My HP OfficeJet 5740 is, after five-plus years, on its last legs. There's no saving it. For various reasons I'm planning to go with another HP OfficeJet, and I'm weighing between the OJ Pro 8025e (on sale for $179.99) and the OJ Pro 9015e (on sale for $229.99). I've seen a lot of good reviews for both, and a few bad reviews, too, mostly re: difficulty setting them up. Some people say the 8025e's printer tray is flimsy and will break on you. Others say it's a very sturdy machine. The 9015e has a few improvements. The page per minute rate is higher, but that doesn't matter to me because I don't do big jobs. On paper the color print resolution is higher, but some review sites say the 8025e's color prints look better. Go figure. The 9015e will do duplex scanning, but I don't need anything two-sided scanned. It also comes with a USB port so you can print directly from a thumb drive. That might be useful. Yeah, I'm thinking out loud. Anybody here have either of those printers? I'm leaning towards the cheaper one, but don't want to be kicking myself for not shelling out the extra 50 bucks.
I don't have either of them, however if either uses tanks for ink instead of cartridges I can recommend that feature--I switched to a tank-based printer earlier this year and have been very happy with it.
Check out the Epson tank printers. I have an 11x17. It's cheaper to use than Lasers and the quality is great for my needs. The flatbed scanner is legal size, which is helpful when you need it.
I have an Epson ET 8150. It is a tank printer, not laser. The print quality in colour deteriorated a week after purchase. The pictures ceased to be vivid. They are dull now. I bought it because it does duplex printing, and because the ink tank promised a better solution to high printing costs. They touted something like 3 or 5 cents a page, back half a year ago or less. But!!! The ink dries very quickly in the nozzle heads. If you don't print for a week, the printout can be faulty, to the point of being useless. And these days somthing that's not perfect is useless, basically. (That's why I can't get published.) So you must clean the nozzles, and you clean it, and it does not unclog. Then you clean it with a deep clean function. That works, but 1/4 of the ink in the four tanks are gone. I had to do it twice, so now I'm reduced to half the savings on ink... it means I am paying double. I am not happy about that. This printer will go after ink levels are too low to print properly. I am pissed off. I am thinking of a colour laser printer. But they get you on the ink powder or toner, too. You get a baby-sized toner for all colours and the BK, and after that you pay through your nose on top of the already much pricier printer. There is no good solution. Printing is expensive, and you must lick that up, butter cup.
@off FWIW, I have a Canon tank printer and so far, over about 8 months, I haven’t had any of those problems. My print jobs are relatively few and far between but I haven’t had clogs and the printouts look nice. However, I don’t need high quality images so I haven’t had a chance to see if that level or quality in color printing has dropped off at all. For my standard settings, it all still looks good.
Sorry for your disappointing performance. Contacting Epson might be helpful. I have an ET 8550 and don't have problems. I use it in bursts, sometimes printing a few hundred pages in a week, then going dormant for a while. The last photo I printed was probably in December. The one I just printed looks fine, at least to the extent plain paper works for color photos. I see the color saturation is less on plain paper than on screen, but that was true on my HP deskjet, too. Photo paper makes a lot of difference. If I print with the wrong paper option for the paper in the printer, the output can be a mess. It's nice not having to worry about cost if I want to print a glossy 8x10. My main use is as a weapon against insane property taxes. I don't print a letter to the editor, I write a 20 page tabloid with a cover page, photos, lots of comfortable white space, and I find it gets more reaction than a letter from a word processor. I particularly like writing a complaint that requires supporting evidence. In a letter, I'd get lost in the details. In a pamphlet I can put the complaint in a succinctly worded article with details and supporting evidence in sidebars. Affinity Publisher can "impress" the right page order to print two sided on 11x17. A long reach stapler makes for a quick binding so I can fold 11x17 into an 8.5x11 booklet. I got a good guillotine printer and that made for a complete publication shop on my desk. If I'm crazy to attack the tax man, at least I'm crazy with craftsmanship.
Caveat here: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/23/02/06/0140238/my-printer-is-extorting-me-complains-subscriber-to-hps-instant-ink-program
My impression of the Epson Eco-tank printers is they took everything people hate about HP printers and then built what HP's market is screaming for. I wonder what HP would say if the tables were turned. Let's say an adept user didn't get his printer supplies on time and lost opportunities. If that user bricked HP's internal systems pending ink delivery, would HP understand that's just business? Of course, don't do that.
I looked into printers that will take tabloid-sized paper. They're all too big for my dinky office. Oh, well.
Yeah, I know. I've been in the program for the last four-plus years. It still came out cheaper than buying the cartridges myself at Walmart. My only complaint is that I'd been faithfully paying the $4.23/month fee and hadn't received any new ink since August. That's what got me off dead-center to call them about that and about the problems my printer has been having since April of '22. Call me naive, but if HP tech support tells me there aren't any drivers that will cure my five-plus year old printer, I have to believe them. It's not like it'd be cost-effective to get it repaired anywhere else.
After spending entirely too much time comparing features and prices of various makes and models, I ended up buying an HP OfficeJet Pro 9018e from the Amazon Renewed program for $169.95 plus tax. That was only after I called HP and verified that the 6 months free ink and the two-year extended HP warranty applied. So we'll see. If it doesn't work I have 90 days to drop it off at my nearest Amazon return center. (In case anyone is wondering, the tank printers I looked at are all out of my budget. The 9018e is the same as the 9015e, but given a different model number for sale at the discount stores.)
Well, that's true. They aren't cheap. On the other hand, I've still got plenty of ink from my first tank-up. I've printed 2,394 pages, many of which had color images. My gray ink is at about 30%, the others are all at a little over 50%. A fill-up of genuine Epson ink is about $70. Third party ink is probably $35 per load. My old HP8200 series would print about 30 color 8x10's on a set of $70 cartridges. My Epson will print hundreds and hundreds. Maybe more than a thousand, I don't really know. The printer was about $800. I figure by the time I've put a tank of ink through it, I'll probably be ahead. The freedom to print photos without regard to cost is worth something, too. Interestingly, I see HP now has a line of Smart Tank printers. I hope my defection to Epson helped HP's thinking. ;-)
@Amontillado -- I have the Canon PIXMA G5020, which is only $200 on Amazon. Has been great for me and the ink is lasting quite some time.
I had second thoughts after reading the comments about HP printers' recent performance on the link @Earp posted above. It made me go back on the Brother page and see if they might have something more reliable. Found a printer that prints 11" x 17" pages, is a tank printer, and is small enough to fit in the space I have for it. True, it also had some reviewers saying it didn't work out of the box, but the high-star reviews were a lot more enthusiastic than those for the HP printer I just ordered. It cost more than the refurbished HP model, but only $20 more than what I'd been willing to pay for it new. And the Brother has the additional features. So I cancelled the Amazon order and drove over to Staples (US office supply chain) to take a look at the display model and verify the dimensions. Decided to buy it, and was pretty happy about the idea, until the salesguy brought up the question of purchasing their extended warranty. According to him, it's much better service than Brother will give me: "They'll come up with every excuse not to fix things." I did a quick search online on whether this warranty was any good, and the overall opinion is that it was. But it's bugging me now that I've spent nearly twice what I did on the HP printer. And who knows if I wouldn't have been just as happy with it. To make things even more unsatisfactory, I just found out that this printer does not qualify for Brother's version of the Instant Ink program, and the new bottles cost a bloody fortune. Have I royally screwed up?
