Looking to buy a printer for less than $150

[Precious Roy]

what would you guys recommend?

 

[Smues]

We've got the Canon Pixma MX340 and haven't had any complaints. Looks like you can get it for ~80-100 online. Amazon has it for 86 with free shipping. We've only had it a month, but before that we had the MX310 which is basically the same printer without wifi and had no problems with that one as well. Text prints just fine, and if you want to kill your color ink it can do some nice photos as well. I bought an ink combo pack that came with some glossy 4*6s so I printed a couple of photos just to see how they looked. I showed them to my wife and she didn't believe me when I said I did it on our home printer. Being able to print via wifi is very handy too when you mainly use laptops.

So yeah I don't know exactly what you're looking for but the Pixma MX340 is a good all-around home printer.

 

[AnonymousBroccoli]

I don't have any specific recommendations, unfortunately, but if you're planning to print a lot, you'll want to look into how much ink cartridges cost, on top of the printer cost. I could go over to Wal-Mart now and get a $50 inkjet printer, but if cartridges for that one are $50 each, that's not much of a deal.

 

[Precious Roy]

It's going to be an all around general use printer. It's actually for my mom and not me, but I'd guess it will get moderate usage, probably 50/50 on text and pictures from her digital camera.

The Pixma looks good but she wants a preview screen for pictures which that doesn't have. I'm looking at the Kodak ESP 5250 right now

 

[Smues]

The MX350 has a preview screen. Haven't used it but I'd assume it's just like the MX340 plus the screen, as the 340 was just like the 310 with wifi.

 

[KOAB]

I think printers should only be $5 and computers $10

 

[Master Thrasher]

Printers are cheap because printer companies can make so much money on cartridges.
I've had the same HP printer for the last 10+ years, so I would probably point you towards HP.

 

[Vitamin X]

go to an ink refill place to save money on cartridges and get a decent printer. I use Rapid Refill, which is national last I checked but there are probably different ones in your area. I filled up my black and color cartridges there recently and it only cost me $30 to replace both which is insanely cheap if you consider it would cost like $55-65 brand new.

I don't do a lot of printing at home though, but when I do I like high quality. I have an all-in-one HP and aside from the bloatware that typically accompanies HP, it's a pretty awesome little device because in addition to printing, it has an automatic document feeder, does scanning, copies, and faxes if I hooked it up to a phone line. I believe it cost just around $100 on newegg.

EDIT: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16828115454 Newegg's actually running a special on the newest version of the printer I have. Normally it costs $150, it's going for $75 right now.

 

[NoCalMike]

I have sort of a weird issue going on with my printer. For some reason the black ink cartridge won't print when I am using any kind of document software like Open Office or Wordpad or notepad (I don't own MS Word). However if I print something straight off the web it prints just fine. I attached a pic of a comparison, and I even printed from wordpad in red ink just to verify it was just the black ink. You can see a faint "#1" on the paper on the right, but it didn't print anything for the other text. Have no clue what is up