On Fri, Sep 4, 2009 at 3:36 PM, Mike Gill<[email protected]> wrote: > She needs an MFP with FAX and wireless capabilities.
Does she need color printing? If not, I just had a side client pick up a Brother MFC-7440N for $150. Very compact. Print/scan/copy/fax. Monochrome laser, color scanner. Both ADF and flatbed scanner. Separate toner and drum for the print engine (lowers costs). Built-in Ethernet and USB. Scan scan to email, FTP, SMB, etc., or so it claims. Can fax from PC. Fairly capable web UI, can use it to manage fax machine. Haven't had to talk to support yet. Their website is kind of meager. The software is modularized, so you can install just the print driver, fax/print driver, or the overly cutsey GUI. Even the overly cutsey GUI wasn't too bad. All of it was still fairly small and self-contained, and didn't pollute the system with 100s of megs of crap. I much prefer laser printers; they've historically given me much less trouble than inkjets. > I’ve been looking online and narrowed my list to an > HP OfficeJet Pro 8500 or the Epson WorkForce 600. I've got a couple people using the Epson WF 600. Overall good. Control panel UI is pretty good. Software is modular and small, like the Brother's. It's still an inkjet (see above about laser vs inkjet). My only serious complaint is the ink cartridges are tiny, so if you do a lot of printing you'll burn through them like crazy. For lighter usage, it's great. And Epson will still do tech support after the warranty expires (unlike HP). I'm crusading against HP printers these days, after buying nothing but for 15 years. Their tech support is horrible, their customer service is worse, they won't call back, they won't help, they won't honor their warranties, they're expensive, and their software sucks rocks. Their software is huge, slow, bloated, crashes a lot, has security problems, has stability problems, causes problems with other software, doesn't install right, doesn't uninstall right. I could go on forever. We've done tests at work, letting an Epson inkey sit idle for 6 months and then plugging it back in, and the inkjets will clean themselves. With every HP inkjet I've used, you're buying new heads every six months, whether you use them or not. > One thing that bugs me about the Epson is apparently you can’t > even print black if one of the color carts is out of ink. I don’t know if > the HP has this problem. In my experience, most recent inkjets refuse to do anything if they don't have a full suite of cartridges. But I haven't tried the HP OJ Pro stuff that has separate inktanks. -- Ben ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
