
[quote=poonprice said]Trouble with most cheap printers is the ink, printer cost £50, inks cost £20ish for the low capacity ones.
Depends where you get the ink from. I use compatible inks for my Canon printer and get 2 complete full capacity sets for £10. Don't do much photo printing, but haven't noticed any quality issue with the normal stuff I do.
Even lazer printers aren't that pricey these days. Unless you [i]need[/i] colour, that would be the way to go.
Depending on how often you do need colour, and what you need it for, printing things online (photos in particular) can work out a better idea
My Epson won't print if any of the carts are empty, and it takes six! That's sixty quid or so for a set, and you can't even get them from the likes of pcworld now. I got a set from these people, http://www.cartridgediscount.co.uk
Cost about £10, or thereabouts, and were quick in sending. Inks work ok, but as to how good they are compared to Epson original ink I can't say.
Look for a black and white laser, possibly 2nd hand or refurb, will be the cheapest thing per page...
For the odd colour printing do at it the university or borrow/pay friend for the few colour pages needed (and only for the final copies) anything which is work in progress can be B&W
Thanks for the advice all, it helps Santa find something. Option to print only in black would be handy - our HP at home won't, but setting it on fast draft helps save ink and quality is still okay. Cheers
Any suggestions on which laser mono?
ive have this one, that i use just for eBay invoices, regen toners are less than £10 shipped, original bundled one has printed 20-30 pages a day for about 5 months and just about out
i had a brother before that but it didnt want to work with OS X properly, always used to "forget" it was connected
Thanks 🙂