Sub £100 Printer

[wolfwiser]

Sorry if this has been asked before, any recommendations for a decent all-round printer.

This is for a present so am not sure of the main usages, just after a good quality, low ink cost general purpose printer.

Are the 'all-in-one' types (i.e. printer/scanner/copier/fax) worth a look at, this may be nice but it seems that Lexmarks are the only sub £100, but you pay for it with the ink!

Thanks for any advice chaps.

[sbowler]

I use an cannon 1500, and its around the £40 mark. Best thing is ink costs around the 1.00 for black and color. You have to watch the printing heads some, they can clog up without regular use. I had an epson which did this, the thing with the cannons is that you can buy replace ment heads reletavley cheaply without haveing to buy a new printer.

[Boogie Badman]

I use a canon mp170 and really love it - cost about £60.

[WheresMyArtisan]

Lexmarks are cheap if you're prepared to get a refill kit and squirt ink into the cartridge with a needle and syringe. It's not as drastic as it sounds.

You can usually do this with most of them - check before buying. I had an old Canon inkjet that got me through 3 years of a degree course with one cartridge plus a £10 bottle of ink.

It's pretty satisfying in knowing that the rip-off printer companies made a loss on your printer, and you've given them no money for their ink cartridges.

Don't worry about the scare stories about sub-standard ink. I've never had a problem. If you do ruin it then you just need to buy a new printer, which only costs about double what an ink cartridge costs anyway.

I recently bought a Dell computer. Whether you want it or not, you get a free Dell 725 printer with it. There are therefore loads of these on ebay, for about a tenner each brand new. I have one myself, which will be going on there later today.

[arfster]

http://www1.euro.dell.com/content/pr...hs1&l=en&s=dhs


The 810 is £22, the 924 is £32 (inc delivery). Both are scanners/copiers, and I think the difference between them is just print quality - I've got one of the latter and it's fine unless you really need to hammer it.

Dell sell them so cheap because they profit a lot on the cartridges, but you can buy refill kits on ebay for £10 that will do 4 refills - much cheaper.

[NicolasB]

Do you think you want laser or inkjet?

[wolfwiser]

inkjet I think, thanks for your replies so far...

[GCDB]

HI,
i hope this isnt classed as hijacking but arfster do you need usb 2 on the computer for the 924 to work. I am after one for my dad but i think his usb ports is usb1. Also is the £10 on ebay for each colour or £10 for a black and £10 for a set of colours. He had a epson 580 which i could get 3 blacks and 3 colours for £10 but it packed in.
Wolfwiser, what did you get???

[arfster]

The Dells use separates - one for colour, one for blacks. The refills are also separate.

[NicolasB]

Originally Posted by wolfwiser

inkjet I think, thanks for your replies so far...

It would also be helpful to have some idea of what you're going to be printing: text, graphics, photographs...?

While you probably couldn't quite get one for £100 (£110, maybe) I recommend the HP OfficeJet Pro K550 as a very good all-rounder, quality-wise; it's also (by inkjet standards) fast and cheap to run.

The HP Business Inkjet 1200 has slightly better text quality than the K550, but is poorer on graphics and photos.

If you primarily want a photo printer then the HP Photosmart 8450 would be a good bet.

[Uridium]

Most Epson's use multicarts for different colours also and the ink's are nice and cheap (Unlike rip off HP)

Have a look at the Epson RX425, fast quiet and fairly cheap to run with nice photo quality prints if and when required