Ten budget inkjet printers As money continues to be tight, buying a new all-in-one often takes a back seat. However, if an old machine has died, or a son or daughter needs something to print coursework, you may be forced to flex a card. On the up side, you could be surprised at some of the bargains which are available in the inkjet market. You can pick …
Something I consider quite important in a printer is the design of the cartridges/heads. HP present excellent long term value since the heads are replaced with each cartridge so clogs or damage to the nozzles are never fatal, unlike some other brand printers I've owned where the nozzles have failed and made the whole printer useless. It would be nice to know what design these printers use.
Not only are HP very good in the way you mention (for those printers which do use replaceable cartridge tech), but those cartridges are VERY hackable - I'm on my first bought catridge after the starter cartridge on my £50 HP J4580 all-in-one fax/printer/scanner, 20 refills and two years later.... That's £300-400 of ink cartridge refill which cost me £15. Mind you the scanner motor now makes horrendous, terrifying noises for two minutes on startup, but it's still been a joy financially.
I would recommend a decent refill kit with a proper 'primer tool', though, and pigment ink for same (not so with the nozzled printers, where dye seems less likely to clog).
HP cartridges are by and large going the way of Epson, where only the ink tank is replaced, not the full printhead as it allows for far cheaper replacement consumables.
I can get a full set of inks for my current HP B110 AIO for less money than than just the replacement black used to cost for my DeskJet 970cxi (never used compatibles/refills as they are ALL crap in the long run compared to new and genuine)
I have a slightly older deskjet.
USB:
Ubuntu 10, Vista, Win 7 all work easy
Wireless:
Ubuntu: Forum searching for magic connection string at first ( dnssd://Deskjet%203050%20J610%20series%20%5B83D65A%5D._pdl-datastream._tcp.local/) but now always works
Vista: I gave up
Win 7: Since installing HP drivers connection to wireless router has become unstable
Be aware that Epson printers genuinely have a built-in service life. They will decide by themselves that they have printed X amount of pages and simply stop working saying that the waste ink pads are saturated. They aren't. The official fix is expensive. The unofficial fix still involves spending money to reset the printer
quote from Epson SX235W manual:
"If an error message appears indicating the printer’s ink pads are nearing the end of their service life, contact Epson support to replace them. The message will be displayed at regular intervals until the ink pads are replaced. When the printer’s ink pads are saturated, the printer stops and Epson support is required to continue printing."
http://support.epson-europe.com/onlineguides/en/sx230_sx235w_sx430w_sx435w/html/trble_1.htm
For the Epson Stylus Office BX305FW Plus the same info is on page 80 of the manual:
ftp://download.epson-europe.com/pub/download/3737/epson373717eu.pdf
Since the printer itself decides to do this there is no way to predict when it will happen.
"I think the error occurs after a certain number of pages printed. There is a piece of software you can get to reset the printer but for most people the only solution is to throw the printer and get a new one."
Not quite. The timing of the error varies according to whether you print borderless images, how often head cleaning takes place, etc. The is obviously a lot of processing going on but it is still all crap. It still GUESSES when the pads are full of ink. Would it be so hard to have a sensor to actually measure the damned thing. The only piece of software that reliably works with the recent Epsons is WICReset. But it still costs money. Dumping the printer is OK if you have a cheapo printer but for a £100+ printer it gets a bit more annoying. I've reset mine twice and fitted an external waste tank and a continuous ink system.
Saturated ink pads? They don't know the meaning of the word!
About 10 years ago I worked for a company who were too tight to pay for a professional printer but had access to cheap cartridges. So they did all their bulk mailshot printing on domestic HP inkjets.
Day in day out the beasties would toil. And surprisingly they tolerated it well. That is until the day a couple of them started oozing a black substance.
As a junior IT droid I was sent to sort out the problem. Poked around, got my fingers covered in black gunk. So I decided to open them up.......
The waste ink sections were overflowing with solid gunk which had leaked out and was going everywhere. The entire insides of the units were a mess.
