What would you like to accomplish?
I need a new printer for my family. We've had a Dell 1660w for (just checked my emails) 12 years that has been awesome. I've been buying cheap 3rd party toner for it and it's been doing everything we need. I've put up with its quirks and been happy. I think it's finally dying. I'm getting a message about the fuser failing to reach temperature. I'm sad, but I think it's finally time.
I need a color printer to print all the random stuff we have to print. My kids want a coloring page, my relative needs his resume printed, we're mailing envelopes for an event and want to print addresses on them, etc. We also homeschool, so we print quite a bit of school stuff. Oh, and I had one time where I needed to print some iron on transfers. I know you can't do that with laser, so we had to go somewhere else.
I've had a color laser printer for 12 years and I've loved it. I know everyone says to get a color laser printer (well, people really say to get B/W laser, but I need color), but... those tank printers seem cool. I've loved my Dell printer, but the color images have always looked a little washed out. I've printed Christmas letters with a collage of pictures on the back and they look... fine. I want them to pop a little more. If it looks good, I might even print some pictures of fancy glossy paper! Although I just looked at Snapfish, and it's probably better to just stick with a real photo printer.
I also read somewhere that inkjet printers end up with washed out colors if you use normal printer paper. It bleeds in through the fibers or something? More then likely I'm just going to keep getting giant boxes of reams of paper from Costco. Unless it's just as cheap to get inkjet paper somewhere else?
So ya, part of me wants to try inkjet to get more poppy colors. But maybe I'll get what I'm looking for with a printer that's not 12 years old and failing?
Are there any models you are currently looking at?
Costco has an Epson EcoTank ET-3958 I've been looking at. The brother Inkvestment seems fine. Maybe the Cannon tanks? Honestly, I don't really care that much.
Haven't done any looking at color laser, but I'm open to it.
Minimum Requirements:
- Budget: <$500, but ideally $200-$250
- Country: USA
- Color or black and white: Color
- Laser or ink printer: Either
- New or used: Either, but I don't want to deal with busted stuff, so I'll pay more for used but for sure good.
- Multi-function: I'd love a copier/scanner
- Duplex Printing: Yes, that would be amazing.
- Home or business: Home
- Printing content: All The Things.
- Printing frequency: At least weekly, but then sometimes we'll do hundreds of pages at a time.
- Pages per minute: Don't really care so long as it's not horrible. Our 1660w was fine.
- Page size: I definitely need to be able to feed envelopes in. But how cool would it be if I could print on 11x17! My kids could make cool book things. For a reasonable increase in price, up to 11x17. Otherwise 8.5x11 is fine.
- Device printing from: PC and Android. I can setup a CUPS server if needed to bridge to the Android though.
- Connection type: Ethernet would be great. I've had tons of wifi issues with my old printer.
Any other details:
Nah, I put it all in the top section. Thanks!