Laser printer vs Inkjet

larc919 said:

I have a Brother HL-L2390DW that includes a flatbed scanner and works great. It's currently only $190 at Walmart and Amazon.

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My local Walmart and the Walmart I was in yesterday only have the Brother Laser printer that cost $250 and is way cheaper then what Amazon is charging for the same printer. I forget the Model number. I looked it up the first day I saw it hoping I could find it cheaper. The store I was in yesterday did have a display model of the $190 printer. If they had one in the box, I would have been tempted.

@larc919 , I was able to find the Brother printer under my local Walmart's website. It's the MFC-L2730DW. The only way I could get my wife's approval is If I donated the old one to a family member or sold it.

larc919 said:

I have a Brother HL-L2390DW that includes a flatbed scanner and works great. It's currently only $190 at Walmart and Amazon.

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Been using the same model for at least 4 years. You don't want to know what I paid for it back then though (let's just say it involved price matching between Beat Buy and Staples).

PenPusher said:

HP Instant Ink, best ever deal! My neighbour has had her Ink jet printer for 3 years now and has never bought any more cartridges.
Maths part £70 for printer/scanner, so far 3 lots of black and colour carts £0.00, 15 free prints per month, 10 extra prints £1.00 and rolls over to following months as well.
With her low usage she's never had to pay!
You have to be careful... test prints and diagnostic printouts do count!!!

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It depends on your usage. I work on projects where I get high periods of usage for say a month, then little for a couple of months. I worked it out and over a year, it would cost me more overall. A key factor is you can only roll over a percentage of the non use.

I would either buy lots of extra pages in heavy use periods, or use pay for a more expensive plan I would not fully use.

Instant Ink is best for people with a fairly constant (or low) use.
Where Instant Ink really scores is if you (say) print pictures using a lot of ink.

When "they" sell ink catridges, they quote as (say) 500 pages per cartridge. This is a bit of a scam as it is based on 5% coverage of page (a full page of text is roughly 10%, and pictures say up to 80%), In other words, you can expect to get much lower number of pages - as low as 120 pages if doing A5 prints (4 times less for A4)!

However Instant Ink is per page regardless of how much coverage, and work out much more economic.

So yeah, for some users it is great, but for others the benefit can be negative - you need to analyse your usage and type of usage patterns to make a judgement.

In the end, I decided to keep my HP Inkjet on normal buy as you need basis. I actually print mostly mono, so I set that as my default, and only need to change black cartridge more frequently. That is another factor to consider with Instant Ink as my pc has high capacity black cartridges.

I bought an Epson printer, ages ago, for 30 bucks.
A couple years ago, I had some printing to be done but the cartridges were dried out.
New cartridges would have costed me 80 dollars!
Took the stuff to a local print shop, got it all done for 12 bucks, haven't done anything since!
Epson scanner still works though.

Edwin said:

I bought an Epson printer, ages ago, for 30 bucks.
A couple years ago, I had some printing to be done but the cartridges were dried out.
New cartridges would have costed me 80 dollars!
Took the stuff to a local print shop, got it all done for 12 bucks, haven't done anything since!
Epson scanner still works though.

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You can get after market inks for epson from amazon for cheap. They are not the best but good enough for my normal printing needs. I usually just print b&w anyway.