Ask Slashdot: Best SOHO Printer Choices? 381
rueger writes "I can remember trading up from a daisy-wheel printer to dot matrix, and can remember when Jerry Pournelle used to say 'Buy the most expensive HP printer you can afford.' Mine was a 4P. Times have changed, though, and I'm looking for trustworthy advice before buying a couple of new printers. Specifically, a B&W Laser with sheet feed scanner, and a color inkjet with a solid flatbed scanner for copying music. We want solid, reliable machines that will give a few years of small office service, that have reasonably cheap consumables, and that will "just work" with Windows and Linux. Network ready of course. Let me expand. These days there seems to be no market leader in printers — they tend to be cheap disposable items. Part of the reason is that it is hard to find any real user reviews of these machines — most of the comments on Best Buy or other sites are full of fanboy enthusiasm, or extreme negativity — nothing that can be relied on. Between those, and the sock puppets, and the astroturfing, there's nothing I'd trust. I do trust Slashdot, though, for things like this. People here are able to offer realistic advice and experience that can usually tell the story. So, I ask: who's making good printers these days?"
My two rules of printing (Score:5, Interesting)
Rule1: You brought an inkjet and use it heavily, it would have been cheaper to buy a laser in the long run.
Rule2: You brought an inkjet and rarely use it. You now spend so much on cleaning the heads that a laser would have been cheaper in the long run.
I have in the past owned an inkjet, these days if I want a photograph printing, I use an online photographic printing service and get my prints delivered to my door printed on real photographic paper. By the time you factor in the cost of the printer, inks and paper it works out just the same for a better result.
Also anything without a ethernet port is a piece of junk not worth considering.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:My two rules of printing (Score:3, Interesting)
I would second the recommendation to look for a machine with an ethernet port. A host running lpd or whatever needs no user-side configuration.
One more rule: (Score:3, Interesting)
Get something with PostScript support. That pretty much guarantees the thing will print, now and later, certainly any Unix, any other OS probably too. Can get away with very simple lpr configs too.
And it's available on pretty cheap printers these days, though obviously not on "winprinters" that depend on the driver to do all the lifting bar the putting stuff on paper part--you don't want those anyway as they might not work with the next version of windows either.
Apparently various "linux" (in casu freedesktop) apps now produce pdf instead of postscript, but that's no matter, since the printable part is a subset of postscript; the same stuff with loops and such removed and compression added, and so trivially convertable to postscript for printing. For that reason it'd be extremely strange to find a printer that would print pdf but not postscript.
Personally I picked the hp 2200d (and ended up with a dt), which is the last model in (that market segment as hp sees it) with unchipped toners, is hp so likely to have toners available for a long time, was available cheaply second hand, does postscript and has a duplexer, and has an EIO slot for a jetdirect. Extra memory and a jetdirect would've been nice, but it does USB and so works well enough for the few times a year that I need it.
But the niceties aside, the one thing that really matters is making sure it does PostScript. Even if you only ever install the thing once, the difference in hassle is worth it. That this requirement mostly wipes out the oh-so-cheap-but-screwing-you-on-the-ink inkjets is just happy coincidence, I'm sure.