And did the company replace the printer? Not exactly. Muggins here had to clean them all out. It was horrible nasty stuff to deal with as well as it got everywhere.
I cleaned the printers out and restored them to service where they happily continued their daily workload.
So when Epson claim their waste ink tank is full they just don't know the meaning of the word full.
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It's not an error as such but a maintenance warning, which means the device ceases printing and needs to be serviced in order for it not to piss ink everywhere (not usually a cost effective job compared to the value of must home user models, unless you want to buy the parts and get blathered in ink doing it yourself)
The ink pads in the bottom of the unit that collect the purged ink become saturated and require replacement and the unit to be reset once the factory pre-set page count is reached.
Brilliant eh?
I got this explanation from an HP worker, that printing BLACK TEXT uses colour ink - unless you choose otherwise; but that some copy functions use colour no matter what. Why? Because "it looks better". Having given 6 years of my life to art school I can with some authority assert black is good enough for black, and only a psychotically unhinged pigment fetishist would insist otherwise.
I think you're right, I remember doing chromatography at school and black ink always had a good bit of yellow in it - but that's something which can be added to the black cartridge beforehand by the manufacturer, instead of dishonestly quadrupling the cost of printing out black by having it combine with a tri-colour cartridge.
I use an Epson Photo Stylus D88 with a Chip re-setter.
I bought it because it was a cheap ink-jet and I've only ever printed in B&W on it, so every time the chip says the colour cartridges are empty, I just re-set them and get on with it. It may knacker the colour heads, but since I don't use them, I don't care.
(Oh, and buy compatible cartridges too, not the Epson ones where the ink is more expensive than vintage champagne!)
If your printer won't do black only with empty colour cartridges then it could be that it is 'making' black from the colour inks at least part of the time (i've seen both deskjets and officejets making black from the colour carts when doing just a self-test page with a complete new set of inks fitted) - mucho expensivo!!!
I know that these printers aren't expected to last too long, but it's reasonably likely that the Kodak printers will outlast the company itself, meaning possible cartridge supply issues (they aren't exactly a massively popular brand of printer)
Anyway inkjet are for mugs - laser is well worth the extra money and nowadays they're pretty close to the cost of the inkjets.
Funny, I'd say cheap laser printers, and most especially cheap colour laser printers, are for mugs.
My reason for saying this are the high-end HP Officejet K550, 5400 and 8000 printers. I don't yet have enough data to be able to say whether the latest HP Officejet 8100 continues the fine tradition of printing fast, well, for tens of thousands of pages, and at a price per page lower than cheap mono Laser, let alone colour.
NB the running cost of all printers in this survey. An extra 2p/page on just 5000 pages is a hundred quid. After that many pages you'd automatically have been better off spending more on the printer and less on the ink. (HP OJ Pro 8600 about 120 quid).
The software for ANY HP product and especially inkjet printers is complete total and utter crap. Common cause of horrific boot times, takes forever to install, puts a ton of un-needed services etc
Kodak isnt much better
Oh and Hp, Kodak and especially Lexmark, get used to being shafted for inak as there are no good alternatives.
Color inkjet:
1 printer $50
1 set of ink cartridges $50
print 20 pages
Sorry, your ink is empty / dried out / got stolen by the goblins at night.
1 set of ink cartridges $50 ...
B/W laser printer:
1 printer $100
1 cartridge $50
prints 2,000 pages, no questions asked
So for the one time a year you absolutely have to print in color, here is a USB stick and a map to the copy shop for you.
...you print at least a few sheets every day, otherwise you'll end up with clogged nozzles. They are absolutely appalling for the average home user.
If you do print a lot then Epson compatible cartridges will save you a fortune over the printer's lifetime, otherwise buy another printer - HP are decent all-in-ones and last for ages.
tl;dr Epson if you print a lot, otherwise HP.
