I need a new printer as my aging Epson Stylus Colour 640 is giving up the ghost. I havent looked at the printer market for years so I need a little help. What I need. Cheap Ink Carts, the kids will be printing there homework so this is a must Good print quality, doesnt have to be fantastic It doesnt have to have a fast print speed I can wait I'll be mostly printing full colour A4 pages or kids homework and the occational letter. Thanks in advance
Epson C64 is a good budget printer, quite quick, good image quality, seperate ink tanks for all the colours, cheap aftermarket carts...... happy enough with mine, especially for the price. Hope this helps, Darkside.
If you look around you can find cheap cartridges for HP's. Pick any around the £80 mark. The build quality on the epson "C" series is rubbish. With the hp's when you change the cartridge you change the head aswell.
dont buy a bloody epson!!!! i went in to get a new cartridge for my epson c70....Dixons......30 quid....WTF!!! must ahve been for 2 went nextdoor for PC world...27 quid.....OMg the rip....cheepest carrtriges i found were lexmark..... even teh printers cheap...18 quid....hey theres economics for you....a new printer and ink or some epson ink cartriges...
Stay away from Epson's, I had a C40UX and my theory is that it's got a "time bomb" like device inside and when the time is up the lights flash and you get the error "Please contact Epson, a technical fault has occured" Pure crap the printer was fine. I got a HP 3550 and it's never flackered, the ink is a little more but it's worth it.
Lexmark printers are crap. Most manufacturers only ship cartridges about 30% full with their printers. On the high street, cartridges will be that price, try somewhere like 7dayshop.com
To be honest mate, you need to go into this with a clear head, there's plenty of people who will say 'ooo, don't buy xxxbrand their printers explode and shoot lazer beams out of their bumholes', well, not exactly but you get the picture What you need to do is think about what you are prepared to spend, for both the printer and cartridges afterwards. There are good models and bad models for every manufacturer, obviously if you spend £30 on a lexmark/hp/epson/canon printer then it is bound to be a pile of steaming horse ****. If all you are getting one for is printing documents and kid's homework, why don't you look into getting a good second hand colour / mono laser printer. Sure, the price to begin with is going to be a bit steeper than your average inkjet, but you'll save loads in the long run over ink as the toner cassettes just keep going and going, you can get them refilled pretty cheaply on the high street. just my two penneth
An old epson 640 would be ideal. They go forever, cartridges are cheap as chips, and are capable of half decent photos
HP Printers are the best no matter what price. The drivers are insanely stable. Never had a problem with an HP, and I've had like 20+.
I know people are saying to go into this with a clear head, and that's all good, but I'd say don't go with an epson. I've had one for quite a while and the print quality goes downhill VERY quickly. Cartridges are also quite expensive as someone said.
I agree, epsons are horrible Canons, good quality, not reliable Lexmark, moderate quality, not reliable HP's, amazing quality, shockingly amazing pictures Xerox, good quality, good for text I haven't had experience with many others, but I've had to fix damn near every one you could imagine.
The epsons usded to be good. but the c2x-c8x and the cx3200 and cx5200 are not realiable, theyre more akin to lexmark (poo). However the R200 and R300 etc... are still good printers. My dads canon (photo 8200) is very reliable. My old canon lbp8mark4 laser was old, slow, but very reliable also. Samsungs are just like everything else samsung, not boasted about, but good at what they do and very reliable. Im currently using a samsung ml-1510 laser. I'd have suggested that but you want colour. Your best bet would be along the lines of the Hewlett Packard P7260 imo.
Everyone's shouting about the price of Epson Cartridges, sure, the genuine ones are a bit steep, but the compatibles are just as good (Print Rite) and they also come chipped for proper ink level monitoring. - go for the C64, Seperate colour cartridges (RYBK) and it prints quickly for an inkjet. (I've got the Photo edition and it does better photos than our 'dedicated' photo printer (Epson Stylus 830U), you can get them for about £60 I think.
Thanks for all the help guys, Im tempted at the moment by a Epson R200. Thats what I have at the moment! I think there is something wrong with head because I get banding when printing (unprinted white lines). These are worse when printing at lower resolutions. At the best quality you can just about see them.
Try the head cleaning process. If that fails try the allignment. And if that fails, next cartridge change clean the heads yourself with cotton buds and a mild solvent like turps/white spirit/isopropyl alcohol.
Aye, R200 is my next printer - upgrading from my trusty Stylus 980 soon. R300 doesn't seem anything special, as you can get card readers for less than the £40-or-so difference between the two.
The only thing I havent tried is cleaning the heads manually with isopropyl alcohol. It gets a little wierd because if I try the head cleaning and alignment process, sometimes I'll get one segment missing, it'll come back and another will be missing. Even If I get full segments on the alignment I still get this banding problem.
For printers i SWEAR by canon, i can get the cartridges cheap, and the printers give good results. GO CANON
