All in One printer

I'm in the market for an all-in-one printer/scanner. Copy and fax are optional, but that might be moot.

For printing, speed, quality, and affordability would all be valued. Good photo printing would be stellar but may be asking too much. A paper tray wide enough for A3 (or A4/letter in landscape) would also be fantastic.

For scanning, I need at least enough surface area to scan entire sheets of standard A4 paper. I do some drawing and would like to be able to get high quality scans of my drawings.

I'll be buying and using this in China, so model numbers may vary, but any suggestions would be valuable.

 

It must be quite a while since you bought a printer.

Just so we're on the same page, you are thinking black and gray laser printer, right?

You don't need the tray to be "wide enough" as most (all?) now electronically shift from portrait to landscape.

At a minimum, get a tray that permits legal paper (8.5"x14"), as the tray will adjust to smaller sizes.

11"x17" will be expensive and heavy.

Get one that permits wireless input, in addition to USB input.

 

Sorry, I forgot to mention it needs to do color - if affordability and speed don't come in the same package for color printers, affordability is preferred. It has indeed been a long time since I bought a printer.

I know printers shift portrait to landscape. My point is that I'll sometimes be printing on A3 paper (A4 is similar in size to letter, A3 is the same size as two A4's side-by-side, making it as wide as A4/Letter in landscape).

As for wireless connectivity, it's low on my list of priorities. I'd pay a few bucks extra all other things being equal, but probably not more than $10 over a regular USB printer. At the very worst, I would have to take a file from my desktop, put it on my laptop, carry my laptop to the printer, and print. I'm okay with that.

Edit: This is a home use machine, it might be used for high-volume printing a couple days a year, but most of the time it'll be a page or two here and there.

 

Given this 2nd set of needs/interests, I'd start by using USA newegg for ideas, i.e. at triple w dot newegg dot com

Use "advanced" under "narrow results" in order to get an item list.

Do that for both lasers and also for inkjet. Read the owner reviews. Then check owner reviews of interesting units on amazon.

You might also consider getting two somewhat inexpensive printers, as that might better fulfill your needs.

Post here when you get down to a few finalists, as you might get a useful idea here that you'd not already thought of.

 

The biggest downside about Amazon and Newegg searches is that they're scattershot - if I search for a color inkjet with scanning capabilities, I might only get 1/3 of the relevant matches because their product entry people aren't doing their job of getting all of the relevant information entered into their databases. I've done a couple searches like that, but it's like wading through tar - personal experiences from the people here, who I trust, are optimal for getting better information (with less personal effort). There's also no search option on either of those sites for paper size - I could live without A3 printing on my personal printer and just do that at the school where I teach, but having the ability at home would be optimal so I'd like to see what models offer that capability.

The more I think about it, the more I think good photo printing would be a huge plus, and worth the extra money on the front end. I don't know that I would want to pay for photo-quality ink for all of my printing, though, so if there's an option that has photo cartridges and regular cartridges (either built-in or swappable), or refillable cartridges where I could fill a set with photo quality ink and a set with regular ink for swapping, that would be ideal.

So far, Brother seems to offer a good product at a good price, with the added benefit that you can get third-party refill cartridges for pennies. Not sure about photo printing capabilities, though.

And finally - Laser and two machine solutions are out. Laser gets big and expensive when you start talking color. As for two printers - I hardly want to have one printer cluttering up my desk; if it weren't for my girlfriend, who wants to have a printer to print out her copious amounts of Montessori training homework (but only needs to do so this once), I would just use the printers at school like I've done for that past five years.

 

I have an all-in-one Brother printer/scanner/copy, but it's a monochrome laser, and bigger than most all-in-one inkjets, so likely not where you want to go.

One other thought is to get a printer that has postscript capability; it generally costs somewhat more but can come in handy, given your above comments.

And yes, newegg and amazon only carry a subset of the total printers that's available; but I find that newegg helps most with narrowing it down to something that's at least in the right ballpark for my interests, with minimal time needed to look.

Good luck.

 

Maybe you could elaborate on postscript: I'm vaguely under the impression that it's basically a driver system that interprets images and text and tells the printer how to print them. What are the benefits of getting a Postscript-enabled system, and how do I know which machines have that compatibility (for example, I see no information on Postscript compatibility on the product pages on the Brother site)?

