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I went from an HP (it lasted for years and years) to a Brother about two years ago. MFC-J4800W, but they probably don't make that one any more. I buy extra capacity ink cartridges online. I print a few things a month, checks and stuff. Mostly black ink. I can copy or scan if I need to. Fax, too, but nobody faxes anymore.

If I printed photos, I'd go to Walmart. Keeping a photo printer at home is ridiculously expensive and wasteful, IMO.


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I have a couple HP Laserjet 4's that I pulled out of the dumpster over a decade ago. At the time KYHillChick was working at a large hospital and they had a "Free to a good home" deal on toner cartridges and no one was picking up the LJ 4's. She snagged half a dozen, and brought them home. Free printing for life!

My advice on B&W is to go on EBAY and get an older laserjet and then buy a toner cartridge for it. Per sheet costs are down around $.08/page.

Be careful with cheap recycled toner cartridges. I had a deal going years ago with a company that recycled toner cartridges for our company's laser printers-- had over 20 in the main building. This company did great things for us for 3 years and then one day started stuffing cheap copier toner in the cartridges. We turned 3 high-end laserjets into doorstops before I caught on.

If I've got any kind of printing to do, I send it to the local Fed-Ex/Kinko's store and it's there when I pick it up.


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I use an HP 7525 and have good luck with it

Only use B&W printing though....no pics


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Worked for HP as an R&D engineer in the LaserJet cartridge group. Was involved with printer development teams for decades.

Printers are not sold for a loss, as mentioned above. Some models are sold at a low, non-sustainable profit where the more feature rich products make up the needed profit to support the program. There is an enormous benefit to producing large volumes of product.

For low monthly printing users a Laserjet is more economical than an Inkjet - at least when I was calculating the total cost of ownership 8 years ago. The Inkjet regularly spits some ink through the orifices to keep them open. So it is a use it or loss it scenario. The LaserJets perform similar operations at a lower frequency and cost.

DON'T power cycle your printer daily. Each power cycle initiates a calibration cycle that consumes several pages of cartridge life. This is a legal requirement since the printer company is required to deliver error free print quality on the first page out.

B&W prints are about 1/4 the cost per page of a color page. BUT if you don't do any color printing the ink/toner will be consumed by the calibration and overhead processes.
LaserJet cartridges have a life determined by and tracked separately by toner consumption AND number of rotations. The photoconductor, aka print drum, is a polycarbonate coated aluminum sleeve that operates as a capacitor and the polycarbonate layer is abrated during rotation. Print quality is reduced to an unacceptable level when this layer becomes too thin.

We commonly tested LaserJet printers to 1 million and more pages and still delivered acceptable print quality.

When I needed wanted an additional printer after I retired I went on line and found a local seller of a used HP LaserJet that came with a complete set of toner cartridges. A set of toner cartridges cost more than a new printer. Only issue is print drivers but there is generally work arounds for this issue.

Last edited by Boise; 02/12/20.

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Originally Posted by Boise
Worked for HP as an R&D engineer in the LaserJet cartridge group. Was involved with printer development teams for decades.

Printers are not sold for a loss, as mentioned above. Some models are sold at a low, non-sustainable profit where the more feature rich products make up the needed profit to support the program. There is an enormous benefit to producing large volumes of product.

For low monthly printing users a Laserjet is more economical than an Inkjet - at least when I was calculating the total cost of ownership 8 years ago. The Inkjet regularly spits some ink through the orifices to keep them open. So it is a use it or loss it scenario. The LaserJets perform similar operations at a lower frequency and cost.

DON'T power cycle your printer daily. Each power cycle initiates a calibration cycle that consumes several pages of cartridge life. This is a legal requirement since the printer company is required to deliver error free print quality on the first page out.

B&W prints are about 1/4 the cost per page of a color page. BUT if you don't do any color printing the ink/toner will be consumed by the calibration and overhead processes.
LaserJet cartridges have a life determined by and tracked separately by toner consumption AND number of rotations. The photoconductor, aka print drum, is a polycarbonate coated aluminum sleeve that operates as a capacitor and the polycarbonate layer is abrated during rotation. Print quality is reduced to an unacceptable level when this layer becomes too thin.

