The Low-Down About Printers

[ceagle]

In a recent entry, I spoke about a lemon Samsung camera with surprise, since every other Samsung product I've met has been good or great.
Other companies might be opposite, such as Sanyo, where everything except one, (an answering machine), has been a lemon.
Others yet are much more mixed, depending on the brand level (high-end or low-end product lines), such as Sony.
In other words, it can be sketchy to stereotype a brand entirely.

With printers though, after all these years... it's kind of like Sanyo... so far it seems pretty universal...

MAKE	INK	PAPER	COMPATIBILITY	OTHER
Hewlett Packards	Goes BAD quickly without weekly use	Early machines had roller defects Paper Jams	Fair
Epsons	Goes BAD quickly without weekly use	Fair	Fair
Canons	Good	Good	Unfortunately not very backward compatible
Brothers	Fair, short life but never a bad print	Frequently grabs and wastes too many sheets Cannot use special papers	Fair	Driver Software bug does not allow multiple copies Must print one copy at a time

For Kodak and Lexmark I have little or no data. Kodak says their ink is a better value, and Lexmark is known as a low-end printer, but I haven't heard of any major complaints in the biz.

For years I've gone through them.... several HPs, several Epsons... all okay or even good machines in concept, but quickly a drag since the ink/heads would go bad rather quickly if it wasn't used every week.

A couple of years ago I looked into it and decided to try a Brother machine. It would run on the older macs and the newer windows machines. Also, the ink never seemed to go bad! Never a streak or bad print, from ink anyway.
Oddly, the manual did say the ink has a 6 month life, and somehow it did always ask to be changed before its time was up.
One annoying software workaround was that the dialog box would say you could print multiple copies, but it wasn't so. For every copy of something, one would have to hit Print again. Luckily I did not have a lot of multiple print needs, usually.
The eventual deal-breaker though was the poor paper feeding system. It would occasionally jam, and frequently draw in too many sheets, causing a print to be spread over several sheets, rendering it useless and a waste. It also can't work with special papers, so I can't do business cards like before, or greeting cards, etc, despite the manual saying it could do it if you loaded one sheet at a time.

So a few months ago I had gotten fed up and bought a Canon... but I never installed it because I had cooled off by the time I got home, and... heh.. I know how long it can take to install these things.. like 30 minutes to 2 hours or so... and really the latter.

So tonight after having to do a big copy job, I'd had enough... and I installed the Canon... (yep, 2 hours).

But... so far so good!
Multiple copies again.. YAY!
Good ink AND Good paper .. YAY!
Alas I won't be able to print from mac classic anymore... but I haven't actually done that in a long time... and realistically anything there can more than likely be moved to a newer machine for printing :}

I hope you enjoyed the Printer Report.. and I hope it helps you with your printer purchases in da future! ^v^ ...Eagle