Posting this here for a wider audience than the Hardware/Software forum, I hope.

I need a printer bad, and probably two. I should have a little spare cash in a few weeks when I get my small amount of excess grant money and my small scholarship.

1. I need a "light duty" B & W printer for school and limited personal use. I am thinking a decent one with black ink only for school papers and correspondence that uses inexpensive ink and paper. 10 to 15 pages per week average.

2. A color printer that can take "limited amounts" of a much heavier paper than normal photo paper, as in good card stock and even heavier if possible. This will be used to learn and practice making greeting and occasion cards on a personal/student level. Not looking to do commercial quantities (yet). Photo quality color for this one, but again, a very limited budget. The heavier paper thing is important.

Looking for info, personal experience links to something besides "go look on Amazon or NewEgg". Kinda hoping for some expert advice if available.

Hello Nixer.


For the B&W I recommend looking at the Brother printers as the are inexpensive and toner frequently goes on sale for $15-25.

Color printers, as you know, is where it gets expensive. All my recent experience with color has been on a Enterprise level so not much help to you there.

Good article and a few choices here: http://www.clark.com/shake-your-printer-cartridge-for-maximum-value

Remember that printer manufacturers no longer do any profit on the machines (not a significant one anyway), and the real expense is on the supplies.

A lot of people are moving towards refilling cartridges, which saves a good chunk of money, but in my experience, this causes issues on the mid-term on the life of the printers.

Epson sells expensive printers, but their cartridges are of lower cost than the competition.

http://www.clark.com/epson-printer-savebig-over-tim

As for black and white, forget ink. Get a laser printer. It will save you a ton of money in ink, it doesn't let you down when you need it most since you can easily see your progress finishing the ink and the toner cartridges can be found cheap on amazon. For ours, we use a $55 cartridge a year, possibly printing more than you're talking about, but if you end up doing a lot more printing, there is a larger cartridge. Ink is no good for text printing. Most printers will continue to mix colors even for just making black and will drain other colors besides just black when printing text. A laser printer will save you a lot of money in the long run.

We have a Samsung ML-2850, which has done fine for around 5 years. I don't think you have to be as choosy with text and laser printers, mainly look to see which has cheaper toner. They're all going to be pretty fast. No need to use settings for darker text, all printing is done on toner saver settings and they come out perfectly fine.
Ours is a network printer, so it just connects to the router. Anyone can print to it just by installing the driver or an app. Most now have wifi which is even better.
The only thing I'd like to have is the ability to print legal size. I could probably buy another tray, but it isn't that big a deal.

Can't help on the color printer. I washed my hands of those things years ago in disgust. We print with online services or by sending to local stores and pick up later that day or the next.
The last photo printer I had was an HP that I liked as much as I could like one of those things. Probably my 3rd photo printer by that point.

edit: it was a Canon photo printer

There's definitely good advice already posted here, like going laser if you can.

For printing photo quality, keep in mind that regardless of the manufacturer, in most cases you'll really only get full photo quality if you use special photo paper. If you're not, then the inkjet printers may not be the quality you expect.

I have a color laser that does OK for photos, but again, it doesn't look like a photograph. I am not in front if it right now to confirm, but I think the one I have is this one:
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/hp-laserjet-...p?skuId=3566043

I have several printers. For high quality text we have an OKI B401d. Recommended.
For photos it's more tricky. I prefer the colour balance on Canon printers. Photo inkjet printers take heavier paper - photo paper is thick stuff compared to copy paper.

Thanks so much for the replies and info. It is greatly appreciated.

I would have never thought about a B&W laser printer. Great stuff and in the budget.

The color one is gonna be more difficult but so far with you guys input and other reading I am doing I am leaning towards the Epson color printers with pigment based ink but I have plenty of time to research that further.

For my more immediate needs a black and white laser from WalMart looks like a great idea so far.

Thanks again for the replies and great information.

I second that. As far as the color printer goes, anything over $150 bucks by HP (Hewlett Packard) should do the trick. Affordable and quality prints. Unless you are looking to make your own then get a 3d Printer - Those little buggers are expensive though.

I got a nice Brother laser, with copier and scanner, and a fax if I ever get a landline.

Color is on hold till the fall probably.

I'm a writer and I hate printers.

I bought an HP laser printer at Walmart for $100.00 CAD about 10 years ago and it is still on the same cartridge. I have an extra cartridge here but this is easily best bang-for-buck printer ever.

I must have missed this thread. I, too, am looking for a B&W-only printer and I never thought of going laser!

I had an HP Deskjet 520 in the 90's, loved it because it took a single big cartridge that seemed to last forever. I've been disappointed ever since.

Sorry if a bit late on this thread... used to print out massive amounts of stuff. And by massive... DCS A10C manual.... 3x. DCS BS2 manual 2x. Tons and tons of RPG PDFs. And so on.

I used to print using an inkjet printer and do my own refills. I've now "upgraded" to a color laser printer and although I'm now buying official toner carts and not doing my own refills yet, it's way, way cheaper and I don't have to worry about ink smudging. My last printer was a Canon iP 9000 which can print up to A3 size and is very much considered to be a very good printer. Did my own refills for that and I still have some ink left.... but my printing needs has slowed down now....