Need A Trusty Home-Office Printer

[Palanan]

So, I could use advice on a durable, good-quality printer for home-office use. This will mainly be for letters, drafts, PDF articles, etc., mainly in black-and-white; it would be nice to have the option for color, but that's not essential.

I have no particular brand preferences, although I've seen a late-model HP that kicked out very nice quality pages. However, I've also tried an older HP and been stymied by its frequent jamming and incomprehensible startup routine. I'm ascribing this to "older and cheaper," rather than a failing of the entire brand, but I'm open to any brand that's reliable and doesn't need a strong dose of technical genius to keep it going.

Suggestions welcome, and thanks in advance. I tend to be overwhelmed by the long rows of printers at office stores, so any advice on narrowing the field would certainly be appreciated.

[Poison_Fish]

Brother printers have worked pretty well for myself and my office. We've also used HP and an Epson, but for monochrome printers the brothers have been most solid throughout the years. That's just based on my experience though. I couldn't say with detailed information.

[Winter_Wolf]

Our family has a Brother and an HP. Both are good, but between them I prefer the Brother even if it's a bit slower for printing; then again, it's about 5-6 years older than the HP. Between the brands I'd go with Brother. Whatever you do, if you do go with a color printer, absolutely make sure all your colors are separate cartridges! None of that "black cartridge, color cartridge" nonsense. You want one for each: black, cyan, magenta, yellow (and if it's an HP, "photo black" which is mandatory for printing photos that don't look like faded crap.)

[Palanan]

Thanks very much for the suggestions, both on the brands and the color cartridges.

As it happens, I've heard good things about Brother as well, and that's the brand which Consumer Reports leans toward. Any suggestions on a particular model?

[factotum]

Since you say it's not essential to print in colour, why buy an inkjet? Get a laser printer. I don't know what the US prices are like, but in the UK a cheap mono laser can be got for as little as £50; the print quality will beat a cheap inkjet, the "ink" (e.g. toner) is dry so you won't have a problem with the heads drying out if you don't print anything for a while, and you'll probably get more prints out of your £50 printer than you would from £50 worth of ink in an inkjet before you even have to change the toner the first time.

[Winter_Wolf]

Thanks very much for the suggestions, both on the brands and the color cartridges.

As it happens, I've heard good things about Brother as well, and that's the brand which Consumer Reports leans toward. Any suggestions on a particular model?

Mine's still working like a champ, so I don't even know what models they're making these days. I'm pretty sure that the MFC CW-685 is no longer in production, but it's surely been replaced with something that prints faster, and maybe even double sided printing. I love that mine has an "ADF" (automatic document feeder) that will feed up to 35 pages into the scanner/fax/copier. The scan bed is also a good size for scanning legal size paper (8.5"x 14") though I've never had cause to. (Honestly an 11"x17" scanner would be more useful to me, but for that I expect I'd have to get a dedicated scanner, and it's not any kind of priority these days.)