economical color printer recommendation?

[Lucy the Valiant]

Wicked frugal here, and have loved my Brother B&W laser for MANY years. I buy off-brand, high-yield replacement ink & toner, and - yeah, that baby and I have been through it together. Heavy use, workhorse machine. I'm spoiled.

I'm looking to add a color printer, but I need it to be relatively economical; do I want Instant Ink? If so, do you have a printer you recommend? Bonus if it can also serve as a copier & scanner. We'll primarily use it for occasional school printing & some photo printing. Do NOT need it to be Alexa compatible. 

Thanks in advance!

[gardenmom5]

when considering costs - include the price of cartridges.  Some of the less expensive upfront - have the most expensive cartridges.   some cartridges can be refilled (and save you a lot of money), but not all.

[sweet2ndchance]

We have had instant ink for 2 or 3 years now (just checked we've had it since 2018 so 4 years now) and absolutely love it. It definitely saves us money on cartridges but ymmv depending on your printing habits etc. We have the 300 pages/ $12 per month plan.

We print whatever we want, whenever we want and never go over our allotted pages per month. When I need to print a huge amount, like at the beginning of the school year, the rollover pages more than cover it.

We have had two printers on instant ink now. Both from the HP Envy line of printers. They print borderless (great for pictures), have a scanner/copier bed, are affordable (around $150) and overall have been great printers for us. Our current printer is an HP Envy 6055e and came with 6 months of instant ink for free which we were able to redeem even though we were already instant ink customers.

Edited March 3, 2022 by sweet2ndchance

[kbutton]

We have Brother printer with an ink tank. They have long lasting tanks and smaller tanks, so just google number of pages per set of ink. We bought it deeply discounted, which helped. 

[Lucy the Valiant]

5 hours ago, sweet2ndchance said:

We have had instant ink for 2 or 3 years now (just checked we've had it since 2018 so 4 years now) and absolutely love it. It definitely saves us money on cartridges but ymmv depending on your printing habits etc. We have the 300 pages/ $12 per month plan.

We print whatever we want, whenever we want and never go over our allotted pages per month. When I need to print a huge amount, like at the beginning of the school year, the rollover pages more than cover it.

We have had two printers on instant ink now. Both from the HP Envy line of printers. They print borderless (great for pictures), have a scanner/copier bed, are affordable (around $150) and overall have been great printers for us. Our current printer is an HP Envy 6055e and came with 6 months of instant ink for free which we were able to redeem even though we were already instant ink customers.

Do you have the HP+ ? (I think the HP+ just adds a remote connectivity vs. the standard, which is irrelevant to me.) Thanks for this - I saw you shared on a different thread a few years back, and I'm leaning toward keeping my laser for B&W and adding one of these on Instant Ink for color. 

THANK YOU!

[sweet2ndchance]

47 minutes ago, Lucy the Valiant said:

Do you have the HP+ ? (I think the HP+ just adds a remote connectivity vs. the standard, which is irrelevant to me.) Thanks for this - I saw you shared on a different thread a few years back, and I'm leaning toward keeping my laser for B&W and adding one of these on Instant Ink for color. 

THANK YOU!

Funny you should ask, we just got our new printer this week and it comes with 6 months free of HP+ as well as the Instant Ink. I've not played with the extra features yet though.

We have a b&w laser in addition to our instant ink color printer as well. It works out well for us. Dh uses the laser printer more than I do since most of his printing doesn't need color. It's an HP Laser Jet M15a that we got on clearance a year or two ago.

[dsmith]

We use Instant Ink for two businesses and personal use, and we love it. I have one printer at $2.99/month, and the other two are on a $4.99 plan. I can bump it up if I know I will be printing more than usual, and lower it if we are printing less. Many months I have a rollover and rarely have to bump my plan up. I always have ink on hand when I need it. It's saved us a ton of money and aggravation, and I highly recommend it. When I see people buying ink cartridges at Staples and other places I wonder why they still do that lol. 

[prairiewindmomma]

Our beloved Brother b/w laser died last year. We replaced into the Brother MFC-L3770cdw, which is a laser color printer. It’s more money upfront, but the print quality has been amazing and I can duplex and volume print like I did before. The scanner is quite good as well. 
 

We blew through the initial starter black ink it came with, and haven’t replaced the high volume toner cartridge since. It’s been very efficient for per page printing.

Edited March 4, 2022 by prairiewindmomma

[MercyA]

We find it more economical to print occasional color pages at the library for $0.25. Just throwing that out there.   

[ktgrok]

On 3/3/2022 at 11:32 AM, Lucy the Valiant said:

Wicked frugal here, and have loved my Brother B&W laser for MANY years. I buy off-brand, high-yield replacement ink & toner, and - yeah, that baby and I have been through it together. Heavy use, workhorse machine. I'm spoiled.

I'm looking to add a color printer, but I need it to be relatively economical; do I want Instant Ink? If so, do you have a printer you recommend? Bonus if it can also serve as a copier & scanner. We'll primarily use it for occasional school printing & some photo printing. Do NOT need it to be Alexa compatible. 

