Saturday, January 30, 2010

Info bleg

Can anyone recommend a decent printer/scanner that has reliable cartridges that will work as they actually should and not constantly stop working for no good reason?

Also, it can't be an HP. I will never buy one of those worthless pieces of $#@! again.

P.S. Thanks for the link, James!

UPDATE: After adding the P.S. above...
Sometimes I think the internet is making fun of me.

13 comments:

  1. I have a Dell all-in-one that has held up for about six or seven years with not problems. I'm not particularly attached to the Dell brand, but this one has been pretty good.

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  2. As soon as you start combining printers and scanners, from my experience you get a shitty version of each. If I were you id buy a low cost laser printer, and a separate scanner. Both of my HP ones have been working perfectly for the last 10 years so I am not really up on any new models to recommend to you.

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  3. Yeah, I could keep the old one to use only as a scanner--it works okay for that. I just need a new printer. No matter what factory or aftermarket brand of cartridge I've tried, one of them always craps out after a month or so, and when the cartridge goes, the whole thing is dead. Right now I have an old black ink cartridge that's empty in it just so I can use it as a scanner and print stuff with the color cartridge. The "refurbished" black cartridge that I bought about a month ago just up and died today.

    Got it from Inksell.com, btw.

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  4. Oh yeah, and I put off buying any cartridges until just recently because I KNEW this would happen. I was just hoping it would last long enough to print my tax forms. I'll just have to print them using the color cartridge to print "black" text.

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  5. unless you absolutely HAVE to have color, go with a black laser printer. much lower cost per page. in fact, some color lasers are down in the $300 range, worth a look if color is mandatory.

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  6. The major problem with inkjet printers is the cartridges. They're very temperemental, even when treated well.

    You can get a cheap laser printer for not much over $100 that should suit your needs pretty well.

    As for printing color, unless you print a lot, I'd recomend just going to Kinko's for printing color.

    Otherwise, I've usually had decent luck with Epson color ink printers.

    And usually getting one of the all-in-one type units is a bad deal, unless they pay you to take it.

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  7. Thanks, everyone. I'll definitely be looking for a black-only laser printer. I almost never really HAD to print anything in color, anyway.

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  8. I have accepted the fact that printers suck and won't last long. So, I actually have a new Epson scanner/printer/fax combo deal that I paid $69.00 sitting on my desk. I purchased it specifically because it used the same cartridges that I had leftover from the last piece of crap Epson. And, I have a second one still in the box sitting in the closet that I got on sale for $39.00 just waiting for this one to crap out.

    I have accepted defeat in the printer game. I'm not proud of it.

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  9. Dave: Yeah, sometimes I miss my Star NX-1000 dot matrix printer. The first one I ever had, and it ALWAYS worked.

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  10. I have a brother 1040 laser printer. It works superbly.

    No color though. Has been boringly reliable. I think I paid 200 bucks.

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  11. I've had good luck using the Brothers line from back when they used full-width ribbons for printing. Currently I'm using their MFC-490CW which replaced an h/p that cost over $200.00 and stopped working after about six months and less then 100 printed pages. NEVER buy another h/p POS again.

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  12. I'll second the Brother laser printer. I have an HL-2040 that I've use about four times a year for the past 3 years (and I was deployed to Afghanistan for one of those years) and I'm still on the original cartridge. Laser toner cartridges don't dry out.

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  13. I'm on my third Epson all-in-one. What I found out is, when you're not using it, TURN IT OFF. The first two went 11 and 13 months respectively. I left them on pretty much all the time. This one has gone over two years and still works. Unfortunately, it burns a lot of ink because I have to clean the heads fairly often (and ink - literally - costs more per oz. than gold. Well, maybe not NOW.) But it is still working. It's a photo-quality printer and a 1200 DPI capable color scanner. I'm pretty happy with it.

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