Printer Recommendation Please

Hi,

A uk computer magazine currently recommends the Cannon Pixma TS6150 as its best buy and the HP office jet pro 6960 as a second choice.

If you do lots of mono printing , you could also consider a laser printer, have had a Kyocera for several years, it just keeps working ! with a toner refill every other year or so.
Mine is the FS1100, now replaced with this latest model.
Kyocera FS-1061DN A4 Mono Laser Printer

 

I was going to say that colour laser printers have a hefty price tag . After a quick google , I can't believe how cheap they are - Lexmarks starting at £150. As @shiney stated the toner refills may be expensive. Also not sure how good at photo printing they are for Woo. He has quite a few drone airport pics to print

 

Colour laser printers are not great for photos. Its probably due to the paper more than anything.

We had a Lexmark colour laser a few years ago and bought toner refils rather than replacing the whole toner cartridge. You can get away with this once or twice but the cartridge will leak as the components wear.

 

Old thread, but who knows, maybe this can come useful..

I have done photography, quite obsessively at some point, for many years. Therefore I have toyed with plenty of inkjet printers and I somehow regret that.
It is true that expensive inkjet printers can come up with good quality photo prints, and, wanting to fiddle, better quality somewhat than what a photoprinting service online will provide.
But only marginally so.
Years ago I have printed whole photobooks and exhibition images with services like photobox.co.uk, taking care to download printer profiles calibrated on the Fuji Frontier commercial printers.
And the quality was good. The price too, even if again, it was years ago, perhaps now they will be more expensive.

Conversely, while I had very good results with inkjet printers, inking drying out by itself over a few month, encrusted spouts and all sort of technical problems have put me off for good. I would spend £30 on a good colour cartridge, print 20 or so images, and then go back to it after two months for a quick print to find out that something did not work anymore.

18 months or so ago I jumped the fence and bought a colour laser printer.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00BJOA3TO/ref=oh_aui_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1

I think it costed me £150 all in, including a three years warranty extension.
It sits in a corner, connected on wifi and in "deep sleep", and prints high quality black and white and graphical colour documents. It does double-side prints automatically and without fault every time. And If I do not print anything for two months, the toner level will stay identical to the last time I used it.
I would never use it for printing photos I care about, but it does a pretty acceptable job of things like photos in schoolwork for my child.
But non photographic colour prints, like graphs or drawings, come out pretty good.

The only sour point is the cost of the toners. I just checked and now a 2,500 pages black cartridge is £30. A full replacement, (3 colours plus black, each 2,500 pages) is a whopping £125.
But it was not like that when I bought it. Actually I selected it also because at the time of purchase a very well reviewed set of compatible toners was £60 all in.
Indeed, last year I replaced with a 2,500 pages toner, for only £14, the 500 pages black cartridge it came with. And the quality is identical, at 0.5p per page.

So my advice, for mainly correspondence usage, would be Laser, taking care of choosing one which has many positive reviews for both the printer itself and some cheap compatible toner.
Then I would buy the printer and the additional toner immediately, in case the price goes up.
Admitting a total expense of £200, plus £40 for 3,000 high quality paper sheets to be used over three years, that works out at £80 per year.
So, 8p per print. If replacing only the black toner and using mainly normal paper, perhaps 5p per print.
That is a better deal of any inkjet.

On top one gets "free" toner for several thousands extra pages in colour, which I am not considering because again I would rather use an online printing service, even if it means waiting a few days for my prints to come in the post.