Yet again a printer fails after a couple of years of light use and get thrown out despite looking like new.
What does Singletrackworld recommend? Needs to have WiFi and scanning but other than that reliability is the most important thing.

I have a Brother MFC-J5910DW A3 inkjet thats been okay. Cheap ink but quite noisy and you have to fiddle about with the tray to swap between A3 and A4 (unless you buy a second tray). Easy wireless connection and I can print to it from my iPhone and iPad.
The one annoying thing it does is that it sometimes runs though its cleaning routine or something at 6am on a sunday morning….
It also physically quite big.

Home printers – are they all carp?

No

But here’s a carp print.

Well corporate ones seem a bit rubbish too.

As someone who does a lot of printing, the sad fact is that decent quality printers still cost serious money. Cheap printers are like cheap anything else… crap. Would you buy that Apollo from Halfords. That’s cheap?

And they’re also physically big, and take up lots of room.

How much printing are you doing? I don’t even own a printer any more. Haven’t done for years. Digital print is now so advanced, and competitively priced, that I just send it to someone with a decent digital set up, and get them to output it for me. I spend a lot on print, but does it amount to the purchase price of a printer that actually prints a high enough quality? No, is the simple answer. Nowhere near!

As above, all “home” printers are shite & exist only to mug you off with massively overpriced inks.

Fortunately I have some decent printers at work but otherwise I’d make do without one. Can’t remember the last time I actually needed to print a hardcopy of anything rather than just download it to my phone/tablet and as for photos you are WAY better off outsourcing (for both price & quality reasons).

light use

That’s your problem (assuming it’s an ink jet).
Ink jet likes to be used. Sitting for months dries the ink out. If you must use ink jet, get an HP. At least you’ll be able to get it going with a new cartridge.

Depends what you want it for of course, but we have a Samsung Wifi laser (mono).

Does everything we need. We don’t use it that often, but it always works when you need it. It’s laser, so no issue with jets drying or anything. Toner lasts for ages and aren’t that expensive to replace.

Had ink-jets in the past and had nothing but trouble with them.

If I had the choice i@d have a mono laser again too – always a lot more reliable than an inkjet for occasional use.

Use a cheap laser like a Brother for most of your printing/scanning and add a compact inkjet for when you really need colour. Inkjets seem to eat Ink if you only print 2 or 3 pages every couple of days

Edit: 🙂 2 more posts saying the same thing while I tap out mine

I have a Brother MFC-J5910DW A3 inkjet thats been okay. Cheap ink but quite noisy and you have to fiddle about with the tray to swap between A3 and A4 (unless you buy a second tray).

Getting rid of one very similar to this at the moment – Brother MFC-J6510DW. It’s got an error code (76) and I don’t have time or patience to fix it. Selling for 99p at the mo plus postage/collection, if anyone is interested let me know.
We bought an Epson dual-tray to replace it – I’ve had an A4 Epson for at least 6 years now and it’s been faultless.

Personally I wouldn’t have a laser in the house unless I had a room with decent extract, due to the toner micro-dust hazard.

My boss bought a colour laser printer from Tesco, was ridiculously cheap once he’d used his clubcard points. Cheapo colour laser printer

We have a HP Inkjet and use the two quid/month Instant Ink service. That seems to be working out OK for us.

Needs to have WiFi and scanning but other than that reliability is the most important thing.

Don’t buy a multi function device, they are inevitably rubbish. I have a Dell colour laser that has been cheap and economical, and a small A4 flatbed scanner that cost buttons and lives in the attic for the few times a year I use it.. even now there are phone apps that will do a ‘good enough’ job for most of those too.

I recently bought one of these: Brother HL-3140CW

I am an infrequent print user at home and got fed up with the Inkjets constantly drying up.

The laser sits in a cupboard for weeks at a time and wakes up when I send something to it and then prints off a document without grumbling!

Thanks for the suggestions. Most of the time a laser would but occasion I need colour documents printed off for work. The scanner probably gets more use that the printer.
Perhaps I should get a cheap printer and just budget for getting a new one every year. Not very environmentally friendly though.

The photocopying function is surprisingly useful i find. Fax less so.

Inkjet printer dies ‘warrior’s death’

Very apt. Bloody inkjets.

The only home inkjet printer I’ve ever had any success with (and am still using several years after purchase) is the Kodak Hero 3.2.

The ink isn’t that expensive and I’ve never had any problems wit the nozzles blocking up, even when only used occasionally. Even if they did block it wouldn’t be too much of a problem as the nozzles are a modular swappable unit that can be bought separately.

The only problem is that Kodak don’t make printers any more so I don’t think you’d be able to buy one, not new anyway.

Nozzles on inkjets are far less likely to block if you use the printer on a regular basis. It’s when the printer sits thee for days, or even months, without being used that the ink dries & blocks them.

