With so many working from home in these troubled times I found buying a home printer an enormous task. My print-head clogged up & the built-in cleaning setting didn’t work. I know it is sometimes cheaper buying a new printer than buying ink & I’ve often thought if printer manufacturers wanted people to buy genuine ink they should sell removable print-heads with ink boxed sets. If you’re like me you hate the waste of throwing out a perfectly good printer save for the ink or print-head.
I’m no expert I just thought my experience could be useful to some folks. Looking through many reviews I came to find Brother printers had far more customer reviews (& positive ones at that, though there are some negative ones) than any other brand on the market. I considered lashing out on a colour laser printer as they don’t have clogging issues, but they are not as versatile as an inkjet. A relatively new inkjet technology on the market uses large ink tanks & are toted as being more reliable than the print-head & small cartridge variety.
The one I bought, a Brother DCP-J1100DW ($294.00) is the smallest & cheapest in ink tank type says it can print 150 pages a month for a year on the ink that comes with it, as if I would print that much for home use. The downside is that their ‘INKVestment’ printers can only be purchased through Officeworks & therefor you can’t shop around for a better price. What’s more, visiting Officeworks is no guarantee of finding one.
As I said at the outset, with so many working from home Printers are being snapped up as soon as they arrive in-store. So I emailed Brother Australia & told them which printer I was after & sked when their next shipment to Officeworks was due. Not only did the Sales Manager respond promtly to my email, but he also emailed me again when it was about to happen. I then used Officeworks ‘Click & Collect’ online purchase system to reserve the printer.
Out of the box there are more than one tutorial for setting up, the quick start guide or online video. The wifi setup took a little to work out, but the instructions were simple enough & it’s amazingly fast from power on to print-ready compared to my Canon PIXMA which whirred & carried on for a good minute before it would do anything. I hope some of you find my experience useful.
