My mother-in-law is looking for a new printer. She does some crafty things and would like a printer that can take various paper sizes and thinkness. Also, it needs to be able to scan as well as airprint. I haven’t researched a printer in forever (we use our really cool copier as a printer/scanner/fax at the office). What would you recomend.
Price-They don’t want to spend $1000 (though if push came to shove they might) but they understand that it’ll cost them more than $200.
Thanks in advance!
Be wary of per-page costs. Color lasers can run $0.15/sheet. Often a complete set of cartridges cost more than the printer. The per-page cost seems to be inversely proportional to the printer’s price.
Also, your MIL might be interested in one of these Brother ScanNCut machines for crafty things. My girlfriend really likes hers.
I have used many bubble jet style printers from canon, brother and hp. They usually fail within a year or two and i finally realized (thick skull) they fail early because of my infrequent printing, the inks in the machine dries up and then you might as well toss it. So i purchased an hp color laser (m477) and absolutely love it. The dang thing just works and is accurate enough to use it for PCB footprint verification. Yes the cartriges are expensive, i think a whole color set is about 300 bucks, but it last forever and works without problems.
The printer has a scanner also but the quality of this is low, good for an occasional bw scan but not for serious stuff. It has air printing but i never use that.
I’ve had a Brother HL-3150CDW for several years and it has been great. Prints over USB or network, supports AirPrint and it has been very economical. Brother have a good reputation for supporting their hardware. When a new version of MacOS comes out they update drivers as quickly as possible, even for older devices.
They no longer sell the model I have; this looks like its replacement,
https://www.brother-usa.com/products/hll3230cdw.