Printer choice

[ffutures]

After a lot of reflection I've decided to go with the Canon duplexing mono printer; at an effective price of £50 after cashback it works out at about 2.5p per page with the starter cartridge, 2p a page with high capacity cartridges. The last colour laser I looked at was very tempting, but in the end I think I have to accept that colour isn't something I need very often; I may buy myself a cheap inkjet for occasional colour work, I haven't decided yet.

The bottom line, I think, is that if this turns out to be a bad move I'm only out £50 (and possibly the price of an inkjet later), and have numerous family members who could make use of e.g. the mono laser if I do eventually decide I need colour for my main printer.

Later - looking at cheap inkjets, Staples are doing the HP deskjet 1000 for about £20 inc. VAT. Anyone know anything about them?

Comments

[pbristow.livejournal.com]

Any you can find at a reasonable price that takes the 300 cartridge, and does everything you need. =:o}

Internally, the machines that take a given cartridge type(*) are all basically the same printer so should give exactly the same quality; it's just the additional features list that changes - i.e. does it have wireless; can it take other types of memory cards besides SD; is the preview/feedback screen tiny or a bit bigger; can it edit pictures that are fed to it on an SD card before printing them; does it have the fancy big control panel that looks a bit like, and has most of the power of, a small tablet PC... If you're just using it as a printer-scanner as a peripheral to a PC, then apart from wireless none of those things matter. If you're a photographer who'd like to print his work directly from an SD card without touching the PC, then the extra features on the higher models may be useful.

*(At the low-end that is. The more business-oriented and/or serious photography printers get more actual design variation, but that's why they cost anything from 5 to 20 times as much! Basically, the low-end is machines that use the two-cartridge system (one black, one colour). The high end is where you're using 4 or or more cartridges, which from what you've said would be overkill for your purposes. The printer and scanner mechanisms are mass produced to fit into a standard shaped housing, and then slight variations on that housing are moulded to accomodate the different feature sets that need to be bolted on for different models / price-points.)

[pbristow.livejournal.com]

Slight caveat: Maximum DPI. That's one thing that *does* change within a range of printers that affects the *maximum* quality achievable. That said, even on my old model, I find the improvement given by going up from 300 to 600DPI isn't worth the slow down and the extra ink used. I can't tell the difference between 1200 and 2400DPI except on the highest quality photographs. But if your eyes are sharper than mine or you work a lot with fine print, you may disagree.

DPI is quoted as X x Y, indicating width-wise versus length-wise. The lower figure of the two is the one that will have the more obvious effect, so you can ignore the bigger one when comparing printers.

Gosh, this has been a useful refresher course for me! It's months since I was last left in charge of the printer section instead of the till... =;o}

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Yes, but since I don't actually have HP's catalogue memorized, can you suggest any that are a simple small printer-only model?

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Sorry, just saw your message below - I'm after a small one because it would get in the way less, with a second printer around. Also, the flatter paper path of e.g. the Deskjet 1000 could be handy.