Printer recommendation

[TwigtheWonderkid]

I have an HP Photosmart B110 printer. The issue is I rarely use it, maybe once a month, and the cartridges seem to dry out thru lack of use. It's ridiculous, I'm spending a fortune printing very little.

Can anyone recommend a cheap (£50 ish) reliable printer where the ink will actually give me the promised number of copies, and not expire after a certain period of time.

[nyt]

All inkjets tend to dry out.

A colour laser wouldn't have this problem but they tend to be more expensive to purchase and they don't print photos to as high a quality as an inkjet.

The cheapest I could find on Amazon is over £90: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Brother-HL3140CW-Colour-Wi...

[TwigtheWonderkid]

Thanks nyt. I'm not fussed about printing photos, so maybe a £100 inkjet is the way to go.

[Mr Pointy]

The technology is the issue, not the cost of the printer. My £350 Epson has a knackered printhead because I didn't use it for eight weeks. All inkjets will dry out if you don't use them so the answer may be a laser printer.

[nyt]

TwigtheWonderkid said:

Thanks nyt. I'm not fussed about printing photos, so maybe a £100 inkjet is the way to go.

IJT direct usually does cheap colour lasers.

I have one very similar to this one: http://www.ijtdirect.co.uk/product_detail/12830/De... and it's excellent.

Be sure to check that the software provided is compatible with windows 10. Printer manufacturers have a habit of 'forcing' upgrades by not updating their software.

One warning don't give them your phone number. They follow-up too frequently with sales calls

Edited by nyt on Tuesday 1st September 12:19

[Spanglepants]

Rather than start a near duplicate thread is it ok to tag onto this one?
Need to get another all in one ready for my son starting back at school ( needs it for homework etc) for around the same £ as OP.
We had a Canon Pixma MG4195 which always took a while to get started and was also quite noisy and clunky, print quality and scanning was fine though.
Looking for similar again to work with an iMac and would be connected by USB, print cartridges need to be cheap as well.
Thanks
Sorry OP.

[sgrimshaw]

If you don't need to print photos, can you do without colour and get a mono laser printer?

Example less than £50, and the toner carts are reasonable:

http://www.printerland.co.uk/Brother-HL-1110-P1326...

[LordGrover]

Set an alarm to print a colour page every week?

[sgrimshaw]

LordGrover said:

Set an alarm to print a colour page every week?

Or use Task Scheduler to send a print automatically

[RizzoTheRat]

If you don't use it often then the advantage of an HP is the printer heads are in the cartridges, so you can replace them easily if they get gummed up. On the other hand a set of cartridges for mine cost more than a replacement printer.

[Mr Pointy]

sgrimshaw said:

LordGrover said:

Set an alarm to print a colour page every week?

Or use Task Scheduler to send a print automatically

You may laugh but once a week a colleague sends a print to his HP plotter in Maidenhead from his laptop in Qatar via the HP cloud print facility just to stop the heads bunging up.

[TwigtheWonderkid]

Well I ended up with a Dell C1675. They cost around £150 and come with third full cartridges to get you going. The refills are £20 a pop and it takes 4 (black, red, blue, yellow) so another £80 to be forked out.

IJT had an offer, buy 3 sets of cartridges (that's 12 thingies) for £240 and they give you the printer free! So I did that. Youngest son has set it all up and connected it to the Ethernet so we can now print to it from any device around the house.

Hopefully with a full set of cartridges installed and 2 spare sets, I won't have to buy anymore before I die. (I'm 53). We don't do much printing at all (youngest son has some stuff as he's doing A levels, and then it's the odd thing here and there).

So a result.

[LordGrover]

It may be worth fiddling with printing preferences to default to B&W printing, and select colour only when it's needed.
It may surprise you how much cheaper it can be.

[MysteryLemon]

Tip for those of you with an inkjet that you dont use all that often.. Turn it on once a week and run a clean, regardless whether you want to print anything or not.

It will use a little ink but will stop the heads in the cartridges from clogging and drying up.

Unless you really must have the best possible photo printing quality, laser is the way forward for little use. Toner never dries up and is very cost effective. You wont get amazing photo results out of one but you would be surprised just how good photos can look from the more graphic orientated printers.

Some printers, if left on standby, will regularly agitate the ink or clean the heads as and when they are programmed to. Turning an inkjet printer off at the mains is asking for trouble really.

[TEKNOPUG]

I have a cheap HP inkjet that I bought about 6 years ago for £50. Print/Scan, USB/Network/Wifi. Never really had an issue with it and as asid, the print cartridges have the print head in them. However, a pair of cartidges is the best part of 50% of the printer price and they don't seem to last very long. Depends how much printing you do as to what is most cost effective.

[sgrimshaw]

Do you mean a C1765?

If so, that's not a bad deal.

[Foliage]

use a reprographics service instead when you need something printed?

[Man-At-Arms]

Mr Pointy said:

sgrimshaw said:

LordGrover said:

Set an alarm to print a colour page every week?

Or use Task Scheduler to send a print automatically

You may laugh but once a week a colleague sends a print to his HP plotter in Maidenhead from his laptop in Qatar via the HP cloud print facility just to stop the heads bunging up.

how does he replace the paper ?

[tricky1962]

The problem with little used inkjets, as has already been noted, is that the ink dries in the printheads and clogs them.

Printheads can be cleaned quite easily by soaking, often for a matter of seconds, in a mixture of ammonia solution diluted further with water.

This is most easily achieved if the printhead is part of the cartridge rather than part of the printer.

Take a saucer, soak a kitchen towel in 50:50 ammonia:water, wipe the printheads over the damp paper a few times until you can see streaks of each colour. Alternatively, leave the printhead sitting on the saucer for a few hours or overnight.

This is easy with Canon, HP and I think Brother machines where the printhead is indeed a part of the cartridge.

It is possible to clean Epson printheads in situ, but my advice is to open a window, drop kick the thing through it and go and by one of the aforementioned

If the cartridges are refillable, to keep costs down, buy bottles of ink off ebay eg. http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Dye-Based-CISS-Ink-Refil...

Will last for ages

Edited by tricky1962 on Thursday 17th September 18:38

[TwigtheWonderkid]

sgrimshaw said:

Do you mean a C1765?

If so, that's not a bad deal.

Yes, that's the fellow.