Advice for a new printer (multifunction inket or personal color laser)

[bobogs]

My Canon S600 seems to be dying, so I'm looking into a new printer for the house (not a business). I'd like to stick with something that's not too expensive to run (ink/toner), but I'm having trouble comparing the yield of a personal color laser to that of an inkjet. I wonder if the toner in a color laser would go bad if not used within a certain time period. On the other hand, we seem to go through ink cartridges pretty fast, either from usage or them drying up. There's also the problem of the inkjet printhead getting clogged up.

I'm considering a multifunction on the inkjet side, because it might be nice to have the copier function to copy receipts and other documents. I have an old Epson scanner, but we don't really scan very much (nice to have though), so the scanner function of a multifunction would be nice to have. Please note that I have ZERO interest in printing my own photos. I upload or bring digital photos to Walgreens to get real prints on quality paper. I'd like the mf's copies to look decent, though.

I can't decide between a personal color laser and a multifunction inkjet. The $50 color laser toner cartridges scare me, but if I'm replacing them once for every five inkjet cartridges of the same color (at $15 each), the one laser cartridge is a better deal.

Any advice?

Thanks!
Gary

[MJA]

nice thing about the S600 is that u can use generic ink from ebay like my Pixma 3000,and Epson C62.all the new printers are chipped now.

I been using generic ink since I bough my printer few years ago with zero issues .

I get all my ink from this store

http://cgi.ebay.com/8-Pak-iNK-FOR-CANON-S600-F30-F50-F60-F80-Printer-BCI-3e_W0QQitemZ3...QQcmdZViewItem

if the S600 can be fix for cheap then keep it

[gadgetguy]

Toner is dry and as long as it's kept dry it will suffer no ill effects from sitting idle for long periods. For the situation you've described I would go with the Color Laser Printer. But you may also want to get a cheap inkjet printer for everyday/draft printing.

[neomaine]

bobogs,

I hear you loud and clear. I switched over to color laser about 18 months ago. Staples had a sale on the Samsung CLP-510. Haven't had a regret yet. Like you, our family was more interested in regular printing and uses a local outfit for all 'real' prints.

It ran me $199, about $100 or so more than a quality inkjet printer. The kids use it for both b/w and color homework while the wife and I volunteer for the kids sports and print a lot of flyers, programs and such. We would have easily blown through hundreds of dollars worth of ink in that time using inkjet.

Actually, we may not have. That is, we found that we had a new ability - not completely wasteful - to not worry so much about what and how much we were printing. Kids printed off pictures, logos and tons of stuff for school that we probably would have made them hold back on or even not print at all or at a very reduced size. Same with our use. The new freedom to actually use the printer is wonderful.

(In fact, I just printed 45 8.5x11 'hole sponsor' banners for a golf tournament the hockey boosters put on. Used a company’s logo, contact info in very large print. NEVER would have considered it before. In fact, I probably did last years on our printer too now that I think about it...)

The printer itself came with toner that was supposed to be good for 1000 pages. A 'starter' set per se. We are just now (within the last week) see the 'toner low' message for black. All three colors haven't said a thing...yet. So, I'll be springing for a $65 3k page or $90 for a 5k page black toner cartridge within the next week or so with school and hockey season starting up. From what I've experienced, these numbers seem pretty accurate. I've NEVER found those page estimations on ink cartridges to be so.

We're all VERY happy with the print quality. Pictures look OK, if you stand back a few feet and blur your vision a bit...actually its not that bad but definitely not something you'd see from store print. We use regular Staples printing paper for the usual stuff but make sure to use labels listed a 'for Lasers'. Not so much for the glue, though that may usually too, but found a huge difference with the way the toner attached to the paper. It took a little to convince the wife it was worth the extra money, over time, to own. She's now seen how much more efficient it is.

All in all...one of the best computer accessory investments I've ever made. I'll never look back.

EDIT: Make that $45 (on sale) for the black cartridge...

[bobogs]

Just received my Dell 1320c color laser. Set it up and it's working fine...nice quality printouts. Looking forward to seeing how it performs for us.

Two things I've noticed so far...it's kind of loud while warming up, and the lights flicker in the room when it's starting up, during printing, and for a while after the printing is done (when I hear a click a few minutes later, that seems to indicate the printer is going into standby, and the flickering stops after that click). The flickering isn't horrible, but it is a bit annoying. I guess this beast is just a power hog.

Gary

[ahhaa]

Nothing against lasers, I've had an Epson Action America just about forever; its only slightly smaller than an aircraft carrier and doesn't have very high dpi to say the least, but it has always worked- even when it got low on toner, you could just shake the cart to get a few pages out.

NOTE: I also owned the notorious Multipass 6000. The software that came with it basically took over the computer- it would even get upset if the Multipass didn't have its own phone line.

I only mention it because I stored it over the winter on a unheated, humid porch. By spring it was a doorstop. Just an fyi...