Haven't had a functional printer here at home for a while, have 2 old inkjets with expired cartridges. So I was looking into refills, but with the price of them and the age of the printers (both over 5 year old) it seems like a no brainer to just pick up a new laser printer instead.

Any tips for what to look for? I haven't looked into printers for years so not sure what the sweet spots would be for price vs performance. Are some manufacturers better for toner prices than others etc?

Don't need anything super fast or amazing, just general purpose home printing. I suppose it would be useful to have in-built scanner/copier and wireless connectivity but not essential.

Recommendations? Umart? Or should I just check out Harvey Norman/Officeworks for specials?

tip no1
the cheaper the printer, the more expensive the refil

Yeah, the only tip I have is shop around for the cheapest refills, rather than looking at the price of the printers themselves. Will save you heaps.

I recently brought myself a new little B&W laser printer for printing out uni related stuff.

I got the Brother HL-2140 from K-Mart for $85. There is a cash back promotion from Brother as well for $40 (i think it ends at the end of July).. so it only cost $45. The initial toners yield is around 1300 pages, and MSY i have a replacement one for $30 (though not sure on the yield).

Nonetheless, assuming that paper is 1c per page.. even if i were to dispose the printer once the toner runs out, it works out to be about 4.5c a page.

the cheaper the printer, the more expensive the refil

Looking around, that's kind of the impression that I get, but it's not really a golden rule.

There are lots of printers from the same manufacturer that use the same model toner but vary in price pretty wildly. Mostly based on the extra features they pack (wireless/scanner etc), but also on how many pages per minute it can print or whether they come with both colour & black toner out of the box (some that are capable of printing colour, only come packaged with black toner included).

So yeah, just looking for tips on what the sweet spots are.

Cheers Alt_F4. will look into that.

Just remember that toner in a laser lasts for ages.

I'd be lucky to replace mine once a year. Actually my old printer (Samsung laser - which you can have if you want to pick it up) I think I bought 3 cartridges in 5 years.

I suspect there isn't a great deal of difference in the running costs of lasers when you break it down, at least for household applications.

Go Umart or some other cheap computer part supplier. You can pick up colour laser printers now for under $400. Sure, the image quality isn't the best, but they're speedy, cheap and look good enough.

Best thing I ever did was buy a printer I wanted (MP630, it has CD-DVD printing, auto double-sided printing and a scanner) then browsed on over to Rihac.com.au and grabbed a continuous ink supply system.

It was really easy to install and now I can buy 100 mL of ink for $13. To compare, the latest Canon cartridges contain 8 mL of ink for $25. My unit cost me $145, which also included 100 mL of each ink (500 mL) - to buy in cartridges would have cost me $1,500+.

I know I sound like I own shares in the place, maybe I should. It's just be the best thing I've done regarding printers in ages, cheap as chips. No quality difference in prints, I've been printing awesome photos too.

Best thing I ever did was buy a printer I wanted

Pretty sedate life then? :D

Thanks for that link, I'd never heard of them, that's freaking awesome. What are the cartridge heads/ink like? I find with refills they dry over pretty quick, are they anything like that?

CISS is the way to go if your using an inkjet, highly recommend http://www.rihac.com.au/ personally I would chose a CISS system around a printer cause f*** its not like they are cheap enough. Supplement document printing with a cheap arse laser printer and your set.

Cheers for that Seven. Def seems the way to go for my purposes. Just buy whatever model printer (that has CISS support) then when the time comes to refill ink, just but a CISS instead.

Now I just have to pick the right printer. Thinking of the Brother DCP-585CW, cause it's cheap, multifunction and wireless.

I just figured out how to print my uni lectures at woolworths.

Syco, yeah very sedate =D The unit comes with it's own cartridges with the cables attached to the reservoirs. I've not had any dry out thus far, but I am printing every week for uni. On the plus side, if they did clog up, it'd only be a few cents to clear them again.

Print quality, I didn't see a difference between the two. Same depth and shade of colour, no smearing, quick drying (haven't smudged any photos at all - they dry in <20 seconds).

NP Dan, that's what I did; instead of spending $125 to buy the cartridges, I spent $145 for the Rihac CISS.

I bought this back in January and I've printed over 2,000 colour pages (lots for uni) and about 100 photos and I'm still only half-way through my black and not even 25% through my colours. Good economy.

last edited by Seven at 20:51:45 20/Jun/09

I believe mongie the guy who works at office works rates brother printers btw Dan.

Cannon MX860 from JB Hi Fi - absolutely awesome, wireless, wired, individual ink pots, fax / printer / scanner, blue tooth.. its got the works and its uber quick @ printing photo's etc also.

Highly rate it -about $260 in the catalogue i think, but i know you could sqeeze another 20-30 out of them :)

from my experience i don't particularly rate brother stuff.

I'd go canon or HP. though HP has pricey refils i think?