I had settled on Brother inkjet printers for quite a while now. Bulletproof with cheap refills from China, which have never damaged anything, unless 10 year counts.
But Chinese sources for any printer ink seem to haves disappeared from eBay, and everything else is about half the price of branded, and at least 5 times what I was paying a few years back.
My 10YO has died, it's very low use, and I'm looking for a cheap colour printer, with cheap Toner cartridges/ drums,and the page count per refill.
A cheap printer is going to be expensive if the pages finish up costing 40 cents each because the refill has 100 page capacity.
What Laser or Inkjet Printer Has The Cheapest Refills?
GOFYS on 07/12/2015 - 20:50
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How often do you print? If not often enough, buy a cheap B+W laser printer for around $30-$50, as cheap as $20. Buy a new one when drum runs out.
Colour ink - dried out around 3 months even if you don't print. Go to office or Officework to print for occasional colour prints.
I could be wrong but this is what I am doing. Comments welcome.Laser. Even if inkjet is statistically cheaper, you'll find a seldom used inkjet printer clogs up with dried ink. Running the head cleaning function on a printer uses a lot of ink and doesn't guarantee a good result. Laser printers are faster to start up, print, generally much cheaper to run in the real world, and better for everything except photos.
It's a bit messy but I'm using a Canon printer with refillable cartridges, something like this. I then buy my premium ink separately from an Australian vendor which costs about $20 for a 125ml bottle (per colour).
And print colour in stores like BigW, Harvey Norman, etc. Sales used to come up regularly on photos, although I can't remember seeing one for a while. If they do still have sales, you wait and print all at once. Also some online printing sites used to give some free credit - again - don't know if they still do. Snapfish was one I think. Places like Vistaprint for larger stuff. They used to have discount codes, but haven't seen them here for a long time either. So search online. Got some T-shirts and mugs dirt cheap from them (less than $10 each). Harvey Norman or BigW (forget which - both maybe?) sign up and they send out emails when larger stuff is reduced - which I always delete without reading, LOL. (Canvases and mugs I mean.)
Hijacking this thread, what is the cheapest color printer to run these days? Just need one for odd color printing at work, probably less than 10 pages per week. I know you can go to OW, but the business is in a small rural town. Just thought might buy one during Xmas sale
You can get a colour laser for less than $200, but check the cost of replacement toner - you'll want to be sure that cheap 3rd party cartridges are available.
The starter toner might last a year at that rate.i use samsung lasers for b&w
i use a epson workforce for colour but i dont print photos really just charts etc.
both use cheap china knockoff carts
tonerstop.com.au seem to have pretty cheap laser toner
brother generally cheap for both inkjet and laser, epson ink catridge is quite cheap. If you want colour, best to settle with inkjet, with laser colour brother and fuji-xerox, but be aware that you won't have photo quality for these consumer colour laser printer. Most colour lasers are good up to around 20-50000 page print, after that you better buy another one because the cost of toner drum and belt will cost more than the printer itself.