We commonly tested LaserJet printers to 1 million and more pages and still delivered acceptable print quality.

When I needed wanted an additional printer after I retired I went on line and found a local seller of a used HP LaserJet that came with a complete set of toner cartridges. A set of toner cartridges cost more than a new printer. Only issue is print drivers but there is generally work arounds for this issue.
Excellent post and info.. Thank you..


In my little shop I've had an HP Officejet Pro 8600 for over 10 years now and it's been excellent ('course, now it'll probably take a dump in the next ten minutes laugh ... ) For an "all-in-one" printer it's behaved well..


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Don’t buy ink cartridges, it’s cheaper to buy a new printer than ink. Give the old printer to Goodwill or Salvation Army.



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New printers come with "starter" cartridges good for maybe 50 sheets, Swifty.

I get cartridges from NEEDINK.COM and so far they've been perfectly compatible with both an HP and a Brother printer, work fine, and cost a lot less.


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If you need color get and Epson Eco-Tank models,If you just need black and white get a laser printers


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"The ink costs to much and every time I buy a new cartridge the printer $hits the bed and dies."

A friend just bought his wife an inkjet printer that doesn't have ink cartridges. It cost around $300, you add liquid ink as needed and they both like really like it. Next time I talk to him I'll ask what brand and model #. My Big Brother commercial printer just quit after 10 years of heavy use and I bought an inkjet HP Office Jet 6978 printer from Staples because it was so cheap $97.41 ($90 off regular price). It prints great but it's for home use with small ink cartridges.

Last edited by victoro; 02/12/20.
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Originally Posted by RockyRaab
New printers come with "starter" cartridges good for maybe 50 sheets, Swifty.

I get cartridges from NEEDINK.COM and so far they've been perfectly compatible with both an HP and a Brother printer, work fine, and cost a lot less.


Interesting, my brother printer is a year old, printed more than 50 sheets. Black that came with it is 1/2 full, colors went dry cost me 35.00. Brand new Canon Pixma on sale Wally World 29.00. Anymore home printers are throwaways. Use them till the ink runs out then chuck em.



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Refilling ink cartridges is also an option, kind of a pita but better than paying high prices to replace them every time.

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I've got to printer's, both photo printer's, both Canon.A 13" and a Small 8.5". Have always used manufacturer ink. Checked it years ago and as I recall it cost's less than $.01 per sq inch for ink. Recently I decided to cut a fat hog and got some after market ink for my 8.5" printer. Printed up an 8x16" photo and it looked good. About a week later the ink started fading badly. Not sure what the life span of a photo is supposed to be with after market ink but a week just isn't all that hot. I have enlargement's made around 20yrs ago here on the wall's and they look great, OEM ink. But I do need to say that after market stuff was really inexpensive! I did try a second 8x16 with the after market stuff over a week ago and it still look's fine. I think for what I use my printer for, I need to rely on OEM ink at about $.01 per sq inch!

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Look for used small business class MFP's. Ricoh, Konica Minolta, Cannon. Don't buy color unless you really need it. These small machines are sold by the thousands and are not throw away units so they can be serviced/repaired. They may not be as easy to connect but will be much more reliable. I'm a production printer tech and personally despise inkjets in any form. HP/Samsung support sucks.
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Lase printers are cheap enough now that there is no reason to deal with ink printers. There are secondary sources of toner cartridges that are a fraction of the manufacturers branded toner. I have been using laser printers for years, and they are much less trouble and much much cheaper per page to print. My printer is hooked to my wireless network and allows me to print from phone or laptop from my recliner. Good luck with your search!

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the printer I have now will not let me print B&W if any of the color cartridges are empty (the 3 n 1 type)


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Originally Posted by RockyRaab
New printers come with "starter" cartridges good for maybe 50 sheets, Swifty.

I get cartridges from NEEDINK.COM and so far they've been perfectly compatible with both an HP and a Brother printer, work fine, and cost a lot less.