 

For general background info on PostScript, see: PostScript - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In the past (15+ years ago) only some printers came with it, and from what I see today that is still true today.

The end of the History section has this:

--->"By 2001, few lower-end printer models came with support for PostScript, largely due to growing competition from much cheaper non-PostScript ink jet printers, and new software-based methods to render PostScript images on the computer, making them suitable for any printer; PDF, a descendant of PostScript, provides one such method, and has largely replaced PostScript as de facto standard for electronic document distribution.

On high-end printers, PostScript processors remain common, and their use can dramatically reduce the CPU work involved in printing documents, transferring the work of rendering PostScript images from the computer to the printer."<---

Odds are that there are a few NBR people who can tell you of if/where PostScript might still have merit in today's low cost printing environment. Maybe there's something in the above writeup that might catch your interest.

I mentioned PS because of your recent comment:
"The more I think about it, the more I think good photo printing would be a huge plus, and worth the extra money on the front end. I don't know that I would want to pay for photo-quality ink for all of my printing, though, so if there's an option that has photo cartridges and regular cartridges (either built-in or swappable), or refillable cartridges where I could fill a set with photo quality ink and a set with regular ink for swapping, that would be ideal."

 

I scanned the Wiki page, but it doesn't seem particularly relevant - sounds like Postscript was getting outdated a decade ago. The note about reducing CPU load for printing is moot, since I've always got CPU cycles to spare, and printing really isn't that CPU heavy most of the time. I guess I'll leave Postscript out of the search, then. I need to get this figured out soon because my girlfriend leaves in a week and she needs to have her Montessori stuff printed by then. Fortunately Amazon in China ships super fast - my first order ever from them, on a Sunday morning, arrived in seven hours.

 

You should give it at least another 24 hours before you buy anything.

No offense intended, but what I hate most is those people that post needing an answer within a few hours or a day at most.

Better to wait at least a bit. You never know what/when some useful idea will show up.

 

I agree with the sentiment, but I posted this thread five minutes after my girlfriend said she wanted to buy a printer - not much I could do...

Unfortunately, when a thread gets like this - it's been around for 2-3 days, has seven or eight posts back and forth between the OP and one other poster - chances are slim that anyone else is going to come in and give an answer.

I'll try one more time, though, in the hopes that someone might chime in:

Right now I'm looking at two models by Brother - MFC-J625DW and MFC-J220. From what I can determine, the major differences are an auto document feeder, wifi, and about $60. The J625DW with ADF and wifi costs roughly $200 while the other one is about $140, naturally these prices are converted from RMB. The main benefit of these machines is low ink cost, but in reality I'm not going to be using a ton of ink anyway unless photo printing quality is high, and the only Amazon review I've seen mention photo quality said it wasn't all that great.

How about Canon Pixma All-in-Ones? There are quite a few models ranging as low as $60 and up to $300+. The name suggests they're alright for photo printing, but what about document printing and ink economy? Any insight into these machines or what differences I'll find between the different price points? If they're good for photo printing and document printing and the ink is either affordable or user-refillable that might be the best way to go.

Settled on the Canon Pixma MG54X0 for lack of model-specific input here or elsewhere. In the US, it's the MG5420, whereas it's MG5480 here in China. The only real issue was that it costs $200 here when it's only $100 in the US...

Is it the best printer out there? Probably not. But I'm sure it'll be good enough for everything we need.

 

Before pulling the trigger, I would recommend you to at least take a look at HP Printers. What makes me think HP is worth to look at is that their printers are speedy and would also save you money when buying toners and cartridges because Canon is a little bit pricey when it comes to toners and cartridges. HP Colour LaserJet Pro CP1025NW could probably give you the services that you need. Prints fast up to 16 pages per minute. Not bad at all.

 

A full set of Canon XL carts is nearly $100 here. Fortunately, I bought a full set of third-party XL carts with a bunch of positive reviews for about $12.50. I guess I'll find out whether or not those reviews were planted in a few months/whenever I need to replace an ink cartridge.

 

I recommend the Epson workforce 845. For a while it was the highest ranked printer on Amazon, which is why I bought it. I've had if for a year and it's been perfect. I've owned several brands and this is by far the best I've used. Very cost effective for the features you get.