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topic: 1984New Printer / Scanner recomendation?
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posted: 14 Jun 2012 14:26

from:

Ken M-T
 
Cornwall - United Kingdom

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My Lexmark X73 combined printer / scanner seems to have finally given up the ghost and I was wondering what the combined wisdom thought, a new combined unit or seperate printer and scanner and any recomendations for make/model?

Rgards,
Ken.

posted: 14 Jun 2012 14:58

from:

Alan McMillan
 
Edinburgh - United Kingdom

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Hi Ken

Having spent a number of years in IT I can recommend you don't buy another combined printer/scanner combination. In my experience they can be convenient but tend not to do any of their tasks especially well. Go for a separate printer and scanner. My scanner is the Epson Perfection V330 Photo. It cost under £100 and is excellent. It can scan documents and photos and has a frame and backlight for scanning negatives and slides. The software that comes with it is particularly good.

Any of the Epson inkjet printers will do a marvellous job but to reduce costs go for spongeless refillable ink cartridges (available from various suppliers on Ebay) and bottled ink from http://www.consumablecafe.co.uk/. Their ink is pigment, not dye, based and in my experience is actually better than Epson's own. I have also noticed that this ink doesn't clog in the print head so readily meaning the machine won't run cleaning cycles anywhere near as often, which is wasteful of ink. If I refill my Stylus Photo R800 with Epson cartridges, it costs £132 and they only last a few months. On top of that the onboard chips will stop the cartridges from working when they're only half empty. This is a major rip-off. You can get chip resetters but it's a pain as the software then thinks the cartridge is full again.This gives a false ink reading meaning the print quality can drop sharply when a cartridge really is almost empty but the offending one isn't always obvious. Refillables with auto reset chips on the other hand, together with bottled ink, costs £60 and there's enough of it to keep you going quite literally for years!
You can also get Continuous Ink Supply Systems from Consumable Cafe for most printers which obviates the need to refill the cartridges at all!

HP printers and scanners are very good in the hardware department but their software and drivers are terrible. Lexmark build quality is not up to much and the few times I saw them used in my last IT job (a hospital) they were generally unreliable and prone to failure. People hated them. Canon printers are very good but each ink cartridge has its own dedicated print head which means their replacement can be very expensive.

These are the only makes of which I have direct experience.

Hope this is useful.

Regards

Alan

Last edited on 14 Jun 2012 15:45 by Alan McMillan
posted: 14 Jun 2012 15:24

from:

Nigel Brown
 
 

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Hi Ken

I'd go along with Ken here. The combined solution never seems to match what individual units will give you. The Epson printers and scanners give you quality, even the cheaper ones.

I will shortly replace my R800, an excellent printer but while the ordinary printing is still fine, photo printing now comes out a mess, and as I've had it 8 years repairing it doesn't seem cost effective. This time around I'll probably go for A3, either the R2000, or the slightly cheaper R1400, choice of these influenced by the fact I do a lot of photography. For a scanner, I'd suggest thinking about your needs and buying accordingly; for me, photography again is an issue, including scanning old medium-format slides.

Cheers
Nigel
Last edited on 14 Jun 2012 15:31 by Nigel Brown
posted: 14 Jun 2012 15:32

from:

Martin Wynne
 
West Of The Severn - United Kingdom

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Hi Ken,

If printing Templot templates is an important consideration, bear in mind that an ink-jet printer is far preferable to a laser printer.

Laser printers heat the paper, causing differential shrinkage. It can be difficult to align laser printed pages accurately.

regards,

Martin.

posted: 14 Jun 2012 15:36

from:

Paul Boyd
 
Loughborough - United Kingdom

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Hi Ken

Ask five people about printers/scanners and you'll get six recommendations!  It depends on what you want to do with it and how much you want to pay - I've no idea where the Lexmark X73 fits in the range.  If you're looking for archival or high-end photo quality scans, a separate scanner is better than a combo, similarly with printing, but you'll be paying hundreds of pounds.  For most people, a combo is fine.

Alan has already mentioned HP having awful software, but another reason for avoiding HP printers is that they all seem to be front loading so the paper has to turn through 180° - not good if you want to print a template on heavy card.  I've heard too many bad things about Lexmark printers, like they keep breaking :?

Canon printers are always very good - I've just bought an MP499 which has a very good scanner (although I use Vuescan software rather than Canon's own, which helps) and the print quality is also very good - certainly good enough for display photos and better than my high-ish end Canon i850 from 2002.  The downside is that a set of cartridges is expensive - more than the printer for high capacity cartridges.  Because the heads are built into the cartridges, you can use "compatible" cartridges for non-critical work because you won't clog a permanently fixed printer head.  Another advantage for me is that a combined printer/scanner takes up less desk space.

I think, but you'd need to check, that the higher end Canon cartridges don't have the head built in.  It's also worth considering finding a printer that uses separate colour cartridges instead of 3-in-1 (the black is always separate)

Often though, the choice comes down to what you can actually get hold of!

posted: 14 Jun 2012 16:57

from:

Jim Guthrie
 
United Kingdom

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Paul Boyd wrote:
I think, but you'd need to check, that the higher end Canon cartridges don't have the head built in.  It's also worth considering finding a printer that uses separate colour cartridges instead of 3-in-1 (the black is always separate)
Paul is correct - on my Canon Pixma ix7000,  the print heads are a fixed assembly which can be replacerd if there are problems.  The ink cartridges are purely ink holders.

Jim.

posted: 15 Jun 2012 19:25

from:

Ken M-T
 
Cornwall - United Kingdom

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Hi,

Thanks for your advice, I've spent far too much time trawling the internet and have come up with what I hope will be good choices. I've selected an Epson Perfection V330 Photo Scanner and a
Canon PIXMA iP4950 Printer, they both appear to have pretty good spec and I just hope that they live up to expectations. I was shocked to find re-manufactured cartridges 2 x 5 packs for £10 on Ebay, don't know if they'd be any good at that price!

I was quite suprised at some of the things I discovered though, the Epson driver page claiming that drivers for Windows 7 were due to be released in 2009, and someone giving the scanner a bad review for only being able to scan slides and negatives at, I think it was, 300 dpi; the spec was clearly 4800 dpi.

I'll just have to wait for delivery hoping all the while that I haven't made a horrible mistake.

Regards,
Ken



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