Correct, new printers ship with starter cartridges. This is done to keep the initial printer cost lower. Starter cartridges, as they are called by the industry, have about 1/3 the capacity of new cartridges.

We, I mean HP, ran extensive testing of aftermarket and refilled Laserjet cartridges and our test concluded they delivered a higher overall cost solution when you measure the actual cartridge life, include failures. Failures are expensive in both time and materials. OEM cartridges delivered the best option for businesses, home users are more willing to absorb the additional time and overhead associated with aftermarket and refilled cartridges. This information is about 10 years old and of course some things may have changed.

Cartridge life is calculated on a 5% page coverage using a scrolling E pattern. Some manufacturers, like Lexmark, cheated the yield test by printing with excessively large borders. There was no industry standard for measuring cartridge life when I retired. Toner yield is a linear response; directly proportional to coverage - within the limits of this discussion. There are some nuisances that will affect this but they are at the limit of use.

Throwing away a printer when it runs out of ink is a costly decision. Cost per page will be higher than replacing the cartridges. We do look at this option before ever releasing a new printer.

Canon laser printers are the same as HP except they have different controllers and software. HP's image rendering has been consistently better.

Epson makes an excellent liquid ink printer with superb image rendering. The trade off is image accuracy. People see things different than they really are, preferring a more colorful rich image. Facial recognition is used to pump up the facial color. Business graphics need to have lots of punch. Memory colors like grass and sky are 'adjusted' towards memory colors and not the true image. This makes for images preferred by end users. Yep, we completed tons of testing in this area also.

My name is on a series of Patents describing the likely direction of the printing future.


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I think what you use a printer for will determine what to get. All I've used is inkjet but then about 99% of my printing is photo's and the rest pretty much shooting target's! One of my brothers has a lazer printer in the office and it does a good job and fast but photo's from it just don't cut it. If your not doing much photo printing, it's silly to get a color printer but then, I would seldom use a printer at all if not for photo's. One guy said when his printer runs out of ink he throws it away and get's a new one at Wally World. For me that over a 50 mi trip one way! Get my ink through Amazon and it's delivered to the house in a day or two. Nearest store of any kind to me is a bit over 30 mi!, Add the gas to the cost of ink and get's pretty expensive. Used to take my 13" printer, Canon 9000, to field trials with me and took photo's on the grounds and could deliver a 13x19 inch print in about 5 min! Walmart isn't that fast. I can go out taking photo's and drag along my little printer, Pixma iP 100, and print up to 8.5x17 photo's on the seat of the car! Then again if I didn't do much photography I'd have little use for a printet. Those shooting target's I can copy off at the Bi Mart for about $.05 ea! I've had HP, first was one and it was a good printer. Limited to 8.5x11 but worked for me. Second was an HP 13" and boy was it noisy! Also took a dump way to soon. Have tried a few Epson's and was disappointed in them, maybe just got some bad ones. The two Canon's I have now I've had longer than I can remember, well over 10 yrs. I cringe when I get Canon ink but having tried to use after market, I cringe no more. Beside's forget the original cost and $.01 per sq in simply isn't that much! But you guy's complaining about cost, your not alone. Lot of photographer's scream about the cost to and I don't know why. They make say an 8x10 photo that cost's about $1.20 to print and charge the customer $25 for it! Other's don't complain bout the cost of ink or paper and use the most expensive paper thy can find, customer pays for it!

Pretty much how expensive you think the ink is is going to be determined by what you use the printer for. Just looked on the wall an have a couple photo's of my ESP's as puppy's. They were printed on my Canon 9000 using Canon factory ink and the dog's are 12.5 yrs old now. Printer is still running fine! Photo's have never been re-printed. Counting the paper I have under a dollar in them!

Last edited by DonFischer; 02/12/20.
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When you can buy a Canon for $20-40 from Groupon and after market ink from places like this...

https://www.printpal.com/


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I'm personally against the "disposable" idea simply because of the gazillion tons of electronic trash put into landfills already. If I'm going to toss something, let it be a tiny ink cartridge, not a printer. A perfectly good printer, at that.


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