Posted: 7/16/2006 1:22:13 AM EDT
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I need to buy a printer/scanner thingy today. I don't REALLY need color, but it would be nice. The fax option would be useless since I know I won't use it. I just need something reliable for my home office. Any suggestions on brand, model,.....etc. I can afford a nice one, but nothing TOO expensive. Thanks |
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I got this one recently, and really like it.... www.walmart.com/catalog/product.do?product_id=4922347 edit: there all color now-a-days |
Hmm, there's an idea. Any advice on name brand for the scanner? |
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The only "good deals" for home-sized printers is on laser printers. Inkjets are a screw-job on the ink. The ink costs nearly as much as the printer does, and the ink dries out after a few months (clogging the print heads) no matter how much or how little you use it. The cost of a laser printer is often down around $.05-$.07 per page; it's not uncommon for inkjets to run 4-5+ times higher than that. With some inkjet printers, printing full-page color comes out to cost more than $1 per page. Most small-business magazines and sites won't even review most home-use inkjet printers, simply because the cost-per-page is considered too high for volume use. Laser printers tend to be sensitive to paper brands however, so check online what paper the model you pick likes best. ....... For sending faxes, you can get a combo machine, or you can use a scanner+program. Microsoft Office for one has a "fax wizard" thing in it, you just pick the image to "fax" and the phone number and it goes. For scanning, get a USB/LED scanner (runs off the power of the USB line, so it can be used portably/with laptops). I've got a Canoscan LiDE 30 (~$70 a while back) like this. ....I don't know how to receive faxes on a PC/home phone line however. If you need that, a standalone fax might be better. You can get "combo" machines that have laser printers. ------- The main drawback of the "combo" machines is that to scan anything, you have to be able to feed it through the machine. So for example--you cannot scan a page of a book, without ripping it out of the book. And you can't scan old [delicate] photographs or images printed on cardboard, because they won't feed through the machine. ~ |
I've owned (and still own) a Microtek Scanmaker E3 (1997 vintage) and a Visioneer OneTouch 8100. The Scanmaker was ~$200, the Visioneer I caught on sale at Staples a few years ago for $14.99 after massive rebates. Both have worked flawlessly. If I were looking today, I'd look for a low-end Visioneer, Microtek, or HP scanner. Oh yeah, one neat thing about the Visioneer scanner (and probably most scanners now, I would think) is that it has a number of buttons that interact with the OneTouch software you install on your computer. I do my scanning from within Paint Shop Pro, but the "Copy/Print" button is very nice. Makes it act like a photocopier. Press the button, it scans, automatically routes it through the computer and to the printer with no other input from me. Jim |
+1. Laser printers are the only way to go. Consider buying a used/refurbished "office/workgroup" laser printer - They're built to print millions of pages between overhauls, parts and service are readily available (unlike most 'throwaway' consumer printers), and consumables are inexpensive (a fraction of a cent per page). Generally, any used HP laser printer model that's designed for office/workgroup use is a good bet. As for scanners, even the inexpensive models reached design perfection about a decade ago. There is simply no practical reason to spend a lot of money on a scanner nowadays. Again, a used model is perfectly adequate - My personal favorite is the UMax Astra series (commonly found in thrift stores for under 10 bucks), but you really can't go wrong with any of the name brands. |
-I had a Umax Astra ?3300?-something scanner, and it scanned fantastically well, especially with printed materials because its driver let you set the descreen LPI resolution yourself. You could scan newspaper photos, magazine pages or book pages and they all looked absolutely-totally-perfect. Photoshop has a "descreen" filter but it doesn't work nearly as good as scanning the original with the proper setting to begin with. If you had the descreen setting right, you never ever got screening artifacts. Ever. But the scanner had problems too, it was serial-port (so it locked up the PC while scanning), the flourescent lamp wouldn't ever stay off (it didn't burn out though) and eventually the mechanical innards got so clunky it wouldn't work, it took 10-15 minutes to scan one page. By the time I chucked it, Umax was out of business. I looked around online for a long time trying to find another one that had the descreen options it had, and couldn't find any home-use scanners that did (I only found professional/industrial ones for many-hundreds of $$$), and I couldn't seem to find anyone else who was aware that such a great product was ever made. So I eventually bought the one I have now. ....It does have a "descreen" checkbox, with no LPI setting. And it works lousy. Just like the Photoshop descreen filter works lousy. ~ |