So I'm tired of buying garbage printers from big box store X. Ink jet printers seem to last about a year before the print head get all messed up and no amount of head cleaning does anything. For those of you who have quality printers, fill me in! I'm open to most suggestions.
Just looking for something for everyday home office use.
depending on how much you print, the cartrige might take a very long time to empty. I've all of my monochrome printing with a HP Laserjet 1320n for the last 4 years with a single cartrige. printing tickets etc. every now and again.
I personally would go for a business device that has postscript support, used is usually fine.
I have come to the conclusion that every single printer under the sun is terrible. I recently went through this ordeal, and just today I found out I have to learn how to compile printer drivers manually.
Note, I got this used and I think the cartrige was at like 25% or something at the time, and I'm sorry to say, I have done an error in how long I've used it, I think its 6 years, not 4.
especially if you take into account that the cartrige has done 4k pages and was installed in 2006. HP consumer printers however laser or not, I wouldn't touch.
well if you think about it, businesses may need to print serval hundred pages per day, consumers wont do the same in a month so that directly translates into build quality as consumer printers don't need to be that good. Also the consumer side tends to have terrible driver support so if your OS changes from xp to vist, vista to 7, 7 to 8 every time you tend to have to buy a new device due to lack of support or at least every other time.
warranties are another thing if you buy new, business devices will have wildly different warranties compared to consumer devices and are usually serviceable and even in some cases upgradeable where as consumer devices tend to be thrown to the landfill and a new one purchased instead of repairing them.
edit. HP consumer side does not make any money off the printers themselves, they lose money selling them so it makes sense for them to make them crappy and force you to constantly change the cartriges. For ex. I have used Canon Pro 9000 MKII printer that is a inkjet, and it never clogged its printheads, then again its a professional device and not a consumer device and cost at the time something like $1200 So if you go and buy the cheapest canon inkjet it will crap out almost as fast as the HP one. also, certain lower end laser printers may have chips that control when the cartrige "goes bad" and will refuse to print after said date. HP has also done other fun things like geo locking cartriges so if you buy German catriges they wont work in a printer bought from US and other fun stuff.
So long story short, you get what you pay for and HP is pretty evil.
I have a Brother HL2150N. A networked monochrome laser printer. Really recommend the HL lineup.
Toner cost 20€ on Amazon (non original) drums cost 20€ on Amazon (non original)
I had to replace the drum last year (I've bought the printer in 2010) and I have had 2 paper jams over the past 6 years. A friend of mine bought a HL2000 series printer last year and he is very happy.
Do yourself a favor: get the wired network printer and not a wireless one, print jobs are kind of big.