IN RESPONSE TO MY EARLIER PRINTER BLEG POSTS, READERS WRITE IN: Reader Rob Ives emails:
I have a small HP wireless laser printer (1022nw) which has been great, but I think the low priced Samsung wireless printers (I have one at home) are impossible to beat. The prices are so low they are hard to believe. Just try “Samsung laser printer” at Amazon.
You mean like this? Reader Tom Armstrong emails:
Epson R series. I bought an R300 a couple of years ago on eBay for $40 (newer model R340 is available for <$75 on eBay). It prints directly on CD’s which is handy on occasion and does a decent job printing photos. But most of all, there are vendors selling generic ink (again on eBay), for less than $2 per cartridge. It has separate cartridges for each color so you don’t throw away the whole color cartridge because you’re out of blue. I buy a case of 24 (6 of each color), for $35, free shipping. And the ink quality is as good or better than Epson ink. It’s a really good “throwaway” printer.
Reader Martin Pease writes:
I am in charge of supporting a remote sales force. The single biggest technical problem I encounter is printers, and the main culprit is HP. Drivers that don’t work right, tons of crapware installed from the CD, dozens of services installed in Windows… For my own personal printer, I bought a Brother MFC-J630W multifunction printer. It has wired, wireless and USB for connectivity, it installs a minimal set of software, and it just works. I am recommending Brother printers to all the people I support over HP models. They tend to be a bit cheaper, too.
I’ve had good luck with HP in the past — my early-1990s LaserJet 4L still works — but they seem to have cut quality lately. And there’s an InstaPundit bonus. A reader emails: “Good news! You recommended Brother wireless laser printer has been reduced on Amazon to $99! Can’t beat that!”
Meanwhile, William Stoddard is bucking the HP-haters: “For Michelle Dornath-Mohr’s benefit, I’d like to say that I’ve been buying and using Hewlett-Packard printers and multifunctions for years. I traded in my previous HP printer for a multifunction early this year, not because it had stopped working, but because it was no longer possible to download a printer driver compatible with my current operating system; they seem to last forever, and at least for inexpensive models, the output quality is pretty good. My new multifunction has full wireless capability, which is handy. So I recommend looking at HP.”
And Jonathan Bailey writes:
I just delivered my oldest daughter to UofA in Tucson and I bought her a Canon Pixma MP560 that cost about $150 ($50 after Apple rebate). It’s an all-in-one unit that prints, scans, copies and faxes. Canon has one tank of ink per color, so using up one color doesn’t require you to by a whole new cartridge, just the color you are out of at roughly $12.00. Also, the scan feature of Canon printers and scanners create multi-page PDF files, unlike HP all-in-ones that create a separate TIF file for each page. I use an HP for work (at home) but find I need to use the Canon on the family computer to scan documents (frequently), meaning I do a lot of running back and forth between computers with a thumb drive. Can’t speak for the other printer
brands out there but I’m happy with the Canon.
Hope this helps. The Canon is showing at just $79.99 at the moment, so that’s pretty cheap.