Printers for music

[AndrewMeronek]

I'm looking to replace my Lexmark E120 laser printer. It's actually performed well, but I'm highly annoyed at Lexmark's cost to replace the toner cartridges. I don't do much photo printing; I just need monochrome printing, and perferrably with a printer that can handle double-sized paper (11"x17" or A3, etc.) for that extremely handy printing of two-page music parts. I also do care about the cost of refill cartridges, that I won't get my bank gouged when my printer use goes up. I am not dedicated strictly to laser printers, as long as the end-result looks professional.

I was wondering if some other musicians have had success with a particular company or printer model along these lines.

[Neo Bri]

I used to have a Ricoh that would print on 11x17, and fast. Wasn't too expensive. maybe they still have something like that.

[Kingfan]

My company let me keep my black and white HP Laserjet when we upgraded to color printers. The HP toner cartridges were over $65 each. I got two aftermarket toner cartridges for under $20 on eBay and after the first ten pages all is good. Maybe you can get a similar deal for your Lexmark.

[AndrewMeronek]

Eh, no thanks. I don't plan on buying Chinese knockoffs.

[LeTromboniste]

Best is a printer that can handle Tabloid Plus (12x18), as it allows you to print 9x12 booklets, which is a standard size for parts and medium sized scores.

[Matt K]

Yeah, I've had really bad luck with knockoff ink. But I've had a few Brother printers over the years and the amount of ink I've gotten on each cartridge has resulted in an acceptable level of price for the official ink. I don't know if they sell one that handles 11x17 but I normally use 8.5x11 anyway so it suits my needs fine. I think my current printer was <$150 and the replacement cartridges are around $60. They advertise like 2,500 pages, but I'm sometimes able to get double that. Only does B&W though.

[Posaunus]

Black & White Laser is typically less expensive than inkjet, and output is much more durable. Laser printers are typically more robust than inkjets. And printheads won't dry out if you leave them idle for a month or two.

Brother printers are typically cheapest of the name-brand lasers, and their toner is also less expensive. Quality seems good. I expect they make an 11"x17" version. You might want to get a 3-year protection plan.

[baileyman]

I have a Brother 11x17 multifunction printer. I'm sure for a young person it would be great but it's too complicated for me with a menu system that never seems to lead where I want to go. If it had a button called "GO" and that was it it would be fine. Printing is good. 9x12 drawing paper makes decent size charts.

[Matt K]

I don't know what model brother printer you have, but mine basically is that. You just hit "START" and it makes a copy and you can basically ignore everything else!

[baileyman]

MFC-J6710DW

At least it simply prints from my iMac, but everything else, especially scan, drives me nuts.

[BGuttman]

I have the exact same printer. For Scan, I usually scan to image since it really doesn't do a good job of trimming the scan to size. I then use Microsoft Picture Viewer (comes with Microsoft Office) to edit the image back (crop). When I need to combine multiple pages I use Open Office Impress to collect the images into a Presentation and then save to PDF. The problem is not in the printer; it's in its software. We can chat tomorrow if you need to.

Note: MFC-J6710 is an ink jet, and probably not best for heavy duty printing. But it works fine for what I need to do. Also, don't let the prints get wet. I used Brother cartridges exclusively for a while and tried a Staples cartridge. Worked fine. I think of all the "generic" printer supplies, Staples is a good choice, especially since they stand by their products. Note that Staples is a large office supply chain based in Massachusetts. I'm not sure how widespread they are.

[Matt K]

Yeah that looks really similar to mine; all I have to do to copy is hit "START", I wonder if they changed something in the not too distant past. Would be a shame, I recommended them for everybody who wanted a basic functionality like "COPY"!

As far as scanning is concerned, Windows has a great open source (re: free) software called NAPS2 that can accumulate images into PDFs very easily. It can do other file formats too, but it's a lot easier of a process than what you outlined Bruce. I know there's a similar Mac utility that I think I paid $10 for, but I can't recall the name of it since I haven't really used OSX in around 5 years. In both cases, connect your scanner(USB is much faster than Wi-Fi usually, but both can work), set it as your default scanner on your OS, and then use the software to handle the scanning. If you handle the scanning from the scanner itself, you have to do files individually which is a real drag. If you handle them from the computer side, you can just rinse and repeat the following steps:

1) Put the paper in the bed/tray
2) Hit scan on your software

And then after all your pages, you can save it to a PDF. You can even crop all of the images from within the application. That's really useful if you're trying to convert them to read on an iPad or something that isn't a standard size. There's a LOT of whitespace on 8.5x11 documents often and you can just circumvent that by removing it altogether.