I stopped using HP printers due to their insistence (at the time) of using tri-colour cartridges which are just f*cking disgraceful. I've never had an issue with the Canon Pixma MPxxx series of printers since I moved to them. They are a bit slower than the Epsons but the A4 photos they print are fantastic. Think it'll be a laser next time though.
With HP, keep the printer in standby even if you won't be using it again for weeks. HPs wakup up to squirt a tiny amount of ink through the nozzles every 24 hours, to make sure that the heads don't block up. It really is a tiny amount of ink - you won't notice unless the printer is left un-used for years.
I have the HP 3050A (bought for 25 quid from hp.com - was as low as 20 quid until its seeming discontinuation), but it seems to be superseded by the very similar HP 3055A now at 54 quid RRP:
http://h40059.www4.hp.com/uk/printers/internal/product.php?id=B0N11B&experience=direct
Tesco do some "compatible" XL cartridges for the HP 3050A that I bought in a 3 for 2 offer (so I got 3 black and 3 colour) and worked at just under 9 quid each, which isn't bad at all. For Linux users, HPLIP works great and is pretty well standard on most distros.
In the last 6 months I've had 2 clients buy the HP 5510, one from JL and the other from PCW.
In both cases they went back after printing the calibration sheet.
Why? Because both printers printed the page at an angle . Left and right margins different at the top and bottom of the page. If the printed calibration page was copied, the copy was even more skewed.
I also have some clients who have bought various Kodak printers (can't remember which models but they have all had WiFi. They print quite well but - and this is a huge but - the noise they make is horrendous and they apear to clack about for ages before anything starts printing. Also, one of them forever forgets its wifi host and the key has to be re-entered almost daily - and that's a real faff.
My youngest bought an HP AIO (can't remember the model) from Tesco to take to uni. Printer cost about £30.00, Two ink carts - £40.00.
No wonder she's in debt.
Yep, common complaint about the 5510 is skewed print - some people have 3 or 4 exchange units to get a good one.
Some of the HP AIOs don't retain the wi-fi password if the power is disconnected - okay if you are only using a 8 char wifi password, a total fucking nightmare if you are using a 504bit one.......
Sorry but should have looked at the price of replacement consumables when buying the printer, my HP B110 AIO was 40 quid to buy and a full set of inks (genuine) is sub 20 quid delivered, and occassionally on offer at two set for 30 quid.
When easily refillable canon died I went through this search. Ended up getting a £50 brother as it uses unchipped cartridges easily available as generics for a pound each with no fuss. Its an average plasticy printer but basically works. Even if it clogs and dies after one set of compatibles you are still financially ahead....
Nagging bloated non-standard print drivers filled with bloatware, cheap nasty jamming mechanisms, cartridges that dry up if you don't print for a couple of days, lifespan of 50 pages, horrific pricing for replacement cartridges, endless clean cycles that eat 50 percent of your overpriced cartridge, streaky printing, jams, test pages etc etc
Only an idiot would get an inkjet.
That'll let me print off a few Reports every few Months, with out having to deal with dried-out Cartridges, Clogged Nozzles. Causing me a great deal of lose of Paper, Ink and MORE OVER Time, in fighting with it to actually get the fecking Job done?
Ahhh yeah that's right Laser Printing, in such instances then Color Laser.
As for Imaging, there are much better options out there like the Thermal Pixma Printers from Canon?
IMHO Ink-Jet is just an unending Money Pit. Thus the above Question, I'd welcome such a Printer.
Fail for the reasons stated above...
I have had two HP photosmart all-in-ones. With fresh ink they are excellent, but I only print color once or twice a month, and it doesn't take long for the cartridges to gum up or go out of date. Ink is already expensive for these machines and this just makes it a lot worse. I agree with the poster that laser printers are reliable and cheaper to operate if you don't need color often. I also agree HP software is horrible: just a bewildering mess of options.
