No more HP, I’m switching to a Brother printer!
My wife asked if we can get more ink for our HP Officejet Pro 8600 Plus printer yesterday, and my response was; I’d rather buy a new black-and-white laserjet printer than pay another $100+ for more color ink, when we print mostly black and white documents, and rarely anything in color.
Every time I try to print in black or greyscale when the Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow ink cartridges are depleted, even if I set black-only printing in the advanced print settings, I get an error about not being able to print until I replace the depleted color cartridges despite having 20% black ink remaining.
I believe I paid $229 for the HP Officejet Pro 8600 Plus (N911) about a decade ago, but have paid more than four times that for color ink cartridges to print in black and white, no matter what print settings I choose, the HP printer will use the color cartridges to create black text on a white piece of paper.
In addition to this; the HP N911 is slow to print after a long period of inactivity, forcing us to stop the print and reboot, and there is a black line on every scan done through the auto document feeder, no matter how many times I clean the scanner glass for the ADF, the line persists, so it’s time for a new printer.
So, after some research, I have decided on the Brother MFCL2750DW for $300 from Best Buy. We bought a more basic version, without the document feeder and fax functionality, of this printer for my mother-in-law about 3 years ago, and she has been super happy with it, works perfectly, with zero issues whatsoever. And replacement toner cartridges are affordable, just $45 for the standard yield, and $80 for the high-yield toner cartridges, making it an infinitely better value proposition for our use case.
The second consideration, at least for my wife’s use case is the ability to scan multiple documents and save them out to individual files in a folder, for her, this is a massive time saver for her work. I read the online documentation for the Brother scanner software before purchase as not having that functionality was a deal breaker for my wife. Obviously, the software has this functionality, as we made the purchase.
I don’t know whether newer HP printers have the ability to print using the black cartridge only, but my experience with the HP Officejet Pro 8600 Plus has made me want to stay clear of HP home office printers. I am not a company, and cost of operation is a big factor, sadly, I did not research ink costs before purchasing the N911 in-store at Best Buy a decade ago, and have literally paid for it ever since.