What type of printer should I buy?

Question

Any suggestions for a printer at a moderate price? I want to be able to print decent quality pictures and use it for invitations. Basic function mostly.

Answer 1

You should go with HP they have the best printers hp.com

Answer 2

If you are looking at HP, and in the inkjet line of products, there are 3 types to choose from.

Deskjet is low-end, it will do the basic functions, but the quality is not the best (image quality is ok, but the printer hardware is low-end). They are the cheapest.

Photosmart is mid-range, probably more what you are looking for. Does nice photos, etc and can usually feed a range of paper types. All different features are available on different photosmart printers.

Officejet is the label for HP's high end inkjet printers (this is a recent change - "officejet" used to indicate the features the printer had, but that is no longer the case).


Officejet printers generally have a lower cost-per-page than Photosmart or Deskjet printers as well, which is something to take into consideration for home photo printing, since it's not cheap.

You can compare different model numbers here:

http://www.shopping.hp.com/printer;HHOJSID=ZyVhHL6ZWT7k1GP9vy19y7H38FTLtPKLMHp52MZnhsvHyY9WMx3R!2094860797?jumpid=in_R329_prodexp/hhoslp/ipg/printer

Answer 3

Photos mean ink jet. Unfortunately, photo paper and photo ink are pricy and getting digital photos developed has really come down in price. IMHO, it's not really worth it to print your own pictures at home.

Once you take photos out of the picture (so to speak), the big problem with ink jets is they dry out when not used frequently. For home use, we go through "bursts" of usage. Some days we'll print 50 pages, but we may not print anything for a week and a half after that. For home use, laser printers are by far the best. They suffer no ill effects from sitting around unused.

There are color Laser printers (Xerox makes some good ones in their "phaser" line, HP would be my second choice). What you have to watch for is does the ink get recycled? Powdered ink (toner) is sprinkled on the page, and melted to it with a laser. The excess is scraped back off. Hopefully, it gets scrapped back into the toner cartridge - if not you end up buying ink more often. The problem is, sometimes in order to facilitate speedier printouts, the color toner just goes into a waste tray and is not recycled. So fastest isn't always best.

If you really want to do pictures and want an inkjet, you want something that has separate ink cartridges for each of the colors. Many printers have a black (K) cartridge, and one cartridge that has Cyan (C), Magenta (M) and Yellow (Y). If you run out of Magenta, you must replace the entire color cartrdige. But if you have separate C, M & Y cartridges, you can just replace the M. Higher end photo printers will also come with additional (slightly different shades of) Cyan and Magenta (CMYKcm). See, the human eye can detect more varitions in color in blue, which is what Cyan and Magenta make, so you need more "blue dots" on the page for brighter colors (at least as percieved by the human eye). Again, lower end printers will have a "photo cartrige" which typically replaces the K cartridge with a Kcm cartridge (again, run out of "c" and you have to replace the whole cartridge).

Generally speaking, I would steer you towards Epson (maybe Alps) for ink jets.

Answer 4

i have a HP 3 in 1 it prints copies and scans... that way i can print pictures that i dont have saved into the computer....really good quality. and decent priced!

Answer 5

go to walmart or frys. you can get name brand multi printers for around 50. if u only want to print picturse your better off with and ink jet jet kodak printer

Answer 6

I have a photosmart C4I80 All-in-One and it gets you great pictures and quality. I suggest that one. Good luck!

Answer 7

Canon iP1300 works for me.