Printing costs and purchased a new printer.
I've been running a Samsung laser all-in-one printer for the last 3+ years. Great printer with fast colour printing and good quality results.
Toner is never cheap but the cartridges in this one last about 2500 pages, so l only needing to replace them once a year. Maybe more for the black as my wife prints a lot as a teacher. Cost was about £35-40 per cartridge, so a full set of 3 colours and black would set you back about £160. Not cheap but compared to the cost of printing the same number of pages on an inkjet and it worked out much cheaper.
Anyway, we suddenly needed to replace all 3 colour toners and I discovered the cost of the cartridges has shot up. Not sure why, but they are now over £60 each everywhere. That would be £180. Or £240 for a full set. More than the printer was new.
So I decided to see if there were any newer printers with much lower running costs. Laser toner is always expensive, but thr quality is great and the print speed is very nice. But there are these new business inkjets that look like lasers and claim to print as fast and with nearly the same quality. Apparently they use a page wide printhead to achieve this so it doesn't need to move across the page, which also makes it quieter.
If heard of the Epson Workforce printers which started this new type of business inkjet, but knew HP also did one. However reading reviews people were saying they were still not that cheap to run. But after much research i came across one I've now purchased.
Brother MFC-J6930DW
I've never owned a Brother printer so had nothing to base it on other than all the reviews and customer comments. Cheap running costs and fast printing.
It's a beast because it's an A3 printer! It's wider than the A4 laser it's replaced but slightly shorter. It's got 2 paper trays that can take 250 sheets each up to A3 (the top can take photo paper too). And a reat paper tray like a more traditional printer that can take 100 sheets of any size including envelopes and labels.
The scanner is A3 too which is a big bonus. I've wanted an A3 scanner for a long time. It also does simultaneous double siding scanning and simultaneous 2 sided duplex printing.
Also has a fax built in but I've never used that feature on any previous printer. Lol.
Connectivity is great too. It's got direct USB to connect directly to a single computer. Plus ethernet and wifi. Also has direct wifi and NFC. I'm only using ethernet and the setup was very simple and just worked. Much easier than thr Samsung was. I might use NFC to print photos directly from my camera or phone and direct WI-FI is handy for guests to print.
It's also got a lot of internet connectivity. As well as being able to print from usb stick as s scan directly to usb. You can also scan directly to your computer but also directly to supported cloud accountd such as onedrive and dropbox. You can also send directly to email and other options. It can scan and directly create pdf, word, excel and other document types too.
Ink installation is one of the easiest I've encountered. A flap opens bottom right, and you just put the 4 ink cartridges in and follow the touchscreen instructions to get it charged up.
Ink costs are very good. About £6 each of the colours and £12 for the black. Standard colours last about 500 pages so works out far cheaper than the laser. You can save more as they also do XL cartridges. The Black XL is about £26 But meant to last 3000 pages! The colour XLs about 1500 pages each. So capacity is similar to a laser toner at a far cheaper price.
Is it any good? Definitely. Obviously being an Inkjet you can tell a difference up close with text, but graphics look better on the inkjet in fine or best mode.
Standard mode prints about 22ppm after taking about 6 seconds to get started. This is about the same as by laser. At this speed on standard print quality you are not getting thr best quality results but they are prefect for everyday printing. You have the option of fine or best which increases the quality but doors slow printing down a bit to 18ppm. Still pretty fast.
The exception is when you are printing graphics heavy pages. Unlike a colour laser that prints at the same speed regardless, being an inkjet it does slow down when a lot of colour graphics or images are being printed within a document. A mixed pages of graphics and text in standard mode still prints at about 18ppm, but you can see it drop to below 10ppm in fine mode but the quality is very good.
If there is one negative, in standard fast printing mode you can get a bit if banding lines every 2 inches in images and graphics. This is like a draft mode and common on many printers as they skip print nozzles to maintain speed. Change to fine setting and the problem goes away. It's the only negative I've found.
Finally one other bonus of an inkjet over a laser is photo printing. It can print to photopaper up to A3 and borderless. We didn't have any offical Brother paper so used some more generic stuff, but thr output is very nice for a 4 cartridge printer. Easily better than a photolab. Speed in photopaper mode is much slower at just over 2ppm, but that's to be expected and you don't normally need photos printed that often.
Finally price. This was a bit of a bargain. It cost £190 from eBuyer.com with free shipping, and £50 cashback. So it only cost £140 on thr end. Not much for everything it packs in.
I do also own a dedicated A3 HP professional photo printer, but i stopped using that some time ago, again due to running costs. That has 8 colour cartridges costing about £40 each (so about £320 to replace a full set). They are large cartridges that can print a lot of photos in brilliant quality, but that printer had a bad flaw. It must be kept plugged in at all times and runs a daily print head and alignment clean and adjustment schedule. This uses up some ink every time. I hadn't noticed how much until i hadn't used it for a month. The inks were about 3/4 full when i had last printed, and without printing anything they were all nearly empty!
The photo quality of the Brother can't obviously match the HP but they are easily good enough for all but the highest quality photo prints. So i will be using that instead now.
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