What Printers Would I Recommend

You walk down the printer isle at the local Office Store, and your are sud­denly hit with big words, acronyms, and con­fu­sion. The sales agent is not too infor­ma­tive, and that price tag bul­let points doesn’t give you a clue.

InkJet, Laser­Jet, PPM, CYMK, 6 Ink Car­tridges, DPI, and the list of words you will prob­a­bly never use again in your life goes on.

Laser print­ers are expen­sive in the begin­ning, but becomes less expen­sive over time. You might pay $100, $200, or $300 dol­lars upfront for a laser printer, but you will be able to print 2000–3000 pages with your first toner car­tridge. How many ink car­tridges will it take to print the same amount of pages at $20/cartridge with each car­tridge print­ing 150 pages? Arrest my case.

If all you print are black and white doc­u­ments pur­chase a Black & White laser printer. I use to be very fond of HP print­ers, until Sam­sung came on the scene. Sam­sung now offer more fea­tures, faster speed, and rock sold reli­a­bil­ity for a frac­tion of an equiv­a­lent HP printer.

If all you need is a printer, I rec­om­mend the Sam­sung ML-1630
. It will cre­ate black and white doc­u­ments that look far bet­ter than a inkjet printer can pro­duce, and one toner car­tridge prints 2000 pages on aver­age. It also prints 17 pages per minute.

It costs less than $100 on Amazon.com.

If you need an all-in-one printer get the Sam­sung SCX-4826
, it is my favorite printer. I have bought three in the last cou­ple of months, and I will be replac­ing my HP 3050 with one of these shortly. It is very sim­ple to use, you can con­nect it to a net­work and let every­one in the house/office print to it, you can scan to any com­puter on the net­work, scan to e-mail, and more. You also get all of the ben­e­fits of a laser printer, such as 3000 pages per toner car­tridge, 30 pages per minute print speeds, and very crisp print results.

I bought my first Sam­sung SCX-4826 on sale for $199.99 on sale at Office­Max, but now the low­est price I can find is $225.99 at Amazon.com with free ship­ping. Every­one else is sell­ing this printer for $300 and up.

I really can­not rec­om­mend inkjet print­ers, because the man­u­fac­turer views them as dis­pos­able or unre­pairable, and most inkjets do not last two years. Ink prices are extremely high, and peo­ple who print casu­ally often have to throw away ink car­tridges because the ink dried up.

If you must print in color, there are a few options.

1. Go to Kinkos, Office Store, Wal-Mart, or the local printer and let them print your pic­tures and color doc­u­ments. Their qual­ity will be far bet­ter than an in expen­sive inkjet, and it won’t cost as much. I live around the cor­ner from a print shop that does 10 cent color copies, so I just take color work to him.
2. HP has the HP Color Laser­jet CP1215 for under $200. It is a stand­alone printer, but is pro­duce accept­able results. I would not print pic­tures on it, but it is nice for doc­u­ments where you add color, or printer web­pages, etc.
3. The Sam­sung CLX-3175FW
   is a very capa­ble Color All in One Printer, and it man­ages to yield vivid results, and high print speeds.

In the end I can­not jus­tify buy­ing a color printer for pho­tos. I have not seen a printer that yields results as good as the Wal­greens or Wal-Mart photo cen­ter if they have cal­i­brated their machine. Pho­tos drain print­ers of their ink very fast, and when you con­sider that you have to buy ultra expen­sive photo paper to get a respectable result, you see it becomes extremely expen­sive com­pared to buy­ing a B&W laser printer, and tak­ing color prints to the shop.