Decent inkjets are absolutely brilliant. The print quality is miles better than lasers. And you can print onto far better stock. When I say decent though, what I actually mean is eye-wateringly ****ing expensive!! 😉

Just bought an HP Envy 5640. So far seems great. Connected to Wifi with ease and prints directly without any issue from my iPhone, holds both A4 and photo paper at the same time. It even orders new ink when needed with HP’s Instant Ink programme that only costs £1.99 per month. Sick of unofficial ink that looks crap, runs out quickly and constantly seems to error in printers. Decided to go down the genuine ink route and this seems a great price.

One bit of advice, never buy a wireless printer that doesn’t have a screen. The way they connect to wifi never seems to work and without a screen and input of some type you can’t just type in your wifi password.

Little bit bulky … but we have one of these – HP Officejet 8620. Reasonable price once you claim the cashback and you can register for a 3 yr warranty.

We have an old (10 years ish) Brother mono laser bought for £99 before WIFI happened to cheap printers. It’s still going as well as it ever did on its third (ish) toner cartridge (£40 to replace IIRC) and quality is great. Fabulous bit of kit.

OTOH, been through several crapola inkjets which have been universally naff, break, fail to print properly, cost a bomb to run with inks that last about 5 minutes, and to add to the fun, every time you print a photo it ends up the wrong size, tiny, or massive and printing all over the roller and not on the 6 x 4 which you definitely set up in the print preferences in about 15 places. I hate inkjets.

We went to Kodak after the Lexmark ‘announced’ that we’d used the ink we were ‘licenced’ to use from the cartridge…

It’s been great and the cartridges are decently priced – but they don’t make printers anymore…

Brother HL-3140CW

Good reviews and at £120 seemed decent value, and then on searching it seems that genuine replacement toner costs twice as much again!

I’ve had a Canon mp560 for about 5 years. Works fine, print quality is perfectly acceptable and a full set of 6 cartridges costs about £6 from 7day shop. It has wifi but I’ve never used it

Brother HL-3140CW

Good reviews and at £120 seemed decent value, and then on searching it seems that genuine replacement toner costs twice as much again!

Clone toner is much cheaper and just as good according to reviews, time will tell I guess!

My last HP wifi inkjet printer cost about £100 and got through 5 sets of cartridges in about 18 months before fatally clogging.

Cheapo dell laser colour printer and compatible toners off ebay.. run one for small business and seem to last 3-4 years. Last one cost about £65

Well I normally get bored of a printer before it dies, aside from busting the plastic feeder trays have never had one expire. Current one (print/scan/copy) is 5 years old. I last spent about £75 and buy either HP or Cannon.

My Canon MP160 lasted at least 6 years – it was just starting to play up a couple of months ago, and the final straw has been Windows 10 which apparently isn’t supported.

I’ll probably get another Canon, my kids need a colour printer for school work and the scanner/photocopier was handy on occasion.

(And whatever you get, make sure it will still print despite having an empty cartridge, nothing more irritating than not being able to print a B&W letter because the Cyan ink has run out…)

Thanks all. I’ve decided on a colour laser all in one, now need to decide which one…

Yes, they are all crap – I work for an IT company and I need to sell £30k of Hardware a month just to keep the lights on, yet I absolutely refuse to sell printers of any description because it’s more trouble than it’s worth when they inevitably break.

The business model is all wrong, they’re in the business of selling ink, not printers and they don’t want to make cartridges for the half-dozen people who still use a 5 year old one so the “inbuilt limited lifespan” factor is huge, 12 months in an office environment for a desk-top printer seems to be the norm.

The only printer I’ve sold willingly was a Xerox solid ink printer which cost £500 or so and hasn’t broken yet (fingers crossed) if a client asks us for one we recommend they lease one.

My last HP Inkjet lasted nearly 10 years before I binned it. Now have an Epson R2000 A3 ink jet, which is much higher quality.

I had an HP all-in-one that was excellent. I used it extensively for scanning in documents and printing off assignments when I did my HNC. I got rid of it because it was too big.

My parents have been using an HP 5530 printer/scanner for a while now and they are really happy with it. It has been used for printing off large numbers of letters for the sailing organisation my Dad was head of.

Cannon mx990 is performing OK for us, about year in.

Snide ink, 2 paper trays (1 for photo paper) cd printing, wireless, prints from phones, tablets etc, scans and copies as well. Big bugger though.

I’d never own another Hp printer. We had a cheap A3 Hp printer in work, total pita. Slow noisy wireless was sporadic. Hp printer at home died after 2 years, hardly used (may have been the death of it) always used proper ink, we were forever doing head cleaning on it before a print, frustrating.

Sorry, it’s a 900. Not a 990

Too late to edit.