Hi all,

My wife and I are about to invest a large amount of tax-deductible money in a really good color printer. We're looking to use it for years to come to print out photographs as well as company related stuff.

The one we're looking at is the Epson Stylus 2200, which has "good quality for the price." Well, right now, I'm prepared to go a little crazy on the price if it means I don't have to get a new printer for the next five years.

Anyone have good experience with this? Also, no HP printers, please. My laster printer was an HP, and I don't like having to run software in the background in order to print.

Thanks in advance!

Just remember that the main cost of a color inkjet printer will be the ink cartriges, not the printer itself... so you'll want to try to find out which printers get the better cost-per-page. I hear PC Magazine does a revew on that once a year or so... there might be something posted from recent results on the web somewhere.

Cost per page can range as low as 7-8 cents per page all the way up to almost 30 cents per page, and if you are doing a lot of printing that can obviously make a huge difference, fast.

Jake is right.
Some ppl really rip you off on ink costs.. LEXMARK and HP are heading the pack I would say

I have bought a cheap EPSON Stylus C62 printer...
IT's cheap (around 100$ here), it has very good printout quality and speed.
And the best thing.. I can buy down here non-original cardridges which cost about 10$ instead 40$ that I would have to pay for original cardridges...
I have printed about 1000pages with it without any problems (got it since few months)... I'm very delighted with it.
I don't know about other models, but overally I like Epson printers... (i owned one earlier, worked for over 3years, not bad as for the cheapest ink model available back then)

I got a color laser, with beautiful quality (it does dim the lights in the room when turned on, however), for somewhere around $800 (Minolta). Sounds outrageous compared to inkjet, right? Well, so does the price of toner cartridges ($100 each color or something?), but in the end, it'll probably be cheaper, because a toner cartridge lasts for a bazillion years compared to inkjet ink. That ink really adds up. Obviously, that has a lot to do with how much printing you do. I print the CD cases for my games, so it's probably quite cost-effective for me, though I really got it for the quality. I found it by checking out epinions.com - good idea for you to do too!

Yeah the cost-per-page for laser printers is somewhere below 3 cents a page, well less than half that of the cheapest inkjets. Given the obvious advanatges in both speed and output quality over inkjet, its a good choice purchase if you plan to be reeling off quite a bit of stuff. The initial investment could be tough to manage though.

I've used a number of printers. I ended up throwing a lot of them out in disgust. The exception? HP Laser printers. Those things are amazing. Great quality. They last for years and years. Love em. I'll never ever buy another inkjet.

Funny, about you laser people... my wife and I bought an extremely expensive laser printer last year, and we ended up taking it back because the color print quality was so bad. Even the crappy inkjet we had at the time did better printing, on the right paper.

The price of the ink isn't that scary to us... we don't print that much, but when we do print, it needs to look *good*. I have a seperate laser for b/w, this is just for printing photographs or the rare brochure.

Again, I'm not look for "good for the price," I'm looking to see what some of the best printers out there are. This is a company purchase, so it needs to last some years, in quality. Five years down the line, I want to say "okay, we don't need a new printer, because this one still prints at near film quality" sort of thing.

(We have an HP OfficeJet d145 right now... it does very nice print quality. However, I also bought a network module for it, and for some reason, the HP software on my computer needs to be reinstalled every time I turn my router off. Also, other computers on the network get to "sometimes" access the printer. All in all, it's been a bigger pain in the butt to keep this printer running that it would have been to unplug it and move it to whichever computer I wanted to print at the time. From this, I'll never buy HP again.)

For black & white, I'd have to agree that nothing beats an HP laser printer. For color, I have an HP Inkjet (Deskjet 1000) and am just so fed up with it, I really don't think I'll ever buy another HP Inkjet. After having suffered with that miserable piece of junk for maybe 5 or 6 years now, I'm really seriously looking at getting a new inkjet (birthday in a few weeks + wife doesn't know what to get me = opportunity).

I've been keeping a good eye on printers for quite a while (I've been thinking about doing this for about 2 years now). I think the printer that I'm most impressed with is the Canon i950. Not too expensive ($250), it has 6 separate ink cartridges (about $12 each) so you don't have to waste ink when 1 color runs out, has great output to my eye, has had spectacular reviews on pretty much every site, and great feedback on epinions.com (if you aren't familiar with epinions, I suggest always checking user reviews there before buying anything).

Originally posted by Raptisoft
Funny, about you laser people... my wife and I bought an extremely expensive laser printer last year, and we ended up taking it back because the color print quality was so bad. Even the crappy inkjet we had at the time did better printing, on the right paper.
Here at my office they recently bought an HP color laser and I was astounded at the quality on plain paper. Just on standard paper it produced results very close to magazine quality... but then again, I'm not a printing afficianado. And I don't recall the model.... but I know it was fantastic. Better than any inkjet I've seen just on plain paper. And water resistant and MUCH faster print speed to boot.

I have an older model Epson Colour 7000 series printer and I really, really love it. On gloss paper A print out almost looks like a colour photograph with only a small amount of blurring. On standard non gloss paper, the image is still exceptional. Epson I think are still way ahead of the pack when it comes to inexpensive colour printing. I have used a number of older (same age as my epson) HP deskjets (650c, 950c, 995c) and HP Laserjets (4550) and for Quality the epson still beats them, except for the 4550, but the price of those is silly.