[DAVES]

Originally Posted by RMarkland

Be cautious, when buying a printer the first cost is not the only factor. You will be using many, many replacement cartridges during its lifetime. When looking into printers, also some have one cartridge which has the colors and black. When one of the colors or black is used up, the rest of the ink goes to waste. Suggest you look for a printer that has threee sepereate cartridges for the color, and a fourth for Black. I have had a Brother printer for 5 plus years. Their service of any issues via telephone is fantastic. The cost of ink is reasonable. Be cautious of the low initial price printer, they get you on the cartridges.

Re: inks in all one cartridge.
I think my earliest printer Canon? was like that. The last ink jet that I had was HP and it was designed to not only do normal printing but photos as well. It took five separate inks. Typical of ink jets they used the ink to clean the heads. The ink was like $30 each.
It is sort of like cleaning the spray heads with gold. If I recall the printer cost me like $100 or $150. The companies likely lose money on every printer they sell. Not only the product but a fancy four color sell box. They make money on the ink. That HP, even if not used would eat up 30x5=150 a year in ink. Cost to print a photo on that machine you could send the picture to one of the labs, a drug store or one of the stationary stores and get a print that is far more water proof, better quality and cost less.

[retiredguy123]

Originally Posted by Karadad

Need a new all in one printer for PC. $100-200 range. Any recommendations? Thanks

I have always bought the HP ink jet printers, but they usually only cost about $60. I prefer the ones that only use two cartridges, black and tri-color.

[zendog3]

If you use your printer at all, your major consideration should be the cost of ink. I particularly avoid HP. HP means "high price". A $100 printer will eat you alive in replacement ink cartridges.

I am a member of a writers group and I print about 5 pages a day. After bleeding money paying for ink, I am now happy with the Epson ecotank printer. At about $300, One filling of Epson ink will print about as many pages as 80 HP ink cartridges. My printer is all-in-one, color, and wireless. It is not awfully fast, and does not have a sheet feeder. Setup and maintenance is fairly easy for a wireless printer.

[Carlsondm]

Originally Posted by Dahabs

Big fan of HP LaserJet printers. Toner is may seem more expensive but doesn't need to be replaced as often, doesn't dry up and I suspect the cost per page is no worse than ink. I replaced my last HP printer with a 4 in 1 with Bluetooth (HP LaserJet Pro MFP M127). I did own a Brother years ago but have found that I have fewer issues with HP.

I have had Hp, Epson, and Brother. Brother won. A workhorse duplex b/w printer with high capacity toner available. I don’t like to keep feeding the printer. My cost is pennies a page. This is my main printer. I have hL 5470dw but newer models capable of high capacity toners keep the operating costs lower and would be great for you. We have a small printer for occasional color and have photos printed at Walgreens and other businesses.

[keepsake]

I stopped buying ink jet over a decade ago.

Love our Brother 2680

It's only black and white, but was like $95 at walmart 4 years back.

Had a color Okidata laser that lasted over 10 years.

[OrangeBlossomBaby]

Originally Posted by Dahabs

Big fan of HP LaserJet printers. Toner is may seem more expensive but doesn't need to be replaced as often, doesn't dry up and I suspect the cost per page is no worse than ink. I replaced my last HP printer with a 4 in 1 with Bluetooth (HP LaserJet Pro MFP M127). I did own a Brother years ago but have found that I have fewer issues with HP.

Cost per page is significantly higher with a laser printer compared to ink.

I used to work at Staples, we sold several brands. I always favored the HP 2-cartridge inkjet printers. One black, the second has the color.

Ink is dirt-cheap if you go the Instant Ink route. You pay by the page rather than how much ink you use. So you can print 100 full 4-color glossy photos on 8*10 photo paper, and pay the same amount per month that you'd pay for 100 black and white letters to family.

Instant Ink is an HP mail-order service. As long as your printer is connected via wifi, Instant Ink can tell how much ink is left in your printer, calculate the number of pages printed, and send you ink BEFORE you need it, right to your mailbox. It's an auto-pay service.

I pay $2.99/month to print 50 pages per month since I don't print much. If I don't print all 50 pages in a month, the leftover is carried over to the following month. You can stack up to 3 months' worth of leftover pages.

