Spent the last couple of days studying printers! Mum was complaining that her Canon printer was costly to maintain; it was always running out of this ink cartridge or that, and stopping her from printing (mostly plain text). The cartridges seem to have gone up in price. (Amusing to look at that old Amazon page… it still remembers the date I bought that item, in 2006!)
I suggested it might be better to get one mono laser printer between the two of us (using ethernet) — and maybe have a dedicated photo printer as well if we wanted.
I spent days searching… there are so many of them out there! It seems a little crazy; why? Especially when one printer doesn’t seem much of an improvement on the last. My priorities were Mac-friendly ethernet printers with low running costs — ones which aren’t running out of cartridges every other week. It was almost more important that it wasn’t constantly squeaking at us than that the ink was cheap!
While I searched, though, I started to realize that there’s nothing out there that’s very much better (in our price range) than the Canons we have. I also remembered the utter nightmare which was the non-Canon printer we had before… it was so lightweight it felt like a child’s toy. I wasn’t printing every day, and when I did print, it would do a bad job or produce a completely blank sheet because the ink had dried up. Or there would be gaps and lines because of the odd clogged nozzle. It had one big ink cartridge, which meant when one colour ran out, I had to replace the whole thing… and that wasn’t cheap either. Compared to that, I have nothing to complain about where my Canon is concerned. The ink is expensive and there’s always one running out, but the photo print quality is good and it doesn’t dry out or clog up on me the way my last two printers did. It doesn’t matter how long I leave it, it will print, and print well. Also it’s sturdy enough for Delilah to sleep on it!
I found some printers on the market right now which might work well for plain text, and not run out quite as frequently, but I didn’t see anything that was as far ahead as I’d hoped.
Meanwhile, Mum was talking to salesmen in town, one of whom pointed out that if we turn our settings to b/w, it should override the printers’ refusal to print when a colour cartridge runs out. Mum tried changing to greyscale, and it worked for her. I didn’t understand that, as I had been reading somewhere that greyscale doesn’t mean the colours aren’t being used… it still draws on cyan? Well, I don’t know if that’s true or not… complete mystery to me!
Having compared the likeliest printers with our Canons, we realized it was a bit like trading a pair of confident show ponies for a single pig in a poke.
I’m actually quite happy to be hanging onto mine, as it’s the first printer I’ve had in years that worked well. Still, I couldn’t help feeling a little glum… all that time I spent looking at innumerable grey boxes and getting the information together! But she said “your work wasn’t wasted — it helped us realize that there isn’t a magic printer out there.”
If you’re on the lookout for a personal-use non-photo printer yourself, I can suggest a few by email! They may not be magic and there are certainly no guarantees, but in my view they have potential.
