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Recommend me a multifunction printer

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KenZ71

Senior Member
I seem to have killed my 5ish year old multi function printer. So, let see what other recommend.

There are a couple on Amazon that have my eye HP OfficeJet 5740 or a similar Epson.

I print about 500 pages every 6 months, not huge volume.

What I want:

Double side print
Scan
Fax
$75 to $100 price range
Reasonable ink costs

Printers tend to last me about 5 years. I buy their ink the first 3 years or so then a couple batches of generics and the printer gets hosed.
 
I seem to have killed my 5ish year old multi function printer. So, let see what other recommend.

There are a couple on Amazon that have my eye HP OfficeJet 5740 or a similar Epson.

I print about 500 pages every 6 months, not huge volume.

What I want:

Double side print
Scan
Fax
$75 to $100 price range
Reasonable ink costs

Printers tend to last me about 5 years. I buy their ink the first 3 years or so then a couple batches of generics and the printer gets hosed.

My favorite are either Canon or Brother brand. both works just fine wired or on wireless with full functionality. Lately I noticed Canon checks printer when trying to update software or driver. If it detects 3rd party ink cartridges update is aborted. So I keep a genuine Canon cartridge set separate for the reason. I use only Canon for photo printing. For other jobs I use Brother AIO(print, copy, scan, fax) color laser printer.
Either printer is trouble-free always. On wireless jn sleep mode faithfully waiting for jobs. Never lose connection. If you get HP, good luck with it.My experience with HP was all bad. Ink costs more, frequent paper jams....
 
One important rule: the less you pay for the printer, the more you will pay for the ink. So, in the long run, don't hesitate to pay a bit more on your printer - you will recover that money over the next couple of years.

Those 50-75$ multi functions will cost you a lot in ink. I would avoid them.
 
If you can live with black and white, Brother MFC laser printers have always done well for me.
 
If you can live with black and white, Brother MFC laser printers have always done well for me.

Would have to second that motion - they're not as well marketed as others, but they're very high quality, and the ink is quite reasonable...
 
Not seeing a lot of choice unless I go high up on the price. If I do that I start thinking the networking gear I could buy instead :)

Might wait a bit longer. The old HP still prints, except the colors are off. Maybe we will just stick with B & W.

thanks for the viewpoints.
 
You're not going to get far at that price point...

If you want to stretch a bit:

The Dell H625cdw and H825cdw go on sale occasionally and are outstanding values when they have a $70-$100 discount on them.
 
You're not going to get far at that price point...

If you want to stretch a bit:

The Dell H625cdw and H825cdw go on sale occasionally and are outstanding values when they have a $70-$100 discount on them.

Personally I don't recommend going with a Dell printer. Unless that has changed, it ties you to them for ordering inks - can't just drop by a nearby shop and buy a new cartridge if yours is empty and you need it right now.
 
One important rule: the less you pay for the printer, the more you will pay for the ink. So, in the long run, don't hesitate to pay a bit more on your printer - you will recover that money over the next couple of years.

Those 50-75$ multi functions will cost you a lot in ink. I would avoid them.
That's the main reason why I buy already for year Brother printers: They are a bit more expensive, but the ink is cheap (also bcs. you just replace empty ink container not the whole print head). ;)

You will always pay for the printer >100$, but after the first ink purchase you already saved money! :eek:
 
I seem to have killed my 5ish year old multi function printer. So, let see what other recommend.

There are a couple on Amazon that have my eye HP OfficeJet 5740 or a similar Epson.

I print about 500 pages every 6 months, not huge volume.

What I want:

Double side print
Scan
Fax
$75 to $100 price range
Reasonable ink costs

Printers tend to last me about 5 years. I buy their ink the first 3 years or so then a couple batches of generics and the printer gets hosed.
I have owned HP, Dell, and Epson. I now have a Brother MFC-J870DW. Best printer I have ever used. Purchased around 2 years age from NewEgg. Still available on Amazon although I think it has been discontinued by Brother. If it dies today I will buy another Brother.
 
That's the main reason why I buy already for year Brother printers: They are a bit more expensive, but the ink is cheap (also bcs. you just replace empty ink container not the whole print head)

And they don't DRM their cartridges - and the consumables are reasonably priced...

(and forgot to mention, they even do a good job with their Driver kits for Macintosh, which is pretty cool)
 
Not seeing a lot of choice unless I go high up on the price. If I do that I start thinking the networking gear I could buy instead :)

Might wait a bit longer. The old HP still prints, except the colors are off. Maybe we will just stick with B & W.

thanks for the viewpoints.

I got Brother MFC9330CW for 199.00 on Holiday sale 2 years ago. Still this printer costs way over 400.00.
Original toner cartridge is still in the machine. My son prints lots of music note sheets. Still quite a bit of toner left. Even prints well card stocks to make business cards.
 
One important rule: the less you pay for the printer, the more you will pay for the ink. So, in the long run, don't hesitate to pay a bit more on your printer - you will recover that money over the next couple of years.

Agreed - and some MFC vendors are ink companies that sell printers (HP is a good example of that), and there are HW companies that sell ink (Brother is a good example).