So right now, at the end of January, I've only printed 14 pages the whole month. And I have 150 pages in "rollover pages" I can use. Very handy for people who only print lots of stuff once or twice a year, and hardly ever print anything the rest of the year.

Also good for small businesses that do seasonal brochures and don't print receipts (if they use hand-written receipt books, or e-receipts, for instance).

Also great for people who print their own photographs.

For higher volume, you have options: up to 100 pages per month is $4.99. Up to 300 per month is 11.99. At 500 it goes up to $18.99. For 700, it's $24.99. And if you do heavy volume and print up to 1500 a month on a regular basis, it's $49.99/month.

If you only need it to print out a couple of coupons now and then, you can get up to 15 pages a month for only 99-cents per month.

This is only for wifi-connected HP photo jet ink printers. I have the HP Envy Photo 6455. It goes for around $150 at Staples. It doesn't have an auto-feeder, but the photo printing quality is really terrific.

[chrissy2231]

HP5500 on
Amazon $99

[SharonW]

Print, fax, scan, copy

Great printer

[Karadad]

I have decided to go with a HP inkjet all in one printer. Thanks for all the feedback!

[John_W]

Seems like HP is the overwhelming choice followed by Brother and Canon. I bought a very cheap Epson five years ago at Walmart for $40, the Epson 440, they now stock the 446 for $41. Still going strong, not a bit of trouble and I print and scan all the time.

Only one other poster mentioned Epson, knowing your price range, they have this Epson XP 4100 at Best Buy for $99, the Ocala store has it in stock and the Lady Lake store can have it in four days. The reviews are great, there are 1750 reviews and it's 4.2 stars out of 5. It uses the Epson 212 ink, which is $20 for a black cartridge and $38 for the 4 color pack.

If I was looking for a new printer, I've had HP and Canon and I don't believe they worked any better or even as good as my Epson. Keep Epson on your radar, they have a demo model of this at the Lady Lake store. If it works as good as my $40 Epson, for $99 this a good deal.

Best Buy Epson XP4100



Here's a photo I took in 1976 of aircraft on display at an airshow at St. Petersburg-Clearwater Airport and I scanned it with my $40 Epson printer a year ago for my Facebook page.

[chas39]

Walmart or Sam’s club my last one was a cannon with ink for under 100.00

[JC and John]

Originally Posted by Karadad

Need a new all in one printer for PC. $100-200 range. Any recommendations? Thanks

I vote for Canon Pixma mx922, copy,fax,scan. Have had several HPs but this Canon is the best we have ever had. Never had any problem with is printer. Since we don’t do a lot of printing, we don’t really care about the cost of cartridges and price per page. Actually if we had a need for a large print job would probably go to Staples and have someone else do it. Just my 2 cents worth.

[rothbear]

I have a Brother B&W printer that also scans....got it cheap with a sale and coupon from Staples as I need the toner printed sheets for my crafting. But we also have 2 Epson printer, one photo and 1 wide format. Love them both and they are workhorses. You can't tell the printed photos from ones gotten printed elsewhere on the 960 though more expensive so I only use when I need just a few. The big Epson is a WorkForce printer (model number starts with a WF), is probably 10 years old and still going strong. It is a multi-function printer and the wide format prints up to a 11x17 size paper which my husband needs for his work. It gets a good workout between the two of us and keeps going. Used to use HP all the time but since getting the Epsons we wouldn't go back since we seemed to be replacing the HPs every 3-4 years.

[Shoogley]

Sorry Epson 2650

[DAVES]

Originally Posted by JC and John

I vote for Canon Pixma mx922, copy,fax,scan. Have had several HPs but this Canon is the best we have ever had. Never had any problem with is printer. Since we don’t do a lot of printing, we don’t really care about the cost of cartridges and price per page. Actually if we had a need for a large print job would probably go to Staples and have someone else do it. Just my 2 cents worth.

In days of old, when I was working and had an ink jet printer Staples was not only cheaper but better and faster. At no extra charge their machine would put the pages in order and I think they would staple and hole punch for free. Cost per page quoted by some, is ink only, the paper cost 1.5 to 2 cents a page.