Printers?

[Cadelin]

I am looking to get a printer.

Requirements:
Going to be doing alot of black and white printing (I am writing a PhD thesis at the moment and I keep needing to produce drafts.)
Cheap to run and not stupidly expensive to buy as I am a student still.
Needs to be reasonably small. (ie can be put on top of a desk without taking up all the room.)
Needs to work with my mac laptop as well as my windows XP desktop.

Nice extras:
I don't do much colour printing but it would be nice if I could print out the occasional photo or colour picture and it look ok.


There seems to be an awful lot of printers for sale and it was a nightmare to work out which ones would be cheapest to run. I really don't know much about printers so any advice would be appreciated.

 

[Yaka]

canon ip800 got this recently from pcw while they doing a special offer £30 with 2 packs of black and colour ink free. fairly small no frillz printer preety good for photos as well. its small as well. only down side is that it has no paper holder for when the paper comes out of its front when its prtined mines on a self with a small tray to dol the papers in place


also still using o]carts that came with it and new ones are around £10 d
from pcw cheaper from on line

 

[Jonty]

Hi Cadelin

I'd second Yaka's suggestion, I have a cheap Canon printer (iP1880, although this may be a little big for your desk) and it rocks. The text is nice and crisp, photos are stunning, and the unit itself looks nice and comes with unobtrusive drivers.

Genuine printer cartridges are always expensive, but Canon's aren't particularly exorbitant.

Kind regards

 

[Bob007]

I might be alone in this, but i'd recommend an Epson. Simple reason is a large compatibles following, tho Epson don't like it. For drafts i'd prefer spending a couple of quid on a set of compatibles and burn through em on stuff am going to throw away.

Colour quality isn't bad on most of em and can use the Epson dura-bright sets on finished prints to produce some realy nice quality prints.

Place i work has an r1800 A3 printer, compatible inks for that cost us £3/per at trade. Compared to £11/per for originals(Takes 8 inks). Equals a massive saving.

At home i own an RX500, full set for that costs me £3 for all 6 carts. compared with £3/per for originals. Again, nice saving.

Only 1 problem i found with Epson was the print counter (counts as you print, hit a number and it stops and says it need a service). But with ssc util you can reset the counter and continue to print.

 

[Kryten]

Can't +rep you atm Bob but cheers for that ssc util, not something i've thought about doing but now you mention it that's going to be damned useful

 

[Bob007]

hehe, clean the ink mat once in a while to wouldn't recommend anyone else do that btw, unless you feel up to it. No software for that sry, but get latex gloves, small fecker seems to hold a crap load of ink.

 

[dysfunction]

I'll rep him then!