Haven't had a functional printer here at home for a while, have 2 old inkjets with expired cartridges. So I was looking into refills, but with the price of them and the age of the printers (both over 5 year old) it seems like a no brainer to just pick up a new laser printer instead.

Any tips for what to look for? I haven't looked into printers for years so not sure what the sweet spots would be for price vs performance. Are some manufacturers better for toner prices than others etc?

Don't need anything super fast or amazing, just general purpose home printing. I suppose it would be useful to have in-built scanner/copier and wireless connectivity but not essential.

Recommendations? Umart? Or should I just check out Harvey Norman/Officeworks for specials?

Yeah, the only tip I have is shop around for the cheapest refills, rather than looking at the price of the printers themselves. Will save you heaps.

the cheaper the printer, the more expensive the refil

Looking around, that's kind of the impression that I get, but it's not really a golden rule.

There are lots of printers from the same manufacturer that use the same model toner but vary in price pretty wildly. Mostly based on the extra features they pack (wireless/scanner etc), but also on how many pages per minute it can print or whether they come with both colour & black toner out of the box (some that are capable of printing colour, only come packaged with black toner included).

So yeah, just looking for tips on what the sweet spots are.

Cheers Alt_F4. will look into that.

Go Umart or some other cheap computer part supplier. You can pick up colour laser printers now for under $400. Sure, the image quality isn't the best, but they're speedy, cheap and look good enough.

Best thing I ever did was buy a printer I wanted

Pretty sedate life then? :D

Thanks for that link, I'd never heard of them, that's freaking awesome. What are the cartridge heads/ink like? I find with refills they dry over pretty quick, are they anything like that?

Cheers for that Seven. Def seems the way to go for my purposes. Just buy whatever model printer (that has CISS support) then when the time comes to refill ink, just but a CISS instead.

Now I just have to pick the right printer. Thinking of the Brother DCP-585CW, cause it's cheap, multifunction and wireless.

Syco, yeah very sedate =D The unit comes with it's own cartridges with the cables attached to the reservoirs. I've not had any dry out thus far, but I am printing every week for uni. On the plus side, if they did clog up, it'd only be a few cents to clear them again.

Print quality, I didn't see a difference between the two. Same depth and shade of colour, no smearing, quick drying (haven't smudged any photos at all - they dry in <20 seconds).

NP Dan, that's what I did; instead of spending $125 to buy the cartridges, I spent $145 for the Rihac CISS.

I bought this back in January and I've printed over 2,000 colour pages (lots for uni) and about 100 photos and I'm still only half-way through my black and not even 25% through my colours. Good economy.

last edited by Seven at 20:51:45 20/Jun/09

Cannon MX860 from JB Hi Fi - absolutely awesome, wireless, wired, individual ink pots, fax / printer / scanner, blue tooth.. its got the works and its uber quick @ printing photo's etc also.

Highly rate it -about $260 in the catalogue i think, but i know you could sqeeze another 20-30 out of them :)