"Muggles" wrote

| I'm going cross-eyed looking at ads for home office printers.

I'm no expert on this, but have owned several
printers. For what it's worth: At one point I switched
to Epson because HP ink was so wildly overpriced.
The Epson was much worse. Ink was cheaper but
cartridges were tiny. Ink dried out. The Epson
absolutely refused to do anything once it decided
that ink was low. It seemed to calculate some
combination of time and usage to arrive at that
decision. My older HP would always still print when
ink got low, and I knew it was low because the
printing would be faint, while the Epson just decided
it was low, despite still printing fine.

So I'll never buy an Epson again. Though I should
point out that my ladyfriend is a photographer and
uses a high-end Epson for printing photos. It's
considered to be among the best for that task and
does a beautiful job. But it does require 8 colors of
those tiny cartidges to work.

My current printer is an HP Envy 5660. $80. All
the stores claimed it "normally sold" for far more than
that, but they were all selling it for $80. I only
use a printer on an irregular basis, mostly to print
contracts, business stationery, return address stickers,
etc. So far the HP has been fine, aside from irritating
nags about how I should claim online coupons. (The
nags seem to be built into the printer software, so I'm
not sure that I can stop them.)

I'm afraid all printer companies are getting more
sleazy while also becoming more clever about
cotrolling the device through software. Epson seems
to not be breaking any laws by actually preventing me
from using the device I bought as I see fit. So what
can one do? On the bright side, the prices are relatively
low. It's almost cheaper to just buy a new printer
every time the ink runs out.

As for the scanner, I've always been happy with those,
since the first scanners came out. My new HP is somewhat
of a scanner for dummies, in therms of the software. The
newer WIA interface that replaces TWAIN tends to come
with dumbed down utilities. But the options it provides
are serviceable.