I installed the demo version of Doozla for my son to use as a digital coloring book. He really likes it, but he wants to print his creations. I have a Lexmark personal laser printer but I don’t have a color inkjet printer.
Question the First: Should I eschew the entire concept of a second printer and just get a personal color laser printer?
Question the Second: If the answer to QtF is “no”, what personal color inkjet printer should I investigate?
Note: that sunflower iMac is runing the external 19″ monitor. The video cable that runs through the iMac’s monitor-arm is ruined, but its video card works just fine. I bought a cheap monitor, hooked it up to the iMac’s external video port, and that little computer has been running just fine like that for many, many years.
I ended up picking up a lexmark “does everything but make you coffee” printer/fax/copier. With it set up as networked on the desktop anyone in the house can print on it just fine.
Only thing I would suggest is making sure whatever you get uses different cartriges for black and color printing, you’ll save a ton ‘o cash that way.
I got rid of my printer long ago. Hand held devices, digital picture frames, and email, make printers (and ink) just seem like a waist of money. If I need something on paper I just print it at work.
I have found that the more expensive the printer is up front, the cheaper the cartridges are. That being said and taking into account that this printer is for your son to print out his creations, I would go with either an epson, canon or hp. Go for a color printer that has scanning capabilities. Why scanning? So that when he gets a little older, he will be able to scan drawings that he has done by hand and send them out to all his buddies.
On a sidenote, while lexmark and other printers seem nice with the 99 dollar value, the ink cartridges will eat up those savings. Just a thought.
I’m really on the fence about inkjets for home use nowadays, even though I just bought us a nice Canon multifunction for home. As the tech director for a small private school, printing is already the bane of my existence, laser or not, and inkjets have a special place in hell reserved for them and their $5000/gallon ink. (It’s true, do the math!) BUT, IMHO color laser quality for photos or anything complicated is just not great until you start spending in the upper 3-digit range. If you must go inkjet, I would recommend Canon – the Pixma line is terrific. If not, the Lexmark C544dn color laser got a 4.5 mouse review from Macworld – that would be my choice if you want to part with ~$360.
Forget inkjet! Help your son think green and get a solid ink printer:
http://www.office.xerox.com/solid-ink/solid-ink-sticks/enus.html
I have the 8560 myself. The up front cost was a little more, but the supplies cost next to nothing and last forever. I don’t know if $5000/gallon is accurate for ink, but it is probably close:
Milk: $0.03 per ounce
Don Perignon: $4.53 per ounce
Chanel #5: $44.11 per ounce
Ink for color inkjet printer: $60.88 per ounce
Love your blog bud and still holding out that you will come back to some good ‘ole hunter theorycraftin’. Glad to see you and your son are doing well.
-Lazaruslong and ArthurDent, Bloodscalp
I hate inkjet’s, the inks dry up and are useless if u don’t print on it once per week. As previously stated inkjet inks are insanely overpriced, and this makes the dried up brand new ink cartridge even more rage inducing, I bought a Minolta networkable colour laser 2 years ago and have yet had to change a cartridge, mind you I mainly print B&W.
While the colour vibrance is less impressive then inkjets, and their special paper, its more then acceptable in mind for children’s artwork, and you can easily have special pieces printed at a photo hut.
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I haven’t looked at inkjets in quite some time, horrid messy nasty creatures. Worth considering if the usage will be in the region of 10 to 40 pages per week. They need to get some usage or the cartridge nozzles clog with dried ink, but too much use and the consumable cost becomes truly unbearable. As has been said go for something that uses as the very least a separate black cartridge and preferably a 4 separate cartridge CMYK system. Also look for machines that hold more ink in each cartridge, some of the really low, up front, cost printers hold only a tiny amount of ink in each cartridge making consumable costs even more outrageous.
I did some research a year or so ago and came up with the Brother HL-4070CDW as a pretty good bet in the Laser category, should be able to pick one up for under $400 and the price per page worked out at under 10c. I can’t remember by exact criterea, but I would probably have taken the fuser life as the throw away point of the printer and amortized the initial cost of the printer and all consumables needed to utilize the lifespan (not including actual paper
). I would have done it using the ISO typical ink coverage per page (5% for black and… damn can’t remember now… 15 or 25% for color). Expect somewhat less life from the toner when your son realizes he can have solid green grass and solid blue sky 
but that applies to inkjets too.
Anyway it worked out most economical with a Dell model, can’t remember which a close second, so we bought one, it takes a little while to wake up form sleep for a first page but is fast once it gets going and has more than acceptable quality for typical home use. It has Ethernet and Wireless built in and also duplex ability too. There is a model that includes a scanner which basically makes it a color photocopier but I think that pushes the price up around the $600 mark.
I have twin 7 year olds who like to have their various art creations printed in color. I have a HP color laser printer and if you don’t keep a close watch on how much they print….it can cost A TON!!!! Just have him print one or two at a time and you should be OK.
