Apparently this is a Technology week.

After 11 years, we’ve decided to retire the venerable HP all in one printer.

The machine pretty much works, although its ADF feeder is prone to jamming.

Our reasoning was the cost of ink cartridges. A full set costs about $100. The cost of a new printer isn’t much more.

I have a nice Canon all in one printer sitting in a storage facility but it’s been sitting there for a year and once again we’d have to spend $100 to get cartridges for it. There’s also the unknown about its status. I’d never intended to have it sitting idle in storage for so long and at this point it may need a printhead replacement. Which means it’s cheaper to just replace the whole machine.

This led to the inevitable conclusion that buying a new unit with a warranty was probably the best solution.

After shopping around a bit, we decided to go with one of the new Epson tank machines. Costco was even having a sale on an acceptable unit.

This little thing is pretty dang neat. It’s smaller than the HP or the Canon, and produces really clear crisp prints. I like the no print cartridge aspect. Instead you just fill the tanks up from a bottle of ink. The bottles are much cheaper than cartridges and this thing is rated at something like 7000 pages per fill. This is a full color machine similar to the HP and Canon. The majority of our printing is black & white and the Costco version thoughtfully includes 3 black refills in addition to the Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow.  

The cost per page in just about equal to my nifty laser printer. The only reason we didn’t just go with the laser printer only is because it doesn’t have a scanner and it doesn’t know how to talk Airprint which is very nice if you need to print from your iPad or iPhone.

The new inkjet can print duplex (double sided), and the scan/copy speed is acceptable. It’s not going to win any races, but for occasional use it’s more than adequate.

I can even see a day when the Canon laser finally dies that we’d just go to having one printer. I like having the laser because when I’m writing it’s fast and cheap to print a manuscript.

If you’re in the market for a new machine take a look at the Tank versions of inkjet printers. You’re going to pay a bit more out the outset for one, but you’ll recover the costs over the life of the printer in supplies.