The Lemon Fool

My 15 year old HP Photosmart printer is badly misbehaving, and my wife wants a new WiFi printer instead. For the amount of printing we do, I think we will stick with inkjet. I am concerned that the newer printers have clever software which will insist on me using expensive HP or Epson ink cartridges, rather than the cheap clones which I currently use. Is that the case?
I would be interested in any recommendations. I don't want to spend more than £120, and I need a scanner built in.

Nimrod103 wrote:My 15 year old HP Photosmart printer is badly misbehaving, and my wife wants a new WiFi printer instead. For the amount of printing we do, I think we will stick with inkjet. I am concerned that the newer printers have clever software which will insist on me using expensive HP or Epson ink cartridges, rather than the cheap clones which I currently use. Is that the case?
I would be interested in any recommendations. I don't want to spend more than £120, and I need a scanner built in.

Canon every time.

And get a model that does auto duplex, enabling you to print on both sides of the paper without intervention. This feature is worth its weight in gold IMHO.

HTH,

Watis

Another vote for Canon. My MG5250 is around 8 years old and has proved infinitely more reliable and refined than my previous HPs, from Windows and Linux. It's been happily using StinkyInk compatibles for years

--kiloran

Covid is making bargains hard to find as much of the popular home working kit is being bought up by chancers to sell on at inflated prices on eBay.

I bought my last HP Laserjet Pro M15a printer in a local Office Outlet administration sale for just over £20, so if you keep your eyes peeled in the news for any electrical retailers in difficulties...

I have had an HP 5xxx all-in-one printer/copier/scanner for a couple of years. It cost around £50, and has worked very well for me.

What I really like is the feature called "instant ink". Basically, I pay HP £1.99 per month, which allows me to print up to 50 pages per month. If I don't use my full month's allowance, the left-over pages roll over to the next month. i think there is a limit of 100 roll over pages). If my b/w or colour cartridge gets low, HP send me a new cartridge - that's what the £1.99 per month is for. If you print more that I do, there are other deal where you pay more to print more($3.49 for 100 pages, £7.99 for 300 pages). It means that I don't suddenly have to rush out to buy printer ink, and for me, that involves a 25 miles each way drive, or a few days wait for online ordering.

I know you said you will stick with inkjet but if you are really only after black printing then you won't go far wrong with a Brother laser printer.
Works out cheaper per page in my experience and the cartridges don't dry up if you don't print something for a week.
Running costs are fine and I have always found Brother machines are very reliable. I have always bought the duplex models. Cuts your paper bill in half.

Please, do yourself a favour & go with a laser printer. You will not be disappointed, nor ever look back.
Although it’s of no use to you to know, as a) I doubt you’ll be able to get one now and b) no scanner, I have had a Samsung colour laser printer (CLP315) for oh, 15 years. Like you, don’t really use it much... still only on the second (? OK, maybe third) set of cartridges. But however long betweentimes, it just prints flawlessly. I bought an HP b&w laser printer, with scanner, (MFP M125 or something) about three years ago. Likewise faultless, & still on original toner (the full sized ‘spare’ which came with the deal is still waiting in its box).

Canon MG3650 inkjet.
Wireless or not.
Copy & scan.
Duplex.
Ludicrously cheap.
Ink lasts well.
Have used clone refill.

V8

Nimrod103 wrote:I am concerned that the newer printers have clever software which will insist on me using expensive HP or Epson ink cartridges, rather than the cheap clones which I currently use. Is that the case?
I would be interested in any recommendations. I don't want to spend more than £120, and I need a scanner built in.

If you want to print high quality colour photos then you only choice is an inkjet. If not, then a laserjet would be a better choice.

If you don't want to pay a fortune for ink cartridges, then look at a tank inkjet printer. There's no cartridge, you refill then from a (cheap) bottle of ink. All the big players have one in their range, Epson, Canon and HP. They are a little more expensive than your budget, but then you're saving on not having to keep replacing ink cartridges.

I bought an HP DeskJet 2630 all in one wireless printer, copier, scanner from Amazon for £29 in January. It came with free ink for 3 months. Then, like Bminusrob I pay £1.99 a month for up to 50 black and white or colour prints per month.

The quality is excellent for normal use. I have printed a few glossy photos and these turned out well. Two replacement cartridges came in the post soon after purchase and HP monitor when to replace them automatically. The HP scanner is very easy to use and particularly good if one wants to include several pages in one file.

For home use, I can't see any reason to pay a lot of money for a printer. My previous HP cost around £30 and lasted years. And if one is a light user printing 600 pages a year or less the cost of ink at less than £24 a year is small, especially if a lot of prints are in colour.

regards

Howard

88V8 wrote:Canon MG3650 inkjet.
Wireless or not.
Copy & scan.
Duplex.
Ludicrously cheap.
Ink lasts well.
Have used clone refill.

