#THE WIRECUTTER PRINTER FULL#
In addition to being crazy cheap and crazy fast, the Pro 8100 has a 250-sheet input tray, features USB 2.0/wired ethernet and Wi-Fi connectivity, a full color LED display and auto duplexing. Oh, and if you're a Linux user, according to one Amazon shopper, the Pro 8100 will work with your hardware without having to hunt the backwaters of the Internet to track down any drivers. All you need to know is that everything you print is going to look sharp as hell. Manufacturers all have different ways of measuring the number of dots per square-inch that their printers are capable of producing. At those speeds, you’ll get black-and-white pages printed at a resolution of 1200 x 600 dpi, and color at 1200 x 1200. According to Hewlett Packard, the Pro 8100 can print laser-quality black-and-white pages at a rate of 20 pages per minute. In addition to printing as inexpensively as many laser printers, it’s just as fast as one, too.
It beats the average 6-cents-per-page color printing cost of many mono laser/LED printers, too. That’s well below the average 20-cents-per-page cost that you’ll get when using most photo-quality inkjet printers to print a color page. At their most expensive, the cartridges still manage a per-page cost of roughly 2.6 cents for every black-and-white page you print and 2.9 cents for a color page. From that, you’ll get a page yield of 700 color pages. Replacement ink cartridges for the Pro 8100 can be purchased in a value pack for as little as $50-$70 pop. Priced as low as $107 on Amazon, the Pro 8100 is an inkjet printer designed for use in a medium-sized office environment, but it's compact enough to use in a dorm room or your home office. I also figured out that cheapo printers end up costing you a lot more in ink fairly quickly.Īs it turns out, I was able to track down a reasonably priced inkjet printer that offers a lower per-page cost than many other color laser printers and has a print speed that leaves just about every color inkjet printer out there eating its dust: the HP OfficeJet Pro 8100 ePrinter.
These are all jobs that can be done using a color photo printer without entailing the higher costs of a photo printer, color laser printer or color LED printer (although I gave all technologies a fair shake in my 11-hour search). While searching for a great color inkjet printer, my goal was to figure out which brand and technology offered the most value for people looking to print a report for school, a PowerPoint presentation for work, or some colored letterhead.
For as little as $107, you’ll get a color inkjet printer with a lower per-page cost and faster print speed than many other color laser printers. If you don’t care about printing photos but still need a color printer, the HP OfficeJet Pro 8100 ePrinter is a good choice.