Going Printer Shopping

I just did this myself...

...and came home empty-handed

I wound up buying yet another pair of cartridges for my old pos epson - ouch! $$. Actually, in a "sterile environment", the Epson 740 is probably not a bad printer. In the "real world" of dust and pets, the innards get pretty messed up over time.

I just could not decide on a new inkjet printer - the cartridge issue is a factor for pretty well all of them.

One that did catch my eye was the Canon... (don't recall the model). What struck me as different about this one is that rather than one colour cartridge, it has three (red, blue, yellow). Typically, we are using the separate colours in different proportions - I think it is yellow that runs out first.

With this printer, you can replace the separate colours as they run out without discarding a fair abount of ink for the remaining ones. The individual colour cartridges are significantly cheaper.

With regards to print quality, reliability, etc, I really have no idea - which was why I didn't actually buy one.

I'd be interested in knowing what you wind up with as I really need to get one myself.

Good luck!

Yeah, I'm wondering if a printer that fits my specifications actually exists!

What will you be printing?

I have a Hewlett Packard PhotoSmart 1000 and it does well on ink - I've just printed out 250 wedding invitations, 100 order of services, 250 thank you cards, 50 wedding photos and much, much more before that on one cartridge and it's no where near empty yet! Plus it doesn't seem to mind going for months with nothing printed and doesn't dry up or get messy with brick dust, pet hair and other general household crap in the air.

Don't know how much you want to spend either but I thought I'd share this with you!

I'm not sure how much I'd like to spend - probably in the $100-$200 (CDN) range but I wouldn't mind paying a little more if I can get a quality product. Do you have any problems with memory hogging? I've had bad experience with HP products in that respect (although maybe all printers and scanners are like that, I don't remember what my Canons were like)

It takes up a huge amount of memory if you just let it install all the crap imaging programs that come packaged with it but you can decide what to install and it's not too bad. I have it running from my laptop. I think it was about £250, but I can't remember exactly

I mean RAM - my old HP and my HP scanner take up so much RAM that I can't do anything else on the computer while it's running (but as I said, this may be a problem with all printers & scanners..)

I've got my first laser printer over last summer and am very glad I did. It only prints black and white (color laser printers are very expensive), but has been outstanding. I have a Lexmark E312L. I don't think it's more than $200, can't recall. Also, I've had good experiences with HP.

Megan, I've NEVER had or heard of printing effecting your computer OS performance (i.e. locking things up). It have had to do with type of printer - USB vs. COM port. I always use COM ports for printers, scanners, etc.

Scanners and printers are notorious for locking up systems, Marc, but usually for folks with only a little bit of ram. The laser HP is quite good (5 years now, one cartridge, no complaints) but no colour.

That's strange because I do have a reasonable amount of RAM (256 RAM) and my scanner slows things down to the point where it's difficult to do anything else while it's working (not impossible, just really really slow). My old HP printer was the same, as is the scanner I use at work. Odd. Oh, and I do use COM ports.

I may look into getting a b/w laser... I've never had a lot of need for colour printing on a regular basis.

I have a HP scanner and when its running I can do anything, dont even know its running with 256 ram

If you only want black and white, laser printers are really good, and the ink/dust/stuff lasts for ages.
If I want color stuff done (hardy ever) I just take a floppy up to the color center.

good luck

Well, I must be doing something wrong then because this problem is really bad on my computer. I swear, I'm not making it up.

I believe you Megan my printer pauses my whole machine (laser - old)

Hmm... it might be an OS issue. When I was running Win98, my HP 670C always slowed things down (but not too badly). Now on Win2k, I have no problems whatsoever - no slowing/locking/freezing.
What OS are you running?

BTW, this HP I have is an old piece of junk.

I'm running HP scanjet 6200c on win 98SE no problems at all.

My laser printer (Seikosha) wont work above win98, another reason I wont update windows

I'm on XP now. It could be because my scanner is a new piece of junk (HP 4300C) I can't remember if I ever had my printer hooked up to this machine or not.... it would have been when I was on ME though..

Could it be yet another XP driver nincompoopability?

Alright, I ended up with an HP Deskjet 845. The guy at the store said that he has a similar model and the same usage habits as I would so hopefully it will work out alright. I haven't tried it out yet - need to get a USB hub (something I should have anyway...). It was only $99 before taxes & after mail-in rebate (Canadian dollars here). So that's a price I'm happy with anyway.

Seems good so far. Not locking up my machine or anything. I'm wondering now if I was having that problem because I was using parallel connection rather than USB (didn't have enough ports before). I'll have to try my scanner tonight and see if it's better now.

Quote: Originally posted by Megan
Seems good so far. Not locking up my machine or anything. I'm wondering now if I was having that problem because I was using parallel connection rather than USB (didn't have enough ports before). I'll have to try my scanner tonight and see if it's better now.

Probably has more to do with the driver than the connection. I use to get errors every time that I opened Photoshop, MS Word, Excel, etc. It got to the point that I couldn't even use Photoshop. I reformatted, reinstalled, changed RAM, processor, power supply but still the problem persisted. Finally with the help of Dr. Watson, I discovered that the cause was the HP printer driver for my HP 920. I removed the printer and never had another problem. The printer was installed on my wife's computer so I was using a network version of the driver. Still odd things like that happen sometimes.