Home Printers all suck (1 Viewer)

[Bobby Henderson]

I don't have a printer at all in my home anymore. And I design signs for a living. I've long had it with paper piling up and wasting space. That includes printed newspaper and magazine subscriptions. My shredder stays busy eating junk mail and other unwanted material that has my name printed on it.

At my workplace we recently replaced an aging Konica-Minolta Bizhub office color laser printer/copier with a new Sharp MX-3050 unit. The new Sharp unit is a substantial upgrade. The document scanner works better. For the real printing work we have a pair of HP large format Latex printers that output on material up to 54" wide. We also have a Mimaki flatbed printer. That's pretty handy for direct printing onto a variety of materials.

A long time ago I used desktop inkjet printers for printing color sketches for clients. The cost of the inks and overall cost per page was just too ridiculous.

 

[Sam Posten]

PC load letter?!?! WTF does that mean?

 

[DaveF]

I finally gave up on inkjet printers just a couple years ago. Had a nice home all-in-one inkjet, top recommendation by Wirecutter. And it began clogging and I was consuming so much ink running cleaning cycles.

Near the same time, my wife's 15 year old BW HP laser printer died.

So, I bought a $400 HP all-in-one color laser printer (the laserjet line, which is the worst naming choice ever it sounds like inkjet when it's laser / toner).

The original toners were running low. New HP toners were going cost as much as a new printer. Literally. The printer was aout $400 on sale. Replacement toner was $350 to $400. So I was debating whether to throw out the printer and buy a new one. I decided to gamble on third-party toner, some rando on Amazon with good reviews and $60 price that's cheap enough that if it's garbage, I've not lost too much. So far, that's done fine enough.

So...yeah...I now recommend buying a laser printer unless you're printing photos at home and need that ultimate quality that only an inkjet can do.

Mac people take note: HP doesn't fully support Macs as well as Windows. Their software is usable but kinda meh in macOS.

 

[Edwin-S]

I don't print pictures, so no need for a colour printer. I have found that the monochrome Brother MFC-7840W laser jet printer I purchased has worked well for me. The only thing I don't like is that it keeps disconnecting from my home network, requiring me to turn it off and on for my work laptop to see it.