Printer blew up, wife has home business!!!
 

So I'm on the other side of the world right now and the printer smoke-checks itself on the middle of one of her projects.

So I need to buy a new one and fast. She's a Rodan and Fields Rep and most everything she does is in color. I prefer overkill with something like this and don't want a $85 "all-in-one". A "prosumer business" model I think is what I would be looking for if there was such a category.

I don't mind paying for ink, and I think I'd like to keep the price for the machine in the $300 range. It's gotta do the scanner/printer thing. I don't need FAX, but I think all the ones I've been looking at come with it anyways.

Anybody have any knowledge to impart?

I've had good luck deploying the HP M276nw for those users who need color + scanner/copier.

Am taking a serious look at the HP 8600 series. I kinda want something "more" though.

I'll double check when I get home, but I believe this is what my wife just purchased.

She's an educator for a large hair product company and prints/scans tons of stuff on a weekly basis.

I have an older version of this.

HP LaserJet Pro 400 M451nw Workgroup Up to 21 ppm 600 x 600 dpi Color Print Quality Color Wireless 802.11b/g/n Laser Printer - Newegg.com

It's bauce. I never worry about clogged ink cartridges

I recently installed my first non-HP toner cartridge at 1/3 to 1/4 the price of HP. Cant tell the difference.

There are also all-in-ones available of the same style

Anything made by brother should be your go to.

And I missed the ops post that it was already purchased.

The Brother printer at work is always flashing error messages on its LCD screen; replace this or that. You replace the indicated failed item, and the message does not go away. It works fine, but the bugginess bugs me.

I have a Samsung laser all-in-one at home. Works great. I got it after my 2nd HP died.

Weird. The only problems I've had with a bother is that some of the off brand black cartridges clog if you dont print on them for a week and you have to run the cleaner a few times before you can print again, they do some thingy in the middle of the night that can wake you up if its close to where you sleep, and if you unplug it for a while because of the thing in the night while it has off brand ink in it in about a month you end up with a pool of ink on your desk.

I just told the wife to go to Costco and see if they have the 8625 there. The "25" is the Costco/SamsClub model number for the 8620 sold everywhere else... same printer.

Will see which one is cheaper and go with that. I had fantastic luck with 3x HP printers over the years. The most recent one I bought and hated. The wifi printing was a horrible joke. Granted, it was $60.

I literally threw the last HP printer I owned across a room. Never again.

If you need a scanner, buy a scanner.

If you need a good quality color printer, buy a Konica-Minolta laser. I've had mine for nearly six years, and still love it.

You just can't compare even the best inkjet to a reasonable-quality color laser. No, it's not as good at printing photos (not that it's bad at photo printing, it isn't), and in every other possible way (speed, cost per page, consistency from first page to last, etc) it's just great.

Mine's a Magicolor 1600W

All the printers I'd recommend are in the $500 and up range. Get a laserjet. We have the HP1518 (admittedly out of your price point) at work. It serves 5 engineers doing work orders, drawings, etc. I load a ream of paper each week, at least.

Like Joe says, get separate components. Then, when one fails, you don't have to toss the whole thing.

They sell scanners separately? The last scanner I ever saw separately used a special parallel port and I had to install a special parallel port card into a 16bit ISA bus on a Pentium I system.

My wife just bought one recently. Cannon brand, roughly $50. Plug and play, USB.

I have a Brother machine in my office and it took me weeks to figure out how to delete the "Replace Toner" Message. I had to manually use the buttons to clear out the code after replacing the toner (Similar to a new car's "Change Oil" indicator, I suppose)

Maybe yours is similar?

Quite possible. We have a constant replace toner message, with other messages appearing randomly (with no fault observed or loss of functionality).

I concur with Mr Joe P. regarding the overall benefits of the laser printer.

I will never buy an inkjet printer again...unless I somehow end up in the business of photography. There just isn't a good reason to buy inkjet anymore.

On the other hand, I have been looking for a good scanner for about 2 years now; I want something with OCR, scan to folder, network drive capability, ADF, scan to network printer (make copies) and I would like a flatbed option. I would also love to have duplexing, but not a requirement. I think every scanner I've ever looked at requires either that I give up one or two of my requirements, or it's some BS All-in-one - which means it's crappy at everything. I've considered the neatdesk because the neatdesk, by all accounts, is extremely good at what it does, but that still leaves me wanting.

Emailed the wife and she hasn't pulled the trigger yet, so I told her to wait while I researched small-office lasers. Looks like I've got 4-5 choices in the $300 range, but reading the Amazon reviews is not helping. I always check out the 1-star ratings first and about half of them usually involve somebody who either "can't make it work" or find something completely unrelated to "how it works" and give it one star. "Product works awesome, shipping was one day later, 1-STAR!!!"... I fucking hate those people.

Anyways, re-looking at this whole thing.

Made it fucking impossible to buy a laptop after windows 8 came out. You could have had a laptop that gave blow jobs, had infinite battery life and was free and people would still give it 1 start ratings because it came with windows 8.

I just oversaw the removal of about 90 HP printers from our office infrastructure. We replaced them with Konica-Minolta for the large floorstanding MFPs and Lexmarks for the smaller group printers.

I fucking hate printers, but there is a special place in hell for HP as far as I'm concerned.

Have narrowed it down to 3. These are all pretty big units, definitely "office" sized. I figure that an investment like this is worth it. We're landlords again (topic for another thread), my wife has a home business, and I've got kids getting into elementary school... seems like it's time for a real printer. For $300'ish, these things have a bunch of cool features. They all do print/scan/fax/copy. All have a manual document feeder and you can single-feed paper into the printer. They all connect to the web an have all sorts of remote printing options . Scan directly to PDF. Print on card-stock and envelopes.

The next step up in the model lineup is about $150 more. For that you get dual/sided printing and scanning (duplex), and a secondary paper tray. The print/scan tech is no better though.

I think I'm gonna be pretty happy with one of these... any opinions.

Duplex printing is nice (from experience), duplex scanning is even nicer. That'd be my vote. And can the unit scan to FTP? For me that'd be the trifecta.

My Brother tabloid size multi-function can do everything but the duplex scanning. Having it scan to a file on a FTP directory is a life saver on a multipage document.

All of those will scan onto a network if that's what FPT means.

The wife just emailed and says those are too big. SRSLY WOMAN!!! Anyways, I'm back to looking at smaller ones. She says she wants to be able to print awesome pictures with them as well and is trying to steer me towards and inkjet. Looks like I'm not going to be able to go huge on this one. Still doing homework... now back to "home office" type injets again. At least we've got the budget to get whatever the best one is.

Tell her to buy a photo specific inkjet printer to put in a drawer for the rare occasion that she will print display quality photos. Most people aren't going to notice a difference in a photo during the 0.8 seconds that they actually take to look at a printed photo.

Or else give her $100 limit to go buy a printer, and you buy something decent when you get home