Hardware Whats a good printer to get?

acturus

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i sell printers all day, the previous posts are right on the money. epson and canon are putting out the best at the moment. what features do you need/want?
 

AlanJohn

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acturus said:
i sell printers all day, the previous posts are right on the money. epson and canon are putting out the best at the moment. what features do you need/want?
At first I need a good scanner to scan pics and stuff.
It can have an ability to print on DVD's (not a must).
It should have great printing quality while printing high resolution pics.
Re-fillable cartridges.
 

FAST6191

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"At first I need a good scanner to scan pics and stuff."
Most scanners made in the last 10 years (if not longer) can pull off decent home/basic scanning up to silly resolution. You start heading into the exotic- scanning film, slides and whatnot or wanting high end colour profile stuff and prices skyrocket. Likewise it has been a while since I saw a nice sized scanner on an all in one.

"It can have an ability to print on DVD's (not a must)."
Any reason you are not going litescribe for this? Granted this probably falls under aesthetics which is not something we call me for.

I will say though why head for the all in one crowd? Most of us will hang a couple of printers off a machine/network when it starts being useful. Certainly I (someone who has no great need for anything other than basic printing abilities most of the time) have been known to have a black and white laser, colour laser, bad inkjet but fast, good inkjet, photo printer and custom stuff (shirts, electronics....) as appropriate although these days printers have gone the way of the DVD drive- you will probably miss it but most of the time it takes up valuable space. This says nothing of the email printer options available now (although I have not tried such things around your parts) or the easier option of VPN printer (print it out at work/a friend's/school).

"It should have great printing quality while printing high resolution pics."
This is a function of paper and ink (and possibly drivers) as much as anything else but I guess you already knew as much. Again you start messing with needing colour profiles and prices jump but on the consumer level get the initial two right and you only then have to argue with the photo equivalent of audiophiles.


Re-fillable cartridges.
Several thoughts at this point- most cartridges can be refilled if you know how (that is to say have an EEPROM programmer or whatever for it) so does this mean you want to refill at home, wander to a shop to have them filled or just have the option of being able to order up some third party cartridges to avoid paying the silly money for branded stuff (do note if you care about warranties some companies try to swing it so using third party gear voids the warranty).


but more importantly you get to worry about printer heads and the like.
Epson at least diverge from normal and go away from thermally driven stuff to piezoelectric which gained them a nice following among many.
Likewise some makers have a habit of bundling heads in the cartridges and this has a habit of cartridges making their cartridges a bit pricier but printers themselves cheaper.
Likewise I do not especially approve of it* (not to mention some companies opting for "starter" aka 10% full cartridges) but some people have taken to treating printers almost as an expense and replacing them when things run out. Coupled with the "pretty much anything new will do the job" thing I was trying to get across earlier.

*other than such practices have left my electronics/engineering parts stores overflowing with good stuff.

To this end assuming I do not need to worry about quality and such (or need custom profiles/large paper support) I would first consider drivers- (do you want linux support, is XP support still needed (a select few models do seem to lack it)?, likewise if it is slightly older does it have good vista/7 support, consider that scanners over network are usually custom protocols or something odd like trying to pipe TWAIN over LAN, are the drivers a huge 50 meg always on background memory monstrosity or is it crippled if the background stuff is not present).

All this being said I seem to find myself about 8 months out of printer world right now (everybody seemed to want to upgrade late last year and not much since) so model numbers for any great deals might not be quite so forthcoming out of me.
 

acturus

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AlanJohn said:
acturus said:
i sell printers all day, the previous posts are right on the money. epson and canon are putting out the best at the moment. what features do you need/want?
At first I need a good scanner to scan pics and stuff.
It can have an ability to print on DVD's (not a must).
It should have great printing quality while printing high resolution pics.
Re-fillable cartridges.

check out the epson workforce 633, it won't do cd/dvd printing (you would need the artisan 725 or 835 for that) but it does have one of the lowest per page costs in ink, a high-res scanner and fantastic photo quality
 

Zetta_x

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I would avoid all in one printers.

Just printers are much cheaper and flatbed scanners are pretty cheap and really convenient to use. My work has several thousand dollar multi-functional printers and it's never the scanner, fax, or anything else, it's just the printer starts acting up. So what do they do? It's not like it's modular where you can detach and replace either. So it's normally replace the entire thing. We have several flatbed scanners that are still working after several years with no problems.
 

AlanJohn

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Zetta_x said:
I would avoid all in one printers.

Just printers are much cheaper and flatbed scanners are pretty cheap and really convenient to use. My work has several thousand dollar multi-functional printers and it's never the scanner, fax, or anything else, it's just the printer starts acting up. So what do they do? It's not like it's modular where you can detach and replace either. So it's normally replace the entire thing. We have several flatbed scanners that are still working after several years with no problems.
But I need an all-in-one printer since I need a scanner.
mad.gif
 

Zetta_x

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Get a Flatbed Scanner + Printer

Flatbed Scanner has options to save files directly into computer. It's lightweight and can fit pretty much anywhere. They are pretty cheap and will last way long then your all in one printer.

A regular color printer without all in one are less prone to breaking and having to replace plus logic would say they are a bit cheaper then all in one.

---

Why do I feel strange that I had to re-type everything in my last post?
 
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