Epson Stylus Office BX305FW Plus
If you need an all-in-one with an ADF and fax facilities in your home office, there are budget machines like this one. It has a two-line, mono LCD and a slightly crowded control panel, but there’s also a memory card slot and fax quick-dials. Epson quotes silly speeds and I saw 3.8ppm (black) and 1.3ppm (colour), which is slow and very slow, respectively.
Print quality is fair, but with some fuzziness on black text. Ink costs are 2.6p for black and 9.5p for colour, which are a little high. The printer has recently been reduced in price, but not quite as far as the Lexmark Interpret S405.
Reg Rating 60%
Price £90
More info Epson
HP Deskjet 3050A
A discreet little all-in one, with its light grey body and two-tone brown top. Unusually for HP, paper flows from a tray at the back to a fold-down tray at the front. Also unusually, It has a hinged control panel with a mono LCD display and membrane control buttons around the edges. The screen uses an ugly font, but is otherwise very serviceable, and there’s wireless as well as USB, with software for mobile print.
HP claims an honest 5.5ppm and 4ppm for black and colour print and I measured 6.4ppm and 2.2ppm, both reasonable. Print quality is OK, with a good draft mode, but ink costs are high, at 4.8p per black page and 11.8p per colour one.
Reg Rating 80%
Price £40
More info HP
Next page: HP Photosmart 5510
COMMENTS
Oh the choices
Color inkjet:
1 printer $50
1 set of ink cartridges $50
print 20 pages
Sorry, your ink is empty / dried out / got stolen by the goblins at night.
1 set of ink cartridges $50 ...
B/W laser printer:
1 printer $100
1 cartridge $50
prints 2,000 pages, no questions asked
So for the one time a year you absolutely have to print in color, here is a USB stick and a map to the copy shop for you.
You arent mentioning...
The software for ANY HP product and especially inkjet printers is complete total and utter crap. Common cause of horrific boot times, takes forever to install, puts a ton of un-needed services etc
Kodak isnt much better
Oh and Hp, Kodak and especially Lexmark, get used to being shafted for inak as there are no good alternatives.
Be wary of Epson printers
Be aware that Epson printers genuinely have a built-in service life. They will decide by themselves that they have printed X amount of pages and simply stop working saying that the waste ink pads are saturated. They aren't. The official fix is expensive. The unofficial fix still involves spending money to reset the printer
quote from Epson SX235W manual:
"If an error message appears indicating the printer’s ink pads are nearing the end of their service life, contact Epson support to replace them. The message will be displayed at regular intervals until the ink pads are replaced. When the printer’s ink pads are saturated, the printer stops and Epson support is required to continue printing."
http://support.epson-europe.com/onlineguides/en/sx230_sx235w_sx430w_sx435w/html/trble_1.htm
For the Epson Stylus Office BX305FW Plus the same info is on page 80 of the manual:
ftp://download.epson-europe.com/pub/download/3737/epson373717eu.pdf
Since the printer itself decides to do this there is no way to predict when it will happen.
Supported OS?
Any chance future reviews could include a rundown of the supported OS? Windows and Mac are most likely but indicating which items have decent Linux support would be very useful.
Regards,
Colin
They are all shit
And filled with hidden booby traps
Epson and canons nozzles block.
Kodak ink is cheap but rest of print mechanism dies.
HP expensive ink and insanely bloated and nagging drivers.
In short expect to be screwed one way or another.
