Most Cost Effective Printer for Home User, 98% B&W, Mod-Heavy User?

[webmanoffesto]

Hello,

What is the most cost effective printer for moderately heavy user who almost never prints color, but would like to have that option, and might use it more if the color cartridges were not SO expensive. I don't need photo quality prints.
- A fast printer is good, but saving money is more important.
- A duplex printer (for double sided printing) is occassionally handy but not required.
- I have a scanner, so a printer/scanner is not required but could be nice, not worth adding much money to the price though.
- I think that having separate C,Y and M cartridges is a nice feature.
- I'm willing to use refilll kits to refill cartridges by hand, if I can be confident it will work.

I have an HP Deskjet 970cxi printer, which I admit has been reliable all the 5+ years that I've had it. The problem is that the cartridges are WAY too expensive. I could buy a Cannon Pixma with cartridges for what I pay just for one BW and one Color cartridge for my Deskjet. I buy remanufactured cartridges and they are still about $20 a piece. And now, my color cartridge ran out again, even though I almost never print color. I have refilled cartridges by hand but I find that it doesn't always successfully get the cartridge working again. I saw that I can buy empty genuine HP cartridges online and bottles of ink (I still have the hypodermic needles) but that adds up to real money too.

I am a school teacher. Sometimes I need to print 40 copies of a page the night before a lesson. Sometimes I print one or two copies of a 15 - 20 page document. I pick up 1 or 2 reams of paper every 1 or two months. I don't know if that makes me a heavy user.

What would you recommend.

(One person warned me against the Cannon Pixma because, unlike HP, the cartridge does not have its own print head; so they tend to clog over time.)

 

[erick13]

I have a Canon Pixma ip8500 and really like it. It has 2 paper paths, duplexing and indivual color cartridges. I haven't had any problems with print heads clogging on this printer or any other Canon printer I've had in the past. I would really recemond a Pixma series printer for what you want.

 

[Osage]

To webmaniffesto,

Sounds like a general purpose Canon printer would be perfect for you. Something like a ip3000 or ip4000. I don't recommend an ip8500, which is an awesome photoprinter but its not as good for text. Sadly both the ip3000&ip4000 are getting hard to find--even on ebay. But you might be able to find a MP780 at Fry's electronics or outpost.com for as little as $100 after rebates. And the Mp780 is based on the ip4000 printer engine but also flatbed scans, has a ADF, copies, and faxes.

You get your best economy--even better than a Laser on B/W text--when refilling.
But if you are willing to refill even a chipped Canon like the ip4200 or ip5200 will due---but you are still better off with a non-chipped Canon IMHO. And Canon BCI-3&6 cartridges are very easy to refill.

 

[websnail]

I am a school teacher. Sometimes I need to print 40 copies of a page the night before a lesson. Sometimes I print one or two copies of a 15 - 20 page document. I pick up 1 or 2 reams of paper every 1 or two months. I don't know if that makes me a heavy user.

What would you recommend.

(One person warned me against the Cannon Pixma because, unlike HP, the cartridge does not have its own print head; so they tend to clog over time.)

Ok... first things first if you want to save money you should be prepared to put a little time in learning a few tricks of the trade that are available on here. Not ideal I realise but you can save a small fortune if you take the time and read.

Now, given that my other half (Bex) is a teacher and has a selection of printers to choose from I can give you a fellow teachers appraisal on printers and a few recommendations (including some non-printing ones).

For printers Bex prefers the Epson C84/86/88 or the Canon iP4000/iP4200.. I was told to ditch the Epson R200 and R300 as being nice for pretty work but just plain outclassed for worksheets and general classroom stuff.

So, whilst you got a warning on the Pixma's I can't recommend them enough.. In fact I'm starting to move my Epson printers to one side in favour of a set of two iP4200's and two more iP4000's..


Now the kicker in all of this is that if you REALLY want to save yourself some money AND actually be able to print more then you could do worse than install your printer with a Continuous Ink System and buy your ink in bulk... Granted, given your usage you could just opt for refilling but as the one providing the printers for Bex I've seem her output change from being black and white, photocopier reliant to full colour, home printers reliant. We're not getting through 5 reams of paper a month at home and thank {deity} it's a business expense

Part of the reason for this is the next part of the equation which is something you could consider talking your headteacher/principal into.. We purchased a Fujitsu ScanSnap fi-5110EOX2 document feed scanner which handles double sided scans at a blistering pace. The sole reason for it was that Bex has over 7 x 80 litre boxes full of worksheets, resources, etc... that we had no storage space for, nor an effective indexing system. She's now slowly but surely working her way through the boxes and putting them all onto her school laptop and a 1Gb USB memory stick. The snapscan will save to PDF and comes with Adobe Acrobat Standard so you can OCR the scans and make them searchable. The result is that she is able to print off whatever she needs either at home or using a printer at school, and has a very quick and easy way to find the stuff she needs by using search.

I appreciate this is a whole lot more information that you asked for but in terms of stress levels, time saved and general popularity (guess who now has the resources the other staff will be extra nice for ) Bex is way ahead..

Hope that helps anyways...

 

[erick13]

OI should of been more clear. I wasn't recommending the ip8500 for what the OP wants. I do think the Pixma series is where he should go though.

 

[panos]

- A fast printer is good, but saving money is more important.
- A duplex printer (for double sided printing) is occassionally handy but not required.
- I have a scanner, so a printer/scanner is not required but could be nice, not worth adding much money to the price though.
- I think that having separate C,Y and M cartridges is a nice feature.
- I'm willing to use refilll kits to refill cartridges by hand, if I can be confident it will work.

A Canon definitely, either the cheap ip3000 or the more expensive ip4000 (same quality on normal paper, much better quality on photo paper).

 

[fotofreek]

Good advice, Panos, but don't forget the ip5000, which I've seen available cheaper than the ip4000 and more readily available. I wanted the ip4000 but found three (new) ip5000's at a Staples store a few months ago for $100 each. Bought one for my wife, one for a friend, and a spare for us, just in case the aftermarket vendors can't come up with compatable carts for the newest Canons.

 

[panos]

The ip5000 is the best 5-color printer out there, but perhaps is a bit too expensive for the author of the original posting... He is not really interested in photo printing, so I think he loses nothing by sticking to the barebones ip3000...

 

[fotofreek]

Same with my wife. I wanted to find one of the remaining low cost ip4000's. Missed the $50 closeout sale on them by procrastinating. That's when I found the $100 deal on the ip5000. Works great for her as a general purpose printer with mostly text and some color on web pages. She may also become interested in printing photos someday and quality will be good there, too. I have a few dozen bci-5 carts and refill, so her printing will only cost me around $30 to $40 per year in ink. The ip4000's I've seen on the internet cost more than the ip5000's cost me locally.

 

[Nifty]

My solution (what I do at home) is to use my workhorse HP Laserjet 4 plus to print 220 programs for church every week and for other "large" B/W jobs. I also have a color Canon on the side to do day to day printing. Up front costs may be a tiny bit higher, but even though refilling is SUPER cheap and easy with the Canon i series and IP series, it is hard to beat the long term price, reliability, and ease of a B/W laser printer, especially if you use re-manufactured toner cartridges or even refill them.

If that isn't in your price range then I'd suggest a 4 color i series or IP series canon printer. My first one was the good ol' Canon i560 which uses a large pigment blank ink for B/W text (and does a great job) and also prints beautiful pictures. I've now got a 5 cartridge MP750 and i860 but don't really see a huge difference in print quality.