Cheapest printer to run

tsheils

Thanks all for such good advice, sorry for not replying yesterday. The A and E admitted stepdaughter into hospital late last night, So I didn't get chance to reply

stator

How much do you print and what do you print?

I rarely print and never print photos so the best printer for me is a colour laser. Toner doesn't clog up the printer if it's not used, so you save tonnes on ink (which you waste unclogging the print heads).

If you want a photo printer I'd go with cheap and cherful inkjet.
Some printers even have a built in kill switch that makes them useless after you've printed so many thousands of pages, regardless of the quality of the printers. The separate ink printers sound like a good idea in practice, but in reality the inks are even more expensive than the combined cartridges and you end up spending £100+ on a full set of colour inks.

Evil_Olive

If you want to try the refilling route, I found my last Brother Inkjet which has *just* died on me (printhead gone so not worth repair), quite good for this as the cartridges don't contain a sponge (they're just a plastic box full of liquid ink), it had separate cartridges for each colour and the printhead was part of the printer - not integrated into the cartridges. This all resulted in easier refilling and less issues with cartridges clogging or poor print quality after refilling etc. I only ever had to buy 2 sets of new cartridges in the 15 years I had it due to the cartridge literally wearing out at the connection point to the printer (due to constant removal, refill and replacing into the printer). I was constantly refilling as I do quite a lot of printing including flyers for my husbands band. I bought 500ml bottles of refill ink at about £8 a pop and used up 1 and a bit of each of the colours and 2 and a bit black bottles in that time. I don't even want to think about what that amount would have cost in cartridges! Sadly, my model is discontinued so I am currently looking for something similar and Brother isn't the only brand that use this type of cartridge, but that's what you need for refilling well - a printer that takes spongeless cartridges, a printhead that's part of the printer not the cartridge and separate colour cartridges.

This printer did 'die' at one point (about 10 years in) due to a mysterious 'fatal' error which I suspected was the previously mentioned automatic kill switch but a bit of googling and it turned out that the big sponge inside it, that the printer discharges ink into when cleaning itself, was 'full'/saturated, but you can take it out and 'wash' and dry it (VERY messy hands-on job under the tap) and then I was able to use the engineers instructions (google again) to reset everything to zero.

EmsJordan

Which Brother printer do you recommend. I've been following this thread, and am definitely up for a printer which is cheap to run and don't mind spending a bit on an expensive printer if it is to save me money in the long run. Are the laser printers just black and white?

oodleflip58

That sounds a great deal,so which actual printer are you running please,make,name and model number? :T

Undervalued

oodleflip58 wrote: »

That sounds a great deal,so which actual printer are you running please,make,name and model number? :T

Although there is some good general advice in this thread most of it is a year old so it is probably unlikely the posters will see and respond to your question.

DoaM

I can only guess the poster is referring to post #7 regarding HP Instant Ink.

RumRat

Spammers....

simonineaston

Was looking at this thread for some advice... my trouble is that I simply don't do enough printing to warrent the extra outlay for a laser printer, but when I do print, I need high quality colour... ho hum
I have a super little Canon mixpar mfd, which has got thoroughly fed up with me ignoring it! I guess I attempt to print maybe once every 6 weeks.

Neil_Jones

simonineaston wrote: »

Was looking at this thread for some advice... my trouble is that I simply don't do enough printing to warrent the extra outlay for a laser printer, but when I do print, I need high quality colour... ho hum
I have a super little Canon mixpar mfd, which has got thoroughly fed up with me ignoring it! I guess I attempt to print maybe once every 6 weeks.

Many libraries have laser printers which will give you the high quality print(s) you need but depending on the number of pages you need it may not be cheap plus you're limited as to the opening hours and service availability of the library services (temporary outages or all computers in use, etc). A lot of libraries charge somewhere around £1 for a sheet of A4 colour so for a one-off A4 print every six weeks that could be as little as £8 a year.