Instead of a review today, I have a PSA for you regarding printers, and its pretty simple. Although I had initially had good results with my Canon MX922, it recently decided that it doesn’t recognize black ink after only a little over a year of use. Unfortunately after lots of time researching and troubleshooting I’ve found that the only way to fix this issue is to take it in for service. So for a $100 printer, I’m assuming it makes more sense to replace it than to take it in for service, which is a HUGE shame. I will however recycle it rather than just throw it out. Apparently if I had Googled something like “my printer wont print black” I would have seen a lot of information on other people who had similar experiences with this printer.
If you want a great write up on how bad the home printer situation is, I’d highly recommend checking out a great article from our friends over at The WireCutter. There is also a great comment in there with a link to a Harvard School of Public Health study on the potential dangers of laser printers in the home. As someone who is pretty picky about the products I bring into my home in order to make sure I’m not doing harm to my environment, I read this and decided a laser printer was definitely not for me. As is the point of their entire site, The WireCutter also has a list of their recommendations on All in One Home Printers.
Anyway, with all of that said, I’m obviously in the market for a new printer and am currently considering the Epson WorkForce Pro WF-4630 (via Amazon). I’ve had an Epson printer in the past that I really liked and the photo quality was amazing, but if anyone has any other suggestions for an all in one printer that they have had long term good experience with, I’m all ears and would love to hear your experiences good or bad about any printers you would recommend or NOT recommend. Sometimes knowing what NOT to get can be just as important as a recommendation on a good product to get.
I can recommend the Espon WF printers; I’ve had the A3 version for a while now and it’s brilliant. It just does it’s jobs – it prints, it scans (very usefully via the document feeder onto a memory stick), it copies. I can’t say how well it faxes, because I haven’t sent a fax for years…
The print quality is pretty good evey on really cheap copier paper.
Down sides – the single sheet feed for card stock is on the back and it’s a bit fiddly. The cartridges are what they are, more expensive than some, dearer than others. Buy the colour XL and the XXL black and you’ll be good some some time.
That Epson WF-4630 is an astounding machine. I bought one at Staples for $149 ($100 off) back in March; the price is higher now for some reason, but check around. The printer is VERY impressive. Print speed is astonishing — 20ppm black OR color, 11ppm duplexed black or color. A page comes out of the printer every 3 seconds printing single-sided. WOW.
But the “Cloud” features are what sets this printer apart: scan to Evernote, Dropbox, Google Drive, or Mac/PC direct; print from cloud, print from email, etc. We have found ourselves using these amazing features every day, and now can’t imagine having to do without them.
The WF-4630 is an incredible machine and a really exceptional value. Highly recommended!
@Chris and @Mike – Thanks so much for the feedback. I just realized how big the footprint is on this thing, Its 21″ x 24″ Definitely don’t have a good place to put that…back to the drawing board. 🙁
I use Epson. Here in Asia, you can buy third-party ink “silos” that extend ink capacity many times over. Espon caught on and now sells inkjet printers with Epson branded ink silos (I don’t think they’re available in the West). Also Epson has good drivers for Linux (but they’re hard to find online), which is important because after Win10 being shoved down my throat and then spying on me – I’m done with Microsoft, forever. Currently I’m using an Espon ME Office 82WD, an excellent wireless networked printer to which I’ve added large capacity ink silos (I don’t think this model printer is sold outside of Asia). The printer has been in service for over 5 years and is still going strong.
I see that all the time with the cheap printers, regardless of the make. Its cheaper now to buy a new printer than it is to replace the cartridges, gone are the days when you had 40ml of ink in the cartridges.
That’s a shame about your printer. The internet has definitely saved me some grief in the past when a printer wouldn’t connect to my computer via WiFi or would start jamming for no obvious reason.