Request: Looking for an All-in-One Printer-Scanner-Copier

[jeffreyjrose]

I'm in the market for a new All-in-One PSC, and I'm not sure where to start. I really like HP as a brand because I've mainly had them in the past and they've worked great. I'd like to spend less than $200 if possible (while maximizing the printer quality, of course ;)).

Should I just start looking in office supply stores, or is there a better source online to search for them?

Thanks in advace,
Jeff

[m6oo]

In the last few months, I've purchased and set up two of the Brother 7820N all in one printer/scanner/fax machines (one for my sibling and one for me) and have been pretty happy with them so far.

I got mine for $299 - $50MIR from Office Depot a few weeks ago.

They are a little above your price range, but they had everything I was looking for in an all-in-one.

1. Laser print engine - I don't need color printing and jet printer ink is a racket for the printer companies. Toner is also a bit of a racket, but at least laser toner doesn't dry up if you don't print for a while.

2. Network card built in - this printer will serve your entire network right out of the box. Just hook it up to your router, install the drivers on each machine and go. No having to have one machine on all of the time to act as the print server. The other nice thing about having this machine on your network is that you can control the printer settings via a web interface. No pawing through cryptic one line LCD menus.

Less important, but nice, features.

3. Auto Document Feeder - no manual swapping for multi page documents

4. Scan via LAN - many networked all in ones do not support scanning over the network. This one does.

[Haggar]

Just a word of caution, make sure you buy it from somewhere you can return it without a hassle if you don't like it.

I picked up one of those HP all in ones a month or so ago because I wanted to free up some space on my computer table, and the quality was absolutley horrible. The printer was very slow, and not very good quality (but acceptable) but the scanner was abysmal. It was pretty lo-res and they were full of "jaggies". I messed around with settings and all, but couldn't improve the images. I ended up returning the all in one and kept my seperate components.

Also, I had a friend's HP laptop break recently, when I did some Google research to see what the problem was, I found many, many people complain about HP quality. Apparently they used to make good equipment, but were bought out by Compaq and now are pretty poor quality-wise, if what I read was true.

Just my 2 cents.

[espy605]

1. Laser print engine - I don't need color printing and jet printer ink is a racket for the printer companies. Toner is also a bit of a racket, but at least laser toner doesn't dry up if you don't print for a while.

I can't second this enough. Although initially more expensive, after even barely a few hundred pages, the cost per page of an inkjet is much more expensive than a laser printer. Unfortunately, many companies have put in a "smart chip" that will limit how many pages you can get out of a toner cart. However it's still much cheaper than an inkjet


Also, I had a friend's HP laptop break recently, when I did some Google research to see what the problem was, I found many, many people complain about HP quality.

Laptops are much less rugged equipment than their use would suggest. It's always a good idea to buy extended warranties with laptop as the repair bill will almost be more expensive than an extended warranty. By the way, almost all laptops in the world are made by the same five Taiwanese companies and relabeled by companies including HP, Compaq, Toshiba, Sony and Fujitsu.


And all in ones are generally space savers first, quality equipment second.