Yeah, looks good -- but then so did the Canon TS6151 I bought (for twice the price) in December 2018 that broke a few weeks ago, out of warranty of course.

First it started giving an error code, on which the manual says "Printer error has occurred. Turn off printer and unplug it. Plug in the printer again and turn it back on. If this does not solve the problem, contact your nearest Canon service center to request a repair.". That lasted for while, then that stopped but it started making ratcheting noises (like gears grinding), and now it goes through all the motions when printing, looking good but nothing at all appears on the paper.

Frustratingly, unlike with my previous Canon printer, there doesn't seem to be a service manual available, so if I did want to try and fix it myself I'd be guessing at both the likely problem and the proper sequence for dismantling it ... I guess they don't want people fixing them.

Oh, and when it was working it absolutely drank ink, mostly between uses. I don't print very often and when I did I always noticed the ink levels to be much lower than they were the previous time I'd used it. Methinks most of it went onto the cleaning pads, which were always sodden.

Annoyingly I'd bought a set of XXL cartridges for it just before it started going wonky, and thinking, well, ok, if I get another printer that uses the same cartridges I can at least save on that -- and guess what? Of the only four other printers they're compatible with only two are still available and they're both at least double the price that mine was.

As I say, I don't print very often, so I'm seriously considering giving up on printing at home and just going to the local library, flash drive in hand, when I do need to print something, and keeping the TS6151 just for scanning (which I seem to do more often than printing) ...

Had several inkjet printers and I loathed them. As I do quite a lot of normal A4 black & white, I use Laser printers for that. The inkjets didn't get used much and when I did use them the heads would be clogged up or the ink must have dried in the lines or something. I made a resolution NEVER to get another inkjet.

I got a secondhand HP Laserjet 1600 for colour printing (£25 on Ebay) which goes on year after year no probs, and uses compatible laser cartridges. All fine.

Printing photos? Just use snapfish or the like.

I have found for BW lasers Brother are excellent. Duplex printing, happy with compatible cartridges etc, includes Airprint, WiFi print, accepts Google Cloud print., double sided scanning etc etc Really do not bother with inkjets, horrible things

i too got fed up with my epson inkjet and cartridges .

i find the Brother DCP-L2530DW A4 Mono Laser Printer - Wireless Print, Copy, Scan - 2 Sided Printing -- is ok for me -- paid £116.

Just to confirm what some others have said, unless absolutely required for some kind of hobby, I wouldn't accept an inkjet if given me free of charge. Horrible things. Over approx 20 years, I reckon I must have lost weeks and weeks unclogging the jets and messing about with cartridges. Never again!

Steve

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Brother-DCP-L2 ... B078GXF59W

I too, like Jackdaw, would recommend the above model. Over lockdown, it was very difficult to find one in stock anywhere, including online, so I think it must have been in great demand for those having to work from home. It seems to have very good reviews and we are certainly happy with it too, except mine cost £150 from Argos.

stevensfo wrote:Just to confirm what some others have said, unless absolutely required for some kind of hobby, I wouldn't accept an inkjet if given me free of charge. Horrible things. Over approx 20 years, I reckon I must have lost weeks and weeks unclogging the jets and messing about with cartridges. Never again!

And also to confirm the opposite, I also do the £1.99/month HP Instant Ink subscription for a HP Envy 5540 Inkjet/scanner/copier. Prints great in B&W or colour, great photo printing, never had a blockage even though it can sometimes go weeks between prints.

Scott.

With the inkjets they seem to vary quite a bit on the drying out and blocking front, so maybe doing model specific due diligence on the user forums might help. I know people who have had zero problems, run them for years.
My experience is that I have two dead clogged inkjets (Canon/Dell) taking up space and two mono HP LaserJet pro's that have never had any issues.

...so I'm seriously considering giving up on printing at home and just going to the local library, flash drive in hand, when I do need to print something, and keeping the TS6151 just for scanning (which I seem to do more often than printing) ...

My neighbour has has a Canon All in one with a tiny single multicolour cartridge. It works fine for scanning, but he now avoids printing on it as if it runs out of ink, and a scan is attempted, it returns the error message “out of ink. Bog off.”

Fortunately he has a Brother laser B&W.

It is over a decade old, and I suppose a newer one might not do that, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

I will add to the 'get a laser printer' chorus if you only print occasionally.

No messing about with blocked heads or dodgy printing, and cheap and cheerful compatible refills which go on forever.

As for scanning, if it is only documents then using an app like Office Lens (https://play.google.com/store/apps/deta ... s&hl=en_GB - or https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/microsoft ... d975925059) works remarkably well.