...for the last time. Words of advice: don't buy any Lexmark printer that's $30. I don't know about some of their higher-end units, but I don't tend to hear a lotta love for their products in general. Anyway, I got a 730 about a year ago, because it was cheap, the ink wasn't that expensive (like $12 for the single cartidge it used), and I don't need anything elaborate. This thing worked fine for awhile, but in the past few months I've used it, the thing would jam up with any paper I put in it...and that's if it actually fed. Well, today, I got my chance to dump that piece of garbage. My work had an HP 3940 for free with the purchase of some corresponding Ink Station cartidges. I don't know how this cheap HP will do in the long run, but seeing the HP's my family has used throughout the years, I have a lot more faith in them than Lexmark. With some discount coupons and an employee discount, I ended up with a new printer for less than $15.
I've always sworn by Epson printers, my family uses one that's 7+ years old and it still chuggs away and works fine! I've got one at uni and it's just great, fast, reliable, good-quality and not that expensive.
I had a really cheap Epson stylus 480. Utter low end and cheap using compatibles not original ink. The print quality was ok for considering how rubbish it was in general, but considering the price it was good. Epson also have a good name, don't really like the HP name, Lexmark sounds good....
Ugh we have have an Epson Stylus Photo 830u, and I've never seen such a load of crap. Even when we paid full price for official cartridges it was bad. Now with compatibles it leaves yellow lines across a page and often gets jammed up. The best printer we had was a Hewlett Packard, which lasted for years, until it started to print everything in Pink (found it's feminine side ).
On my old school, they had an Epson Stylus as well. It always swallowed the whole pack of paper (about 50 pages). I'm still using my HP Deskjet 840C (from 2000). I never had any problems with it.
I tend to agree with Big B, I've owned lexmark printers and I've had good ones and bad. Surprisingly, I have a cheap lexmark under 30$ that seems to work. I have a x80 printer/scanner combo that worked at 1st, 4 years old, now it has not only issues with printing the images but with getting documents to print, driver issues etc. I don't think hp is that much better, my significant other has problems with her hp printer/scanner combo.