I was struggling with the 2 printer desk space – black and white laser + color inkjet. So I picked up a Brother color Laser for a song during a sale – $250.
It prints beautifully but toner cartridges – there are 5 of them – are $85 a piece. Ouch!
However, if you do the math – I was spending about $50 a month for inkjet printer ink – getting about 200 pages to a set of cartridges (of mixed photo printing and text). That works out to roughly .25 a page. The $425 of toner cartridges yield about 5000 pages. That’s less then .10 a page. So the initial outlay was rough – but I like having 1 printer and in the end it is costing me less.
The one major downside is that the printer is BIG and heavy. Still less overall desk space then the 2 other printers, but hernia inducing when it needs to be moved.
I work for Office Depot, and sell printers for a living. Questions you want to ask is:
“How long will you be printing in color?” Color laser printers are a HUGE upfront cost compared to color laser printers, but over time (think a year or two) you will make up most is not all of the upfront cost from toner. So if your son is pron to liking something for 2 months then never using it again, I’d use a ink jet printer.
“How much do you care about print quality?” Laser will give you awesome quality, but you will pay for that quality, mostly in the up front cost of the printer, and in the first two years of use (on average). If quality doesn’t matter to you, then a ink jet is looking more like a viable option.
From those two answers you should have a good idea of what kind you want. That being said, if you go with an Ink Jet, spend a little more, you will get a better printer, better prints, and the ink costs less. If you go for a color laser printer, you should be able to get one of the cheaper ones.
**BIG NOTE:** What ever printer you get, be sure to look at the total cost of all ink for the printer, and look at the total costs of ink for the other printers you might get. Toner will ALWAYS cost more then ink, but toner will ALWAYS last longer then ink.
My advice, My daughter loves to print our her work, but (right now) we only have this massive and ancient HP laser jet 4 plus that has toner problems. I used to have a multi function, that problem with those is net working. As in they hate it you see as they already do everything they don’t think they need to talk to the commoners and only want to work with one system which is not the end of the world but means you need to put everything on a pen drive move it to the system it likes or constantly fight to keep it working on the network.
I suggest an alternative to printing which as worked as we no longer have the colored printer. Make him a blog that he can post the pictures to. My Girl love it because it just like what mommy does and she can show it off to friends and family.
Personally I’d go with a color laser if you aren’t going to print photos and these days, I very rarely print photos at home because I discovered it is much much cheaper to use Walgreen’s online photo processing and they will mail things to you or you can pick them up in the store nearest you. Using this is at least 350% cheaper than buying ink, no matter what size you are going to print.
Color lasers have come down hugely in price. I personally recommend the Xerox Phaser 6125 or 6130. Great quality, nice color, not a huge size, good speed, reasonably priced consumables, great name.
I purchased mine at Newegg.com and got a free mini laptop with it so I couldn’t pass up the deal.
If you really think you want to print ultra high quality stuff and want to stick in the inkjet realm, you can’t beat Epson.
I’m a network admin for a medium sized school district and I agree with allot of what others have stated. However you need to ask yourself some questions that I don’t know if others have really touched on.
Are you going to keep your son’s mater pieces for some time in the future? Or is it a print it out show to daddy, then it’s 86 in the trash can? If your going to keep it a while then I would go with a decent home/office laser. They are down around 300 and the toner is not to bad and more cost efficient. However do not buy them if you are going to want to print out photo’s cause you will be disappointed. Cheapest way there I still believe is to take it to your local wal-mart or what have you and do the printing there.
We just got a HP cp1518ni color laser – networked! – from Staples for $200. It’s brilliant. Highly recommended!
Has your son discovered http://www.kerpoof.com/?
I’ve long wanted a color laser printer, but when I look at the cost of toner–you pay for the printer all over again each time you need to change toner. For the quality you need, an HP or Canon (sorry, I no longer can in good conscience recommend Epson) inkjet. You might also investigate Kodak inkjets, as their replacement ink costs are considerably lower but the quality of their early models (2-3 years ago) wasn’t up to that of the Canon or HP models.
I just recently bought a Kodak injet/scanner (the one with built in wi-fi). I have had no problems with it and the ink really is cheaper. I was also impressed in its Mac-like simple setup. I expected a lot more pains in getting the wi-fi to work, but it went smooth.
Canon Pixma
My Epson printers visited the shop every 6 months until each died in turn. The Canon is legendary, it just goes and goes and goes. It’s also at least twice the weight of the Epsons I had which I like.
Warnings about inkjet ink costs are true.
I had a very good wide format epson for around 7 years before it conked out.
Bought a humble little $99 Canon ip4600, and it is fine. Only proviso is ya have turn it on for quite awhile before you start using it because on startup it seems to floss itself and maybe adjust its braces and gargles too for a longgggg time before it is ready to spit anything out….
(at the lowest quality level it prints BandW documents at incredible speed)