Thanks in advance!

If not printing a ton, I'd get an HP with instant ink. I LOVED it when we had it, great printing quality, and for this ADHD lady never ever having to remember to get ink was fantastic. Plus, you generally get a free month or so of instant ink when you buy the printer. I bought it right before printing a ton of stuff for our school year (aka it was september, and I bought the Good and The Beautiful to print myself) and asked if I could pay the difference between the free trial plan and the plan I actually needed (more pages). Customer service offered to instead just up me to that level plan for free during my trial period! I printed SO much and it was gorgeous quality. 

BUT....it was slow. So slow. And I was constantly printing coloring pages on the fly, plus workbook pages for a kid that "messed up" or spilled or erased too hard, etc. And was dealing with my kid mid PANDAS diagnosis plus a toddler and just didn't have time for slow printing. And my son then got a state scholarship to use for homeschooling that covered printers. So I got a giant Brother Inkvestment that was fairly inexpensive to run as far as ink costs, but much faster (not as fast as a laser though..sigh), and pretty good print quality, and could scan/etc up to 11x17 pages. 

Honestly? I hate the thing. Much faster - which was needed for when we were doing a mix of Gather 'Round and Good and the Beautiful and printing so much, but it has errors all the time, ink doesn't last as long as they said it would, and I've never once printed or copied anything that big, lol. And it's HUGE. Like, almost office sized. If I had to do it again I'd either get a faster HP or an Ecotank. Hell, I'm tempted NOW to get a little HP again - I hd the little cheap $40 dollar one that didn't scan or anything - just for printing stuff for decoupage art and cricut print and cut vinyl stickers. The quality is better and I could keep it on my desk in my room or on my cricut table. And I'd get the instant ink for sure. 

Yes, you pay for the convenience of the instant ink, but man, it was worth it. And for someone like you, not printing a ton? Yeah. 

OH! CAVEAT AHEAD! 

IF you often print small things - like I was often printing one tiny image to use on our timeline, rather than a full page, THAT can make it not a good deal. You pay per page, not for how much ink you use. That's another reason I switched - so often I was finding myself feeling annoyed I "used up a page" on one little thing. But looking back, that was MORE than balanced out by all the full color artwork I was printing for The Good and The Beautiful. 

Anyway, good print quality, machines themselves are reasonably priced from what I remember, and convenience of instant ink can't be beat. They always were one cartridge ahead with me, so I never ran out. 

Other option people like is an Ecotank - those are cheap ink, and what comes in the machine when you buy it lasts many people a full year, BUT the printers themselves are more expensive -significantly so. And many don't have the features I would want if it was my sole printer - things like autoduplex scanning and printing, decent sized multipurpose tray for sticker paper/cardstock/etc, that kind of thing. 

AND I've read that after a few years they will stop working - that some tray that catches extra ink gets full? Not sure about that, but given the amount you seem to print, I think that the cheap ink wouldn't be worth the overpriced printer itself in your situation. 

[ktgrok]

On 3/3/2022 at 1:34 PM, kbutton said:

We have Brother printer with an ink tank. They have long lasting tanks and smaller tanks, so just google number of pages per set of ink. We bought it deeply discounted, which helped. 

Ugh, we have one too - the InkVestment ones? It has been a CONSTANT  problem child! Not wanting to connect to my computer randomly, then randomly connecting an hour later and printing, printing but not scanning, then working again, poor quality prints with lines on the page that turned out to be from dust/pet hair getting in it (never had that with other printers) and running the clean print head thing does not fix it - have to manually move the print head and clean in there which is hard to do, etc etc. (I will say it almost never gets jammed, so there is that....)

I just ordered some bigger paper to see if being able to print giant stuff on it helps me fall in love with it again. But I'm really sick of it. 

On 3/3/2022 at 7:02 PM, sweet2ndchance said:

Funny you should ask, we just got our new printer this week and it comes with 6 months free of HP+ as well as the Instant Ink. I've not played with the extra features yet though.

We have a b&w laser in addition to our instant ink color printer as well. It works out well for us. Dh uses the laser printer more than I do since most of his printing doesn't need color. It's an HP Laser Jet M15a that we got on clearance a year or two ago.

Yup, we kept our b&w laser that DH uses almost exclusively. 

[kbutton]

1 hour ago, ktgrok said:

Ugh, we have one too - the InkVestment ones? It has been a CONSTANT  problem child! Not wanting to connect to my computer randomly, then randomly connecting an hour later and printing, printing but not scanning, then working again, poor quality prints with lines on the page that turned out to be from dust/pet hair getting in it (never had that with other printers) and running the clean print head thing does not fix it - have to manually move the print head and clean in there which is hard to do, etc etc. (I will say it almost never gets jammed, so there is that....)

Yes. Ours hasn't had connection problems, but it's right next to the router. I haven't used it for scanning as we started using an app for scanning on our phones (something free from Adobe). 

We've never had an ink-based printer that wasn't super sensitive to dust, though it's usually the rollers that are the problem. I haven't had a serious issue with this one and dust.