[baileyman]

...
For Scan, I usually scan to image since it really doesn't do a good job of trimming the scan to size. I then use Microsoft Picture Viewer (comes with Microsoft Office) to edit the image back (crop). When I need to combine multiple pages I use Open Office Impress to collect the images into a Presentation and then save to PDF.
...

Ow, headache already coming...

[timothy42b]

I have an older Canon laser printer I got at a thrift shop for $35 years ago. Huge thing, takes two of us to carry it down stairs.

A new Canon toner cartridge was somewhere around $150. I got a $20 cartridge from Amazon, and years later it is still on that one. It scans fine too.

It works fine. BUT! I can't get drivers for Win10, it's too old, and so I'm limited to the basement PC. That's one problem with older IT equipment, drivers may no longer be supported.

[JohnL]

It works fine. BUT! I can't get drivers for Win10, it's too old, and so I'm limited to the basement PC. That's one problem with older IT equipment, drivers may no longer be supported.

If it does any sort of Postscript or PCL emulation, you might be able to use a generic driver. I've gotten more than one "senior" printer back in service with a generic Postscript driver. It doesn't support some of the higher-level functions, but it prints, and that's usually sufficient.

[afugate]

[snip]
I know there's a similar Mac utility that I think I paid $10 for, but I can't recall the name of it since I haven't really used OSX in around 5 years.
[snip]

No need for an extra utility on the mac. Just open up the printers, select your printer with the attached scanner and click the scanner tab. Check the option to save as PDF and to combine pages.

The Previewer utility will let you combine PDFs, remove pages, crop, etc.

About the only thing it won't do is create a table of contents, for those times when you might need/want one. Oh, and it doesn't deskew images.

--Andy in OKC

[Matt K]

[snip]
I know there's a similar Mac utility that I think I paid $10 for, but I can't recall the name of it since I haven't really used OSX in around 5 years.
[snip]

No need for an extra utility on the mac. Just open up the printers, select your printer with the attached scanner and click the scanner tab. Check the option to save as PDF and to combine pages.

The Previewer utility will let you combine PDFs, remove pages, crop, etc.

About the only thing it won't do is create a table of contents, for those times when you might need/want one. Oh, and it doesn't deskew images.

--Andy in OKC

Oh slick! I don't know if that was an option the last time I used a mac a few years ago. Does it also do pseudo-duplexing? (E.g. your scanner only does one side scanning in the feeder, so you feed the even pages first then the odd pages and then it sorts them so that they're 1,2,3, etc. isntead of 1,3,5,7,9,2,4,6,8). Seems to be an oddly missing feature from a lot of applications but is so useful!

[afugate]

No need for an extra utility on the mac. Just open up the printers, select your printer with the attached scanner and click the scanner tab. Check the option to save as PDF and to combine pages.

The Previewer utility will let you combine PDFs, remove pages, crop, etc.

About the only thing it won't do is create a table of contents, for those times when you might need/want one. Oh, and it doesn't deskew images.

--Andy in OKC

Oh slick! I don't know if that was an option the last time I used a mac a few years ago. Does it also do pseudo-duplexing? (E.g. your scanner only does one side scanning in the feeder, so you feed the even pages first then the odd pages and then it sorts them so that they're 1,2,3, etc. isntead of 1,3,5,7,9,2,4,6,8). Seems to be an oddly missing feature from a lot of applications but is so useful!

That would be useful indeed. However, I'm not aware that OS/X will do this.
--Andy in OKC

[Lawrie]

I use a 2nd hand Kyocera photocopier - it has network printing and scanning built in. It will print and scan duplex too. They are cheap once they come off lease and the previous user/owner has upgraded to the current version.
Mine does up to A3 and toner is comparatively cheap - it does NOT include a developer kit or drum, just a humongous toner cartridge that will do thousands of pages way cheaper than any laser printer.
Mine is so old it doesn't do colour scanning, but I don't need it to. For that I have a cheap Epson inkjet multi function that cost $99 and has never printed a page.

<Corrrection> Mine uses PCL5 or PCL6 as well as KDPL (Kyocera's own version of Postscript)