All in one printer or seperates?
 

I'm soon to be wanting to buy a new printer & scanner. My current one (Lexmark X83) is not very impressive at all and I've been 'advised' to look at HP machines as they have a good record of quality.

Has anyone got any experience with them and / or advice in general?

Anything much appreciated. :tu:

Re: All in one printer or seperates?
 

What do you print, what do you scan.

HP make good laser and inkjet printers and scanners. I think Epson makes better photo printing inkjet though.

You can get very good black and white laser printers now for around £60-100, the HP 1150 or Samsung being two that spring to mind, the cost per printed page is much lower (around 2p) than inkjet. No good if you print lots of pictures though.

Whats your budget, how much room do you have. Personally I would get a scanner, b&w laser and inkjet, the TCO should be lower.

Re: All in one printer or seperates?
 

I scan occasionally (like the birthday / Christmas cards sent by the children; school reports) but do little photo printing because what I have at the moment is so awful.

I do print CD labels and other coloured documents done in Publisher. If the quality was there I'd print more photos.

Looking around £100 BTW.

Re: All in one printer or seperates?
 

We've got a Canon MP360, its excellent, and the carts only cost 1.99 from www.refreshsystems.com :)

Saying that I've also got a Brother HL-1430 thats still on its first tona and I've printed about 4000 sheets on it since I got it in Jan!

At £34.07 for a toner cart is so much cheaper than printing with one of the ink-jets!

34.07/4000 = 0.85p per page :shocked:

Re: All in one printer or seperates?
 

I've got an Epson CX6400 Printer/Scanner/Copier, & I think it's about the best 'multifunction device' I've ever owned.

The quality of photos is superb (as long as you use genuine Ink ;) ), & so far the reliability has been spot on (& I do make it sweat when I'm printing out shedloads of covers :angel: )

Re: All in one printer or seperates?
 

epson c84 for £50 , well impressed with the quality of photos :tu:

Re: All in one printer or seperates?
 

I got a Canon MPC200 last year. Very good quality scanning & printing. It's quick and the ink cartridges are reasonable cheap (compared to HP).

Re: All in one printer or seperates?
 

We have a HP 1012 B&W laser printer. It's fast and very quiet (and cheap) :tu:

Re: All in one printer or seperates?
 

Avoid the multifunction devices. If one part breaks down then you have to chuck the whole lot (or have a very large scanner or flat topped printer :rolleyes: ).

I've just bought a Canon i560 printer for £84 at PC World (I know :disturbd: but PC World offered the best price out of the lot online and in the high street - except John Lewis - £79, but sold out for weeks and not getting stock for ages).

Print out quality is reasonable, not done any photos on it though. Takes a good few prints and cleans to 'break it in' and get the ink flowing - all of the first printouts were all hideously bandy on solid blocks of colour.

Re: All in one printer or seperates?
 

I have had a Canon i550 for over a year now - and I think it is BRIL! B&W text (full A4 pages) are mid-teens per minute and colour photos are really excellent using Kodak Ultima Picture paper. Cartriges I get from Tesco. I cannot remember the exact cost (~£4 I think) which is a LOT better than for the Lexmark I used to use.

This printer is AMAZINGLY quiet in operation.

I would now always buy another Canon.

Re: All in one printer or seperates?
 

Agree with ntl_customer about all in ones.

Saying that, some of the deals on all in ones are pretty good....I saw an HP scan/print/copy machine in Curry's for about 50 quid the other day, and the print quality was pretty good.

Considering you'll be likely to spend the best part of that on a low-end scanner these days it might be a better option.

Also, take into consideration what you want to do with the kit...

If you want to print true photo quality prints of digital pictures, it is worth spending more (have a look at the HP 7762 in PC World) stunning results (but the lever for switching between A4 and 7x6 photo cards is flimsy - I know I broke one!) but apart from that it is a superb bit of kit - they're about 120 quid now (they were 200).

Scanners, if you just want to do a bit of casual scanning, then pretty much all scanners these days produce good results. If you want to scan transparancies or negatives then you will need to spend a little more. I saw a review of a Mustek 4800 that said it was the best scanner under £200 they had seen, and it was only 60 quid.

If space is no option, and you can afford a little more, then I would personally go with separates.

Re: All in one printer or seperates?
 

Good Lord :Yikes: so much advice for me here that I think I will need to get at least four different ones :D

Space IS a problem as my current "all in one" sits under a desk unit and there is JUST enough room to put the paper in the feed.

One further question if I may: if you do not use your printer for a while (say a few weeks or more) will it do the ink cartridges / jets harm and dry or block them up? Mine is in the dining room, therefore it is always at a constant temperature, but maybe a little humid with central heating on. Just a thought.

Anyway - thanks to all for your input. There is a lot to think about :erm:

Re: All in one printer or seperates?
 

When I was in argos yesterday I saw a HP psc1205 all in one (with 4800dpi printing) for £49.99

Re: All in one printer or seperates?
 

