Hey lemmy. I’ve been paying out of pocket to get stickers printed from online printing companies. But its getting expensive and I think I’d like to get a printer to do the job.
HOWEVER, I’ve been avoided getting a printer, because, well, the whole thing is just a shit show. Our household went through like a printer a year for almost four years. Between ink prices, and the printers just failing, we threw our hands up and said fuck it. Not playing this game, so we shifted to printing services or the local library.
So I’m looking for a very basic (I think?) printer. Honestly, a black only printer might even be fine. I’ve heard I think that maybe Canons or Brothers are the ones you want and HP’s are to be avoided. The purpose of the printer will be to print stickers on sticker paper. What printer should I buy?
Don’t even think about getting an inkjet printer unless you really, really need color, and need it often. Even if you aren’t dealing with DRM and price-gouging BS, the ink dries and gums up the print heads unless you’re using them regularly.
For me, color is a want, not a need (meaning I’m not relying on the quality of the output or making money from it), and only an occasional one. But I did want it, along with other bells and whistles like automatic duplex printing, for my “buy it for life” printer. So I decided to go with a Brother color laser.
I ended up buying two used ones from some office getting rid of them on Craigslist for maybe $50? each. The one I actually print with – the other is basically for spare parts – has almost 60K pages on it and is complaining that it’s due for some expensive “fuser” and “PF Kit” replacements, but it keeps working, so I haven’t actually bothered yet.
If your use case is very much about stickers on sticker paper, and you’re doing it regularly and often (not necessarily tons of pages at a time, but not going weeks at a time without printing anything), you may actually want an inkjet rather than a laser. Aside from the images not being as pretty as with an inkjet, the other disadvantage of a laser for you is that because it heats the paper, you might have to worry about paper compatibility to avoid gumming up the machine with melted adhesive.