Spec me a document printer

GSDog · 9 Mar 2009 at 14:39

Hi all.

My brother bought a Canon Pixma IP8500 printer a while ago as an all purpose printer. The problem is that it has 8 ink cartridges and they cost £10 each! We're currently paying atleast £20 a month on the ink cartridges alone and we're barely using it for photo printing at all, that is mostly document printing.
So I'm basically looking for a fairly cheap, reliable, colour printer for document printing and it must be cheap to run!
I know very little about printers so any help would be appreciated. I don't really want to spend more than £40-50 and would consider buying second hand if you think it's worth it.

I will keep the Canon printer for photo prints only and the new printer will be used for documents.

EDIT: Forgot to add, it has to work with Vista and I would like it to be a network printer.

bremen1874 · 9 Mar 2009 at 16:22

I can't see you matching all of those requirements for anywhere near £50.

Do you need a colour for document printing? If you can live with B&W you can get a decent low volume laser printer without spending too much.

fobose · 9 Mar 2009 at 17:06

As said above, you will struggle to find what you want with £50. You can buy a cheap Samsung monochrome laser for around £40-£45, however it will be USB only. I had to pay £100 for a mono laser with built in network.

rpstewart · 9 Mar 2009 at 17:30

Isn't the sensible option here to go for compatible cartridges for the Canon? My usual supplier looks to be doing 12 cartridges for £10 (pick the colours you need) for that printer.

GSDog · 9 Mar 2009 at 21:00

Thanks for the replies.

I didn't realise they would be that expensive. I will keep an eye on auction sites to see if I can pickup a good deal. I don't think I need a network printer but it would be very useful.
I currently have the Canon plugged into a PC on the home network and all the other PCs on the network print via that PC.
It can be annoying because the PC has to be left on all the time and I haven't been able to get my Vista PC to work with the printer because the Canon is attached to an Windows XP PC and it refuses to print, saying it's using the wrong kind of driver.

rpstewart said:
Isn't the sensible option here to go for compatible cartridges for the Canon? My usual supplier looks to be doing 12 cartridges for £10 (pick the colours you need) for that printer.

I did try those cheaper cartridges and they were awful. It leaked and the colours looked terrible.

ecat · 9 Mar 2009 at 23:14

First off double check your printer settings to ensure black really is black ie the printer is using the black cartridge. Sometimes the printers are configured to make their own black by mixing various other colours, expensive and unnecessary.

If your documents must be full colour then you're stuck with inkjet prices unless you splash out on a low end colour laser. Compared to inkjets colour lasers are cheaper to run but you may still find the costs unacceptable.

If your documents contain only partial colour, or you can re-do them to minimise the colour content then splash out on a low cost office b&w laser. Forget the £50 consumer jobs, the toner cartridges are relatively small and relatively costly. The initial £50 - £100 extra cost will be offset by the size of the supplied cartridge and wiped out at the first refill. When printing use the laser for b&w and give the document a final pass through the inkjet to add colour where necessary. A bit more work on your part but the savings are considerable.

Considerable ? I bought a Samsung office laser, network ready, full size toner cartridge (£75 replacement cost) for a little over £100. At a guess by now I'd be on my 3rd or 4th inkjet refill, checking the Samsung it tells me I have 95% toner remaining.

lsg1r · 9 Mar 2009 at 23:55

ecat said:
First off double check your printer settings to ensure black really is black ie the printer is using the black cartridge. Sometimes the printers are configured to make their own black by mixing various other colours, expensive and unnecessary.

canon shouldn't mix the colours to make black in the ip range, they have 2 blacks and use one for 'glossy' and one for text usually.

To the op.
What I would suggest first (I use an ip5200 and ix4000) is to play with the output settings (ie set to draft or reduce 'darkness). Make sure you've got the paper set to the right type (see above)
Also from my experience, theres usually about 10+ pages of text left in the black cartridge even after it's 'empty' according to the ink level tool.