I've owned three inkjet printers, the first was an HP and the last two were Epson. I want my old HP back .. :( Both Epsons have had dreadful problems with clogged nozzles, and the head cleaner utilities for both of them are completely useless. The room the printers have all lived in is not excessively hot or cold, humid or dry, so I can only believe that Epson is to blame. Plus of course the first Epson was dead when I bought it and had to be replaced, and the call centre nerd I spoke to prior to taking it back to the shop was the most unbelievably rude moron I have ever had the displaeasure to talk to.

Re: All in one printer or seperates?
 

I used to have only HP printers - then I had a lexmark all in one - what a pile of SH*T it was :( - So I went back to a HP - the one that is now £49.99 above as it happens :)

I've never looked back - it is - however - irritating that it's almost cheaper for me to get another printer instead of getting new ink cartridges for it.

Re: All in one printer or seperates?
 

Lexmark are without a doubt the worst brand of printer I've ever used. I owned one for a few day's before the plug in power supply, brick type thing short circuited, melted and tripped all the fuses in the house, for the day or two it did work, the print quality was absolutely awful. I bought an Epson R300 after that, even though it seem's to drain ink very quickly, I love it, excellent print quality and more importantly, it looks nice ;)

Re: All in one printer or seperates?
 

Beware, the cost of the cartridges of HP printers is pretty expensive - nearly £50 a time to replace the colour and black cartridge with originals for the PSC1205. The remanufactured ones are slightly cheaper, but not by much.

For me, it has to be a balance between economy and print quality - there's not much point buying a printer which costs as much to replace the cartridges as the printer itself. You might as well flog the old printer on Ebay and get a new printer complete with cartridges! ;)

Epson printers are OK in terms of print quality and the older ones can be very economical without compromising on print quality (colour + black only cost £4 a pair) , but my last one which was about 4 years old died for no apparent reason - one day it threw up an "unknown" error (whereby all the lights just flash on the panel and it doesn't print at all) whilst printing. I never managed to find out what was wrong with it - was this some kind of time bomb fixed into the Epson printer where it would be set to expire after X amount of pages? :erm:

Re: All in one printer or seperates?
 

True, HP ink is more expensive, but shopping around does pay dividends.....

7 Day Shop are doing some good deals on HP ink right now.

Also The Computer Shop (Time Computers branches) are promoting lower inkjet prices....I picked up a black cartridge in there for about £10 when PC World are flogging them for £20!

Re: All in one printer or seperates?
 

Slightly :notopic: , but ...

[img]Download Failed (1)[/img]

WTF ?? :erm:

Re: All in one printer or seperates?
 

Hahahaha...well it is Time Computers....what did you expect?

Re: All in one printer or seperates?
 

You have to bear in mind that most printers these days (including HP) come with cartridges that are only half full. In the case of the HP PSC1205 the printer may cost £49.99 at Argos and the black and colour multipack £41.90 but these cartridges will last twice as long so you would have to pay £99.98 to get the same amount of ink.

Re: All in one printer or seperates?
 

Some photo printers have four ink carts instead of just one colour and one black. :)

Re: All in one printer or seperates?
 

http://www.ssclg.com/epsone.shtml - crucial tool for Epsons, they DO have a "death counter" - the waste ink counter - you SHOULD service the printer and either replace or clean the waste ink pads, but you may get away with just resetting the counter - be aware that the printer could puke waste ink from a clean, if the waste reservoir overfills.


I'm not keen on "all your eggs in one basket" all in one machines, unless you MUST save that space (though individual scanner and printer are less bulky units, and may fit where an all in 1 would be awkward. or you value the standalone copier feature of some of them.

If you print CD labels, maybe an R200 for printable CDs would be a good move.
At PC World, £49.99 as an accessory for a digital camera, including the cheap little AGFA
Model - AGFA SV VGA
Product Code - 948861
Out of stock, are they getting wise to this dodge?

Model - AGFA SX 1.3MP
Product Code - 948878
Next one up

You could get the printer alone for about the same overall price at Ebuyer, but with both of these, the cheapest scanner takes you over budget.

PS. Epsons DO have a bit of a clogging habit, I'd say you should excercise them once a week to be sure - a normal text/color page, the black and colour test blocks. Or anything you would normally print in some numbers, spread them out.

If you fear a fatal head clog, then stay with discardable heads in the HP, Lexmark and SOME Canons - the best of the Canons, you can choose to replace either the inks, or the whole head and ink set (which WILL need replacing occasionally, as under that system, it's not designed to last the life of the printer).

On any discardable heads, I'd be looking at refills, and on Epsons, probably clone cartridges.


PS.
PHOTO printers, at lest in EPSON terminology, use 5 colours and black, which may be a 5 colour tank, or 5 individual - the individual colours can be a saving, if you use 1 or 2 colours excessively, and with the 5, using up the light cyan in sky tones may be a problem.

In practice, the ultra-high resolution of modern 3 colour + black models, makes them as good as previous 5 colour models - they don't have the light cyan and light magenta, but they can apply exceedingly small dots of the ordinary ones.

Re: All in one printer or seperates?
 

I've got a Photosmart HP, and these have the extra cartidge that give the light shades, plus there's another cartridge for B&W prints that is stunning.