Cheapest printer to run

tsheils

Hello all I need some recommendations. Other than epsom printers can anyone recommend a cheap printer to run. My budget is about £80, maybe a tad higher

Thanks in advance

Neil_Jones

It works in a sort of inverse tandem way.

As a general rule the more expensive the (inkjet) printer to buy, the cheaper the ink it takes to run, and the cheaper the printer the more it'll cost in ink.

Depending on the amount of printing you want to do you may do better with a printer that takes single ink cartridges - All Epsons work like this, some HPs and some Canons do this as well. The budget printers tend to take the block cartridges which can be expensive.

Of course there are some cheap mono laser printers around, the toners cost more but you'll get more pages out of them but the cheaper ones tend not to scan or copy or do anything other than print.

Carrot007

Three choices.

If you do a lot of printing. Find a printer with seperate inks (mostly Cyan, Mangenta, Yellow and 2 blacK, but could differ). And find one you can get cheap under £2 copy carts for.

If you do medium amount of printer gen the cheapest inkjet you can with full carts (canons at aldi etc). When it dies get another.

If you hardly print and can cope with b&w buy a cheap laser. Inkjets hate disuse and the cart either dies of the whole unit get ink issues.

SouthUKMan

Everyone makes really good points above. A couple of extra thoughts, if you decide to stick with an inkjet printer then bear in mind that some manufacturers produce 'standard' and 'XL' capacity cartridges for the same printer. Usually by paying around a third more for the XL version you get three times as much ink compared to the standard cartridge.

Depending on what you want to print, you could choose to only print in B&W - and / or you can adjust the quality settings to use far less ink. Most printer software I've seen has options such as 'photo' 'high' 'standard' 'draft'. Draft uses very little ink. Some software has a percentage slider.

You can also look at refill cartridges. However I have personally found these hit and miss in terms of reliability. For several years I bought refill cartridges but sooner or later I would always come across a cartridge that wouldn't work or one that would dry up and stop working far sooner than expected. Overall I probably didn't save any money by using these and just had additional hassle.

Neil_Jones

Draft mode might use little ink, granted, but on some printers it may be too light to read on a white piece of paper. Still it sounds impressive when the printer pulls the paper in at the speed of light, makes some noise and chucks it back at you just as fast

With regards to refilling cartridges, you can get the continuous ink systems too, though you often have to botch these and the domestic printers to get them to work effectively and the end result can look a bit unsightly. They're expensive to buy initially but running cost wise it wipes the floor with the compatible cartridges - a 100ml bottle of printer ink can cost the same as 5ml compatible cartridge.

Frozen_up_north

The OP doesn’t say if they need to scan/copy, print photos, or just print basic letters and documents... there are cheap scanner/copy/print units but they have poor photo quality and can be expensive on ink.

I mostly use a Samsung mono laser printer, Amazon sell them for about £50 (latest version is the M2026, I think, mine is an M2022). Compatible toner cartridges are about £13 and can produce 1000 A4 pages at 5% coverage.

k3lvc

We've just converted to this - new printer was £24.99 (half price at JS and price-matched by John Lewis)


We're currently working on £1.99 per month vs the £8-£10 previously


http://www8.hp.com/uk/en/instant-ink/overview.html

psychic_teabag

You might be lucky enough to find a mono laster on freecycle - I got one a while back, and there's currently another on offer in my area.

RumRat

As the OP seems to have abandoned the thread and not given any further information (how much printing he does etc) it's not really possible to answer.
The cheapest would be a HP printer on an instant ink free subscription.
You get 15 pages a month for free with each additional 10 pages costing £1.
Of course if he prints more there are different options as mentioned by others.

Tom99

lomax512 wrote: »

My Brother HL-2130 monochrome costs £14 a year for toner, it's awesome.

I have also had a brother printer for 10 yrs and only replaced the toner twice. Works everytime unlike the inkjets I had before.

System

Second hand HP P3005DN mono laser, usually around £5-£10 from IT auctions. Third party toners are cheap as chips and you'll get well over 10,000 pages out of a toner cartridge.