Inkjet printer recommendation....

[Chuck Wintle]

I need to buy an inkjet printer that has decent speed, inexpensive ink refills and it is not a multifunction printer. What are some good models that fit this description? thx.

[Matt Meiser]

inexpensive ink refills

Good one!

Dont fall for Kodak's promises. Seems like every couple times we use ours it needs ink. And we don't use it for most of our printing. Plus the thing doesn't work half the time.

[Jerome Stanek]

Why not a laser

[Greg Portland]

One tip: Never, ever, ever, power off a printer. It uses an extremely large amount of ink when it powers on (yes, I know it's not printing). This info comes directly from a friend who designs Inkjets.

" inexpensive ink refills" --> You can get low cost per page (expensive cartridges) or you can get cheap cartridges that won't print a lot. Print settings make a huge difference.

Do you need an inkjet for a specific reason (high quality photo prints, etc.)? If not I would strongly consider laser printers which now cost $200-$300... the cost/page is much lower.

[Mike Cozad]

+1 on the color laser... The wifi inkjet is nice as I can print from any computer in the world to it, which is a great feature. But if I had to do it again, I would get the laser and use a print server for the cloud printing functionality....

[Curt Harms]

Chuck, I believe you use Linux as well. Ubuntuforums.org has a lot of threads about printers. HP is the easiest and best supported; they have hplip & hplip-gui in many repos. I've had very good luck with Brother. They support Linux as well though not as smoothly as HP, you have to not be intimidated by the command line. I use refillable ink cartridges from inkowl.com (based in Montreal I think with a U.S. office) and buy bulk ink from them as well. That cuts the cost/page a LOT. Though it's not widely publicized, Lexmark is getting out of the consumer/small office inkjet business. Epson has quite good Linux support. Canon is spotty. Canon's North America site has little in the way of Linux support but Canon's Asian (Malaysia & Singapore) and Austrialian site are more useful.

[Steve Meliza]

The only way to get cheap ink is to buy third party. If looking for a cheap and simple printer I'd get an HP. Don't get too hung up on the manufacturer name of the low end printers, they're all made by Foxconn using the same computer chip inside them as this sort of product is a commodity.

I wrote firmware for inkjet printers for a year so I know a little more than the average person regarding how they work (though not an expert by any means). None of the units I worked with use up more ink simply because you turn the power off. As long as you leave the power cord plugged in then when you press the power button the printer is able to cap the print heads which keeps them from drying out.

[Greg Portland]

I wrote firmware for inkjet printers for a year so I know a little more than the average person regarding how they work (though not an expert by any means). None of the units I worked with use up more ink simply because you turn the power off. As long as you leave the power cord plugged in then when you press the power button the printer is able to cap the print heads which keeps them from drying out.

I looked into it a bit more and it appears that the type of cartridge determines if powering down will waste ink. Most modern cartridges don't contain the print heads so you should keep the power on (unless you don't use the printer for months).

http://www.digitalversus.com/readers...er-n15143.html

[Steve Meliza]

I have an MP610 that is very similar to the article in question. While I can't say for sure how often the print heads are cleaned, I have my doubts that it is on every power up as some usages of the MFP are to scan to a PC or memory card. According to my ink ordering records for the 4 years I've owned this printer I replace the big black ink tank once a year and the color tanks once every two years. I don't print a whole lot and limit my color printing, but I do power cycle it enough that if it cleaned the heads on each power up I think I'd be using ink a lot faster. What I know for sure will waste a lot of ink is when your wife presses the power button then yanks the power cord before the printer has time to cap the print head.

[Curt Harms]

Another point re inkjets. If I don't print anything with mine for longer than about 2 weeks, I can have a problem with partially plugged printheads. Black seems to be the most problematic for me. I've made up a page with small black and cyan, magenta and yellow colored shapes. If I haven't printed anything in a while, I'll just print it. I figure it uses less ink than multiple cleanings.

[David Weaver]

I would buy a small laser printer and get reman ink, not brand name ink.

It costs me about 5 tenths of a cent per page to print with reman ink in a small HP 1018 laser printer (NLA, but I'm sure they have a replacement for it) that is B&W only. If I buy HP ink, it's closer to 4 cents per page. HP can stick it. I believe even if your printer works, they've set the price of ink per printed page around 3 or 4 cents per page.

First HP printer I had (HP 540) would print 2000 pages on a cartridge for $20. Now they print 500 on a cartridge about the same price, and if you go over to laser, they have set the price of small laser cartridges about that.

But the small lasers are so much more reliable than the inkjet printers and you can buy inexpensive cartridges for them, despite all of the scare talk from HP about how they void the printer's warranty. I've been using a laser for 5 years now, and the three inkjet printers I had before that lasted about one year each before they developed a problem that required them to be tossed.

The other benefit of a laser printer is when it says it prints 15 pages a minute, it prints 15 pages a minute, unlike the inkjet printers that claim ridiculous numbers like 20-25 and print 5 a minute in real life. Inkjet printers and the pricing structure (cheap unreliable printer, expensive ink) are a *bad* joke and scummy business practice.

[Myk Rian]

We have a Samsung laser. Never been happier about not having ink cartridges drying out.

[Lee Schierer]

We gave up on inkjet type printers about 6 years ago and purchased a Brother Laser printer for about $100. We've used one cartridge and are currently working on our second one. The cartridge cost less than 2-3 ink refill cartridges and for us they last a couple of years. For color, I put my documents on a jump drive and take them to an Office supply store that offers printing. For photos I use the same jump drive and go to Walmart and use their in store printers. They have the cheapest cost I've found and you get your prints in just a few minutes. You don't have to worry about the "ink" in the laser clogging up and the cost is pennies per sheet.