I don't have a lot of needs for my printer, but the needs I have are recurring and important. There's the usual black and white musical lead sheets, coupled with some business letters. Then, there is promotional material for my performing and teaching business. That's a lot of labels and postcards, in color, during the fall and winter, as well as business cards and the like.
The last printer I had was an old HP 895 CSE and that was just too slow. It would take all day to print labels and post cards and then I would have to spend more time assembling everything. Finally, about a year ago, I was sitting in front of the printer waiting for it to choose to print another sheet and I decided I had enough.
I was looking for a moderate price, speed and excellent printing. I looked at CNet.com and other rating sites and saw that this unit had fast specs and good ratings for speed and quality. I also noticed that it had a reasonable footprint on the desk (20x15x14; 16 pounds). This unit was on sale at Buy.com for $99, so the price was right. I immediately bought one.
Set up was easy. This is a plug and play unit. Installation was a matter of running the CDRom, loading the cartridges and connecting to a USB port and was completed in a matter of minutes.
It's done what I wanted. It prints very quickly, much more quickly that the HP. The vendor rates it as 29 b/w pages per minute on standard. I don't know that I have gotten there, but it has been fast. The print resolution is 9600 x 2400 dpi, which was higher that the HP. It really does put out good looking documents quickly.
This also does double-sided printing, which is slower, but I have tried it and it works great.
So, it clearly does what I bought it for – put out fast, good looking documents. This prints great, whether the media is plain paper (Office Depot recycled paper works fine), laser labels, inkjet labels, post cards or envelopes. I have found that mead security envelops print better than the plain envelopes. I suspect this is because of the thickness.
Another feature which enticed me was being able to direct print photos from a cable connected to my Canon power shot S50, but I haven't tried this yet.
It also has a nice little program that you can use to see how much ink remains in each tank. And, there's the rub.
This uses 4 dye-based inks: black, cyan, yellow and magenta and a black pigment-based ink. Bought individually, the dye-based inks run around $13 each and there are no good generics available. A 4-pack of one of each dye-based color is $44.99 in Office Depot stores and $47 at Amazon.com. The pigment dye cartridges are $15.99, 2 for $27 at Office Depot. Of course, you can cut the cost a bit by bringing in old cartridges for which they will credit you $3.
That's the biggest disappointment. These printer EATS cartridges. I'm now winding down my second set, and this is after I decided to send photos electronically to Walgreens, who will do 4x6 prints for 19 cents. Early on, I saw that the ink was being used up quickly. I started printing draft and grayscale whenever possible. This helped a little bit, but really not enough. Then I noticed that photo printing depleted the ink tanks, particularly the color ink tanks, quickly. So, I stopped doing that and the use moderated slightly. I really think the problem has to do with internet screen prints in color, they really use up the ink.
So, even with the steps I've taken, I've found toner usage high. It's been a year and I'm nearly exhausted with the second set of cartridges. I really don't print that much. So, the ink usage has been a major disappointment.
The pharmacies around here like Walgreens and CVS are doing 4x6 photos at 19 cents each as a loss leader. At that price, it doesn't make sense for me to lay out for photo paper and the ink usage.
So, this printer is fast, inexpensive to buy (as Circuit City has it now for $89) and prints great looking documents. However, it heavily uses color inks and so I do not recommend it as a photo printer. You are better off sending your photos electronically to your favorite processor.
3 1/2 stars, rounded up. Even with the warts, it's a keeper.
Thanks for reading. God bless!
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