I've had a really bad experience with our printer. It's an Epson Stylus CX5400 and it just died out. I've hated it since the first time we bought ink cartridge replacements that seemed to come too soon. There are four different cartridges, black, red, yellow, and blue. Apparently you need all four cartridges even to print in only black. To get replacements for all is about $80. We just shelled out the $80 and now the whole thing quit working so it's time to buy a new printer. I would like some suggestions on what might be the best long-term value considering not just the initial cost, but factoring in the cost of future ink cartridges. Personally, I think that we really need a printer mainly for printing up black and white documents, though my wife would like to print color pictures from time to time. Do any of you have suggestions for brands that don't try to take advantage of the low cost printers, but to later charge you a lot for ink?
Get a Samsung Laser printer. Some models run about 60 bucks after rebate. The cool thing is the ink, is actually an ink powder, which you can refill many times. Its really easy to refill. You take out the cartridge, get a screw driver, and open the area where powder goes, and just fill up. No messy actual ink to deal with. For example with one filling of the ink cartridge, you can print about 500- 750 black and white pages. You can buy the ink powder on Ebay for like 10 bucks shipped. Now I print whatever I want, when I want. I'll give you the model of some good Samsung laser printer models if you are interested.
i recently bought a printer and to me the important thing was not to waste money on ink cartridges. but i got tired of the messy ink refill kits and so I found that canon and brother are the easiest companies to buy cheap generic cartridges for. careful on epsons and lexmarks because of the cartridge prices....
Buy a brother laser printer. Often officemax has rebates on themm we got ours for about 100 bucks or less. I have one, my dad has one and he has one at his shop. I have yet to change the toner in 3 years. He changes it every 6 months and he prints tons of invoice all day. We have the 1440 model. but they may have made new ones since then. We have an Epson all in one only for when we have to have color printouts.
An HP laser is hard to beat. They seem to be extremely durable and the toner cartridges are easy to find on ebay.
Thanks for the good advice. I'm going to start shopping around for laser printers. I almost got the Samsung laser a while back, but I figured that since it was so cheap after rebate that it wouldn't be very reliable. It's good to hear a positive review. Your responses confirmed what I was thinking that laser is the way to go. My wife can just get her pictures printed out at Walgreens or something.
