If you only need black and white (and be honest, you probably do, just use Kinkos or whatever for your occasional color print and buy a photo printer if you need an actual photo printer) buy a laser printer, HP makes fine ones. You can use a 3rd party to recharge your cartridges, this will cost you a fraction of what bubble jets and ink costs per year.

Oh yeah, laser jets actually print fast.

I don't know if it's only me but it always freaks me out when it takes like 3 minutes (or eternity for those impatient like me) of noise just to print 1 sheet that takes 3 seconds to print.

I don't have anything relevant to add just thinking on keyboard.
Was that enough info OP? Any specific questions? Awesome people helped me out with external hard drive questions and want to pay it forward with stuff I know about.

If you know any of the awesome models of laser printers now, my old, and awesome HP LaserJet went out the door in my divorce. I want a network enabled B&W laser printer, I'll need to seriously consider features if it's well over 100 USD, though, I'm not opposed to paying more to get a better printer though.

EDIT: I've been looking for a high end scanner (that can do photo negatives and slides as well), if you know if any of these that also do great printing I would also consider it. I know these are pretty expensive as they are almost professional grade.

The photo negatives and slides I'll need to go thru my contacts for some gimme a few days (I went straight to digital with SLRs)

Oh I've got worse, I have boxes of old black and white photos too. I need to archive this stuff, the people who know who was in these photos are dying and even the ones alive have long since forgotten some of these faces (my 100 year old grandma no longer recalls how she met her husband).

I appreciate the help:)

I have a different issue with Canon, at least the model I have (see posts above). If the non-OEM cartridges end up not working out though, I plan to replace it.

I don't mean to hijack the thread from Lexor, but do you have any recommendations on Epson? I'm looking for something that
- scans well, an automatic feeder would be nice, but not necessary
- has better ink usage than I have (which won't be hard to beat) ie: doesn't use up the color ink when I'm only printing in black...
- prints fairly fast, meaning quick "push print-to-print start" time (won't be tough to beat what I have here either). The HP I mentioned is pretty quick from the tests I ran before taking it back due to the scanning issues. Unless it's something important, I print with the lowest ink settings anyway, so that speeds up the print speed itself.
- having an inside paper tray is preferred over back loading, but whatever
- around $100, cheaper preferred, but whatever.
- wireless does not matter to me

I have seen an Epson Workforce printer at Target that looked alright and was in the price range, but now I forget the model number...

Thank you for all posts. I went to sleep but now I'm back. :)

I've heard similar thing about Epson - it is good but has priced ink. Yes, partially printer will be my money maker, but as I am not going to use ink's "cheaper versions" I do not know if it will be enough suitable for me. I can say I will probably print more home stuff on it than actual work. As I said my work is mostly digital and I will have need to use printer only from time to time (like to test something before sending it to print, to print business cards or CDs with my portfolio, backup data for job givers).

I know that my "price range" is really low for pro printing, but I know also it is much higher than average for home printer. Also in every price range there is possibility to get bad, average and good printer, and I'm trying to get good one.

I must say I'm quite surprised by this part of your post. You are probably first person who recommends me HP printer. Yes, I know that HP printers are these of higher quality, but most persons do not recommend me them because of low capacity of ink cartridges (=frequent purchases of new ones) - they were bigger in the past but newer versions of printers have them surprisingly small.

The other part of my surprise is that you said "Canon is bad". Most people I've asked suggested me Epson or Canon printer with a very strong accent on Canon (because of cheaper original ink).

That's also first time I've heard. One of professionals I've asked said that he is using Canon printer at home with no problems with color. In fact the color is so good that if not using CMYK color book he could hardly notice any difference on prints between his home printer and pro one. The printer he was referring to is A3 iX4000.

Well I think I'll be going to use 50%/50% color and b&w printing, so ink printer will be more suitable for me. Also I can't print CDs on laser and they have sometimes trouble with thick paper.

So talked to 3 friends about their experiences with those 3 in 1 scanners. I've never used one myself.
Apparently SVP is a solid choice just don't expect ANY tech support or service because they are horrible to deal with (IE non-existant). One has the PS9890 which the others were jealous of and 2 of them bitched a lot about the amount of re-work they had to do in photoshop with the Wolverine line because of bad registering of colours. The reds looked faded and the grey sky was too dark when trying to read slides. It's not too tough to fix the levels in photoshop.
I'll see if I can dig up more info next time I volunteer at the consumer's bureau early Feb.

Sorry, I don't know how to snip. Don't get me wrong about Canon, Canon is great if you pair it with other Canon products but you'll notice issues with color if you shoot with a Nikon or mess with shots/stuff in Photoshop (PS) or Lightroom. The primary colour issue is just having prints look cold (blue) which you can compensate for in PS (it's just crappy if you forget to do that and send work to a client).

Yeah, HP has fairly expensive (ish) ink but I find that no matter what I do, things I print whether straight from my Fuji or Nikon (into the built-in SD slot) to stuff I created with PS Lightroom or inDesign usually looks good (and when it doesn't it's user error). My work around that problem is to get the XL carts. I don't know about prices in Poland but I can get an XL for roughly $40 with taxes in Canada. Canon's prices are maybe $5-8 cheaper here (depends on model)

As for Epson Workforce, model you probably saw was the 630. Beautiful prints but a bitch on inks. Friend in nursing who never prints in color had her magenta dry up and her printer stopped working. The work around was just take out all the ink and store it in a cool location. Printer worked but if she ever needed to print in color she had to the inks out of storage, install, print, and then put back. Hassle but saved her cash. *this is also do-able with HPs, cyan ran out before student loan came in*

Hmmm... anyone knows some good dedicated web page where I can compare different printers from different manufacturers by selecting a large number of details?
Most of pages I know provide only some most general specs (or offer isn't full - like on some shop pages) and on producer pages I can only select printers from their offer.

For example I have trouble to find out what current models on the market supports CD printing and at the same time has no additional things I do not need (like LCD, memory card slots etc) which increase final price but I have no plans on using them. Also, if we are talking about combos, some printers comparisons miss details I need about scanner.

You're right.
This is gonna be off-topic but good fyi for freelancing. I've just had a few mishaps over the years where I've warmed stuff up so it looks epic on my printer, saved the file with the changes so I wouldn't need to re-do if I needed other touch-ups (I <3 layers) and then sent the warmed up image instead of the proof by accident. Or sometimes the client will print stuff for directors etc and you got to explain why that image they printed isn't what will be mass printed.

I'm not sure that was model. I don't think it's any of the ones Target lists online.
Are you also meaning that it goes through ink quickly or just that they dry if not used? And it was able to function having only a black ink cartridge? If so, that's a plus. This Canon requires that they are all in and all have ink or it complains that you will damage the printer.