old jon said:
Hi BGM. You`re looking at it from the correct point of view.
I think most popular printers are pretty good now,
but the deciding factor is. How much does it cost to run.
My Epson all in one, cost about £95 when I bought it, but the
`genuine` replacement cartridges were about £50+ a set.
Fortunately you can get `OEM` cartridges for about £15-18
for 3 sets.
It`s a case that the printer manufacturers could give away their
printers for free, the price they charge for ink.
Finding an inkjet printer that will be inexpensive to run these days is
about as easy as finding a gallon of gas on sale.
If you want cost efficiency and don't need color then go with a laser.
If you need color photos from the printer then accept that it will run you
money. HP and Canon are good bets. HP is good if you aren't going to print
that often because its design has built in heads with each new cartridge.
The cost of cartridges will be the highest among the three companies I'm
discussing.
Canon's heads are built into the printer so the cartridges are cheaper to
replace than HP and will have the next ease of head clogs. They also use dye
base inks and that makes head clogs easier to avoid and remedy should you
get one.
The Epsons, IMHO, give the very best photo printing but some models can
be exceptionally problematic in terms of maintaining because of the inks
that their sub $100 varieties use. The Dura-brite inks used in their 4
color, inexpensive, general purpose printers (less than $100) C series (ie
C-84, C-86, C-88) and several multifunctional printers as the CX 6400, have
proven extremely difficult to remove clogs if they are not run very
regularly. If they are run daily there seems to be little problem with them
clogging. The inks, pigment variety, have some very good characteristics in
that they dry fast, are close to being archival, being lightfast, and are
extremely water resistant, unlike inks from HP and Canon. The clogging issue
aith Dura-brite is becoming a known deterrent, and unless you really are
printing often I would avoid them. However, the C-88 is the newest C series
and it is supposed to use a different formulation of the Dura-brite ink
(Dura-brite Ultra), which may have better characteristics, yet to be
determined.
Epson has some other photo-printing models that use dye-base inks; ie
R220, R300, R320. These use dye base inks; are relatively inexpensive to
purchase compared to a tri-color HP cartridge, but I believe are 6 color
design printers so that makes one spend more for ink even if the cartridges
are cheaper than the one tri-color. Most of the Epson printers now use
individual color cartridges. In comparing dye base ink between Canon and
Epson it appears that Epson ink is less fade resistant.
The much more expensive photo printers are the R-800, R1800. They use a
pigment type ink called Ultrachrome, (8 color design) and seem to have
proven much better at avoiding clog issues because they dry a bit slower
than the Dura-brite ink yet maintain the good qualities of the pigment inks.
These printers are in the $350 + range and don't fit what you requested as
far as initial cost.
I'm reluctant to discuss the Lexmark line as I've had little experience
with their printers other than their cheap models failing mechanically very
quickly whenever we've used them in our school.
A couple of years ago if you had posed this question I would have said
Epson right away. Pigment inks were just barely being used and Epsons were a
cheap and reliable approach to decent general photo printing with their 740
or 880 models. Today you can get exceptionally fine printing but none of it
is cheap in the standard purchase of cartridges for these printers.
