Just had the effing second printer fail in less than two years. It’s only on it’s second set of inks!
Can anyone recommend a reliable, cheap-ish printer? All it needs to do is print. No bells or whistles. We’ve had expensive multi-function jobs and cheapies. They’ve all failed too soon.
Would a laser be more reliable/cost effective?
I’m thinking of buying a cheap printer every time the ink runs out.
Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.
Grrr!
Hi mikep
I would suggest an HP although I couldn’t recommend any particular model not only because Linux support is first class with HP but in my experience are good solid printers, I have an HP Photosmart and it run flawlessly and ink isn’t particularly expensive compared to other brands
Samsung also has good support in Linux albeit not as good as HP
Would a laser be more reliable/cost effective?
Good question laser toners don’t clog up like inkjets and tend to last longer in my experience but are more expensive (especially colour) but I wouldn’t like to say what is most cost effective overall I suppose it all depends on what you use it for most, if you’re mostly printing photos I would go with inkjet and for general text laser but that’s just my opinion
Good luck
Graeme
Or a Samsung Laser 
Thanks both,
The most recently failed one IS an HP. The problem I’m having seems to be quite common (skipped lines) and no-one seems to have the answer.
I might just buy another one (since I have two hardly used ink cartridges) and see how it goes.
If it goes badly, I’ll try a black & white laser. I print pretty much only documents. The next document might well be a pithy letter to HP… although email might be more reliable.
M
What version of the HPLIP driver do you have installed? In most cases, updating the HPLIP driver fixes a lot of issues, bugs and other problems. You can find the latest HPLIP driver here: http://hplipopensource.com/hplip-web/index.html
Thanks Nomko,
But the problem exists also in XP, so I don’t think it’s the HPLIP driver…
Seems to be a common problem with no real remedy. I’m going to buy the HP Envy 4502, which uses the same ink cartridges, so at least I can use the inks I already have.
All consumer level printers seem to be unreliable rubbish, so I’m just going to buy cheap ones and throw them away when they fail (usually just outside warranty), and not stock up on inks. We’ve had relatively expensive consumer level printers and they followed the same pattern, so, cheap, cheerful and disposable from here on in.
Edit. I bought the 4502, which exhibited exactly the same problems as the original, on bothe OSs. That left the ink cartridges as the common denominator, so I swapped the black (which was showing as low - not empty - and problem solved. Now I have two printers when I only need one. Never mind. A spare printer is bound to come in useful sometime…
M
If you don’t need colour, maybe try a Samsung laser … they seem ‘pretty’ well built