I've had a Brother laser based (BW/Greyscale) in the past, and was happy with them - got a good deal on an HP OfficeJet MFC (inkjet) as I wanted color, and it's been less than satisfactory...

Last firmware update I got on the HP nuked the ink carts, which were about 50 percent, and that was a $70 set of carts that needed to be replaced. That, and the carts cannot be refilled (there's a chip in the cartridge), whereas Brother carts can be refilled, next go round, it'll be Brother replacing the HP.

As a side note - for Small Businesses that have a heavier load than what a SOHO multifunction printer/scanner/fax/copier - consider Kyocera/Mita's document solutions there.

I've found them to be extremely competitive to the HP and Xerox devices targeted towards the Small/Medium enterprise, and again, consumables are better there compared to HP/Xerox...
 
Personally (at work), we tend to mostly sell HP products. Just have to avoid their entry level throw-after-use products. Their 200-500$ lineup is pretty good, and ink cost is better than you'd expect even on inkjet products. That new product line they introduced a year or two ago has inkjet having a much lower cost per page than a laserjet (new ink technology they were advertising heavily at a recent tradeshow). And the Laserjet 5000 we have at work is over 12 years old, and still going strong.

We used to be heavily Brother-centric. We ourselves used an HL-1660 that was very reliable. Then, Brother quality suddenly dropped in the early 2000s, had a lot of software-related issues with their products, which made us switch to HP. I haven't looked at them recently, it's quite possible that they have improved since then - they're in general a fairly good printer company. They just seemed to have trouble adjusting with the move from 16-bit Win9x to 32-bit WinXP, and with the move to networked printing/scanning/faxing (got a customer burned by the latter - product advertised with networked Fax support, except they didn't mention that this fax support ONLY worked under Win98 - they didn't support it under WinXP...)

We sold a few Epson over the years. Great image quality (we mostly sold them to people wanting photo quality printing), but the recent models we sold had reliability issues. Frequent paper jams after only ~2 years of average use by a customer, they were ready to throw it out of the window when I replaced it last week...

Haven't really dealt with Canon since the early 2000's, except for their bigger ImageClass Business products. Their installation is fairly easy, and customers never complained about them either. I do have a Canon at home, but that's because I got the cheapest printer I could find that came with cartridges - I print maybe 20 pages a year... :) My previous HP Deskjet (D2420 or something like that) died after only 2 or 3 years (was one of their cheap, entry level garbage products). The previous HP Deskjet 930C however, lasted for many years. I loved that printer.

Have a few customers with Toshiba business class products, they seem decent, but the driver is sometimes problematic. It's sometimes a guessing game to figure out which driver to use, as a given model can come with a different model of daughterboard, which requires a different driver.

A few other customers with large Konica-Minolta, great products so far (at least I never hear any complaint, and their drivers are fairly easy to deal with).

The only Lexmark models we dealt with were their entry level inkjet, which were horribly noisy - we moved to Canon and HP at the time. Never really worked with their mid range products, so I can't comment on them.

Purely software-wise, I like Canon because they're light. HP's software is a bloated pig eating lots of resources and having stability issues - I usually install a very stripped down setup of their software whenever possible. Epson is somewhere in the middle.

That pretty much covers my experience with the various brands with my customers :)
 
If you arent printing pictures i suggest laser. I use brother DCP-9020W laser printer which has double sided printing, LAN and even though it cost £200 with basic cartridges the it still says 100% ink despite the printing i've done and printing full page photos for testing. If i print the same full page photo on inkjet it would use a significant percentage of ink

With a laser printer you dont get ink issues so it doesnt matter if you print regularly or not but maintaining it regularly is important. Unlike HP brother doesnt annoy you if you reuse cartridges as all their printers have been using the same cartridges for years so you can refill them and keep using them. You can also use non genuine brother cartridges and the printer wont mind. The network bit also supports print and scan from cloud and email such as dropbox directly and you can use cups with it so you dont need to install their drivers except for windows unless you use dropbox.

Even though the model is said to have issues it has been more than 2 years since its released and they've ironed out the bugs so i suggest avoiding a new budget laser printer till the bugs are ironed out.

The only problem with brother network printers is that it doesnt have web scan that HP wireless printers do (scanning from the printer's web page).
 
My vote goes to Brother laser printers as well. If you can, hold off until the Thanksgiving sales then keep your eye on Newegg and Amazon. You'll save a bundle.
 
I'd suggest getting either Epson or Canon. My number consideration is how to go about after the ink that goes with the purchase runs out.
 
Once they're configured - the primary concerns would be consumable costs (price per page so to speak) along with SW driver support.
 
Once they're configured - the primary concerns would be consumable costs (price per page so to speak) along with SW driver support.
dont forget maintainance. Whether laser or inkjet they will break down or stop working at some point unless you can maintain or fix them.

hp has the best software/drivers at the moment. Brother printers cant properly be used with generic drivers and canon is just terrible with software. It would be a lot easier if everyone would agree on a standard and follow it, it would save costs as you would only need to develop software for the model specific features that would be considered extra (basically the bloatware you get with printer drivers).
 

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