Time for a new printer...

P

Psychopomp

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Feb 21, 2005
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I decided to do a little hiking a few days ago around the area where I live now. To help me on my way, I loaded up MapTech to print a topo map of the area. To my dismay, with a brand spankin' new cartridge, my topo map was a blob of pink.

About a year ago a piece fell off the printer and I could finally say "it's falling apart," I've never had anything actually fall apart.

It's an old HP 810C, I got it when I started college (I got my undergrad degree in 2003, so the printer is around 6 years old). It's a wonderful printer for text... but it's one time photo quality has slipped a bit.

So what I'm in the market for is one of these new-fangled printer/scanner combo thing-a-ma-jigs (because my scanner will NOT work with WindowsXP no matter what I do).

I'd like another HP, because I've had a lot of luck with them in the past. But I'd like to keep it under $250 if that's at all possible. I don't need the best printer in the world, just one that'll print my little maps in shades of green instead of blobs of pink (now if the map was shades of pink, I could manage... but it was a blob).

Any suggestions?

THanks,
Ben
 
I love my Epson 1280. I've had it for years. And... you know what? Three or four years later Epson is still making the 1280. That says a lot. In an industry where a model rarely lasts a year, the Epson 1280 has held the field for getting on four years.

They street for about $275-300.
 
K.V. Collucci said:
HP 1507...I picked one fo these up from HP.com recently when my both my scanner and printer crapped out (an Epson printer and a Microtek scanner). I have not had any problems so far. I do like the added function of being able to copy.
Click to expand...

I like the looks of that a lot. It says that the cable isn't included, I'm assuming that it uses a standard cable?

I may have to put off that Schatt & Morgan stockman I'd been eyeing lately for this printer.
 
I've given up on color ink jet printers myself. I had an old original HP "Deskjet" inkjet that I far exeeded the duty cycle on and it lasted at least 6 years if not longer. I replaced it with another HP inkjet that always failed me when I had something important to print. Then came a Lexmark/Compaq IJ1200 which was a great printer until the factory original half full ink cartridge ran out. $50 latter, I was thourougly ticked because I still had no printer and was $50 poorer. Those ink cartridges are way to expensive.

Today, I use a plain old black and white Laserjet. It works. These days you can get an entry level HP LaserJet 1320 for ~$250.
 
The store I work in opened in 1993. The printers we use today are the same printers that were there in 1993. They print probably a thousand pages a week or more and have never had any problems. The lazer printer we use for things like order guides (the dot matrix printers can't print a barcode that can be scanned by our hand held order guns) gets jammed all the time.

I'm proud that my 810 has lasted this long, and is still a good text printer... no matter what I buy, I'll probably keep the 810 hooked up to one of my computers just for printing text.
 
At the law firm I used to work for we only used HP. Our newest printer was about 6 months old and had done 250,000 sheets. The older ones were in the millions of sheets. You can't beat HP for printers IMHO.
 
HP's are the workhorses of printers.

I've got a new Epson (CX4600 under $100) that does a wonderful job on photos and general printing, the scanner is better than any I've used. The only caveat is ink, the Durabrite is expensive (it doesn't smudge). My cartridges (4) lasted about four months, replacing them was about $70. It will not work with one cartridge empty.
 
I have an HP PSC750, one of the multi functions, and other than cartridges it's been fine. Nice functions, easy to use--I use the scanner quite a bit actually, and we're very happy with the photo print quality when using good paper.

HP also stood behind their warranty as I screwed up a Laserjet 6P a few years ago with recycled paper(it tore internally and was impossible to clean out of the roller area, so they overnighted an advanced replacement that lasted another two years). I like them for that.

That being said, next time I go for a printer I'm looking at something simple and for a wireless option. For $60 I bought an Ambicom 900mhz wireless that fits in the USB connector, and it works, I think, but not on multifunction printers--sometimes it works on basic print but if it's at all involved it ends up as hash on the page. It should work well on a stand alone printer. HP does offer a wireless device for mine, but it's $200+

Am I wrong in thinking laserjets are at this point probably cheaper per page than inkjets? I'd advise someone to actually sit and calculate out the per page as if you do a lot of printing it'll add up and give you a truer cost of the printer. I read that HP makes like $4000 profit per gallon on inkjet ink, so they're all now in the razor game--give away the razor(I've seen decent inkjet printers below $80) and make your money selling the blades, err, cartridges.
 
If you're compliant enough to pay $4,000 or more per gallon for the convenience of getting your ink in cartridges, inkjet probably is more expensive than laser (it might even be more expensive than hiring an Egyptian to carve hieroglyphs in limestone). For those of us who buy our ink in bottles and refill the cartridge it's a good bit cheaper. :cool:
 
Cougar Allen said:
If you're compliant enough to pay $4,000 or more per gallon for the convenience of getting your ink in cartridges, inkjet probably is more expensive than laser (it might even be more expensive than hiring an Egyptian to carve hieroglyphs in limestone). For those of us who buy our ink in bottles and refill the cartridge it's a good bit cheaper. :cool:
Click to expand...

So how good is the quality on those refills these days? My parents tried them back when I was in high school and using a lot of paper/ink, but they never seemed to work too well even with text. But that was a long time ago in terms of technology (I graduated high school in 1999), and I'm sure they're better now. If so, then I'm probably sold on another inkjet.

As far as being a workhorse, this 810 sure has been. My undergrad degree was English with a journalism minor, so it probably printed upwards of 20,000 pages (I usually went through a 5000 sheet box of paper a year). Certainly not the life of a dot-matrix, but good enough... and it still prints text just fine.

Great suggestions all around, guys. I've done research on all of them. The HP that KV suggested is still the front runner, but these all look like good machines.

Thanks a lot :)
 
My personal experience is limited to one printer, but a couple of brothers recently opened a cartridge refilling center at a local mall. They tell me they can usually refill a cartridge about 5-6 times before the heads wear out. It's best to refill it before it's empty. Sometimes people bring them old cartridges that ran dry and have been sitting drying up for a long time -- they soak them in solvent and they can usually get it to work even then. You leave the cartridge with them and they mess around with it while you shop, and when you come back they show you a test page to prove it's working -- they won't let you pay them until they have a perfect test page. They have a collection of printers that between them can test any cartridge. They told me there's a single printer designed to test all cartridges but it's too expensive -- they use a collection of 9 or 10 printers instead. They charge about half the printer manufacturer's price, which makes their customers very happy and still leaves them plenty of profit.

You can get cartridges for most printers cheaper than that on the net. It's even cheaper to refill them yourself. They are not designed to make that easy; in fact they're designed to make it difficult, but once you figure out how to pry the cap(s) off yours or you drill the holes or whatever it takes, you can keep topping them up before they run dry and avoid interruptions. If you do a lot of printing you can get a system with big bottles that feed into the cartridge continuously, too.

I have heard stories from people who've tried refilling and had a lot of trouble with the heads clogging and given it up. All I can say is I haven't had any more trouble with heads clogging on a refilled cartridge than on a new cartridge. If you don't print often enough or clean the heads often enough or park the carriage properly, the heads will clog.
 
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