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by AlanYx 1202 days ago
What would you recommend for a color printer?
2 comments

Just one anecdote, but I bought a Canon in either late 2014 or early 2015 and it works great- it looks like I have printed about 6000 pages on it- mostly academic papers. IIRC it was a clearance that was selling for $300ish when it originally listed for about $700. I use off-brand toner replacements which work fine, from what I recall I have only bought one set of replacements. My only real complaint with it is that its large and weighs about 80 pounds, not that I move it often, but it takes up a significant amount of room.

Its a Canon Color ImageClass MF8580CDW, its well past its sale date, but it looks like this line of printers still exists: https://www.usa.canon.com/shop/printers/multifunction-printe...

Perhaps surprisingly, the HP ink tank printer ("Smart Tank 510 series") is not too too bad, we are about 300 sheets in and still lots of ink left. (This is impossible on an HP cartridge inkjet).

Print quality is good; the image does not bleed and the paper does not warp from "wet ink" syndrome.

But it is expensive.

And it has the oppressive "login to HP website to print". Nope, I avoid that.

Pro tip: decline auto upgrade of the "HP Smart" software; one day HP will "update" your software to require login before printing. The workaround is to remove that software and load the "enterprise" class packaged software.

> we are about 300 sheets in and still lots of ink left. (This is impossible on an HP cartridge inkjet).

Generally, the cartridges lasted well over a ream of paper (500 sheets) for me, often closer to two.

However, the "setup" cartridges that most of their printers come with are much smaller, and don't last as long. This fundamentally seems like a bad marketing move, giving people a poor initial impression of how long ink cartridges last.

(My personal reason for always going for HP is that they reliably work with Linux, even over the network, for both printing and scanning.)