Printer recomendations please

I want to replace our printer, it’s a Brother 7860DW, it’s fine but does not play nicely with the ipads, so I’m looking for a replacement.

We need at least;

A4
Airprint compatible
User friendly
Resonably priced consumables

Nice to have;

Copier

Any suggestions? :slight_smile:

But why buy just one when you can get 2?!!

Daft I know but it works well for us - we have a very small Brother laser printer (approx £100) that does 99% of our printing with very low running costs - it is small at just over the size of a shoe box but has airprint, duplex and prints at about 30 pages a minute.

We also have an old HP Officejet MFP that I bring in from the barn perhaps once a year for colour printing.

Scanning/Copying I now do from my phone via scanner app - not quite as good as MFP but very convenient.

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I’m a long time HP user, so would suggest a HP wireless enabled MFP of some sort, even though the quality of both the kit and the software has gone downhill over the years.

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Had to look up airprint, now I know why I didn’t know what it was​:thinking::rofl:

Daft it may be but we opted for a similar solution. We also have a cheap Brother that looks to be identical to as yours for the day to day black and white printing at a low cost pp, it can produce good quality but we normally hav it set to draft for reasons of economy.
We have a cheap Canon inkjet for when we need to print in colour, which is only occasionally. or in case some eejit forgts to order a spare cartridge for the Brother. Always good to have a backup. The inkjet of course costs more pp.
On the very very rare occasions when we need top quality colour output we get it done professionally.
This has worked for us for a couple of years now.

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I have had Epson printers for the last 20+ years and never had a problem with them.
Airprint links seamlessly from iPad and IPhone (sons’) When original inks became too expensive I started to use compatibles, without any problems.

I’m a Epson man myself, we’ve a couple of their printers that are both about ten years old now (old enough to have FAX :slightly_smiling_face:) Both are still going like trains. One has airprint (sadly not the one in France) and one, for some reason, hasn’t.

But, I think it’s all down to volume James, most printers have most features now. The business model for home printers is to sell the box cheaply and screw the punter on the consumables. So a good comparison site should give you the best options based on your volumes.

I have a wireless MFP from Brother but ios won’t talk to it without using the crappy Brother iprint app so i would rather use an airprint compatible device

We went with a Epson Ecotank L3160, the refillable tanks have been a godsend, excellent print and photo quality and no more having to worry about having to buy short lasting cartridges.

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That sounds good. How do you refill the cartridges?

Just had a Google and I see the printers are quite expensive, the overpriced ink replacement business model must be obsolete :slightly_smiling_face:

I can’t address the airprint issue specifically, but the 2 makes I will avoid now are Lexmark and HP. Both are temperamental, and Lexmark also outrageously expensive to run.

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We have a Canon Pixma for colour and photo printing, and a 10yo Samsung monochrome laser. Both are attached to the router so they show up for her iPad and my Windows laptops.

Most of the prining requirement here are monochrome so a laser is probably best.

So user fireindly A4 laser with airprint is what we need. I’m not too impressed with the Brother that I have (software is very dated and awkward) so would prefer another brand ideally.

Agreed their software is very old fashioned but I don’t ever have to use it so not really a problem. The printer just prints from all devices without glitches which is all I am after.

I did try to buy one recently for my parents in UK but absolutely no stock anywhere.

It will be interesting to see which one you go for, and then how you get on with it.

Front runner so far is the Xerox B230

That looks very like our Samsung from the front, though our controls ar different and we have no screen. Looking online just now, it seems that Samsung make some of Xerox’s printers — don’t know if that applies to this one.

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Very good. Maybe I should upgrade. I just need to use up the replacement cartridges I have.

I’ve ordered the Xerox, looks like it will do the job nicely. Thanks for your suggestions!

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Maybe a help to some.
Boing Boing: Forced by shortages to sell chipless ink cartridges, Canon tells customers how to bypass DRM warnings.