I'm running an oldish Epson DX8400 and used to have terrible problems with compatible cartridges.
the usual experience was as follows
1. Yellow cartridge is empty (replace yellow cartridge)
2. after priming yellow cartridge another one is empty (get fed up replace remaining cartridges)
3. primes remaining cartridges and prints perfectly until powered off
4. next power up cartridges are not recognised / refuses to print
I gave up and installed a continuous ink system, since that day I have never had a problem with it (4 years and counting) despite wild swings in printing demands (anything from 1 page per month to 7000 pages in one day)
The last printer I bought was a cheap brother inkjet. I bought it because the printer and the inks were cheap but it periodically cleans itself when not used so it will use up a set of cartridges in 6 months if you leave it on standby even if you don't print a thing. If you don't print very much, the cost per page is v high.
You could unplug it from the mains when not using it but then it does a full deep clean when you power it back on, so if you do that every week you're no better off.
1. Canon... The one I had years ago had rather expensive cartridges, but other than that no problems.
2. Epson... Insist on spending ink head cleaning every single time you turn them on (solved in the end by just keeping the printer on), refuse to print in black and white if a colour ink cartridge is empty, the last set of unofficial cartridges I used set off some firmware tripwire and now it refuses to work with any kind of unofficial cartridges, nozzles clog up with light use. SSC Service Utility hasn't been updated for a while now. Won't touch another Epson ever.
3. Lexmark... I know it's cheaper to buy a new printer than buy a full set of original cartridges.
4. HP... I don't know how they manage it but their drivers weigh in at 100 megs.
I wish printer reviews would take into account cost of official cartridges, cost of unofficial cartridges, chips, if ink refill is an option, firmware tripwires, and so on and so forth.
For a comparison, copy/paste the following into a text file, save as a .csv & open in a spreadsheet:
Budget All-in-ones,Price,Rating,Print Quality,B PPM,C PPM,B p/p,C p/p,ADF,Fax,Cassette,Card Reader,Carts,Connect,Dimensions,Display
Brother DCP-J125,£65-90,70%,Fair,3.2,,1.6,7.6,N,N,100,Y,,USB,,Colour LCD
Brother MFC-J430W,£90-108,65%,Poor,7.7,4.8,2.6,7.6,20,Y,100,Y?,,USB WiFi,,Colour LCD
Canon PIXMA MG2150,£49,65%,Good,6.9,1.7,3.2,7.8,,,,,Tri-Colour,USB,,LED
Epson SX235W,£50,60%,Poor,3.9,1.1,1.5,10,,,,,,"USB, WiFi",,-
Epson Stylus Office BX305FW Plus,£90,60%,Fair,3.8,1.3,2.6,9.5,Y,Y,,Y,,,,Mono LCD
HP Deskjet 3050A,£40,80%,OK,6.4,2.2,4.8,11.8,,,,,,USB WiFi,small?,Mono LCD
HP Photosmart 5510,£70,90%,Good,9.2,4.6,2.2,6.6,,,,Y,Separate,? WiFi,,Touchscreen
Kodak ESP 1.2,£69,80%,Good,8.1,3.5,1.6,4.4,,,,Y,Tri-Colour,,,Colour LCD
Kodak ESP 3.2,£79,75%,Good,8.6,3.7,1.6,4.4,,,,,,,,Colour LCD
Lexmark Interpret S405,£50-133,70%,OK,6.8,4.1,3.9,11.5,Y,Y,,Y,,? WiFi,large?,LCD
This is based just on the article (apart from the unmentioned WiFi on the Lexmark, but given away by the "WiFi" logo!). If anyone's interested, I'll do some research & fill in the blanks.
I gave up on ink-jets years ago. I don't print huge amounts, and whenever I did the ink-jets heads were clogged or the ink dried up, so I moved to a cheap colour laser printer instead which always prints fine, even if I've not used it for weeks.
Like ink-jets the cost of the toner is more than a new printer, so I'll just get a new one when the toner runs out eventually.
The quality isn't good enough for proper photo printing, but I take my photos to the nearest photo printers on the high street for that.
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