Manufacturers have worked on that. Now recommend keeping the unit turned on/standby to keep the print head warm... plus, have head-cleaning protocol to help avoid clogging. Probably still not a good idea to make "zero prints over a few months", but any kind of light volume should keep the head from clogging.
The Lexmark Pro printers have black ink that's only $5 if you print mostly black and white. If you print alot in color it's the same ripoff, but they offer a print option that prints only in black and white. Hope that helps for what it's worth. We have a couple around our office that work great. Chadd Cobra Trading, Inc.
This is new to me. I gave up on printing because of too low volume / clogging, so now I go to a print shop - cheap and not too inconvenient. They do laser colour printing for me sometimes and the quality is pretty impressive.
Go to Amazon and buy an older model but new and you can get the a good model from 2 years ago for $cheap.
I've compared a few printer brands for office printing and have generally found HP to have the highest print quality. Take a look at the HP LaserJet CM1415fnw color all-in-one printer. Currently on sale at Staples for $375. Here is the link: http://www.staples.com/product_897096 The gotcha with the COLOR laser printers is the cost of replacement toner cartridges. For example, to replace all four toner cartridges in this HP printer would cost approx $275! If you need the color printing for your charts, then a lower cost alternative is an inkjet printer, commonly sold as all-in-one units. The inkjet quality should be more than sufficient for your own personal chart analysis. I would only upgrade to the Laser if you need to provide printed color charts to your boss/clients when a high-quality presentation is important.
Really appreciate all your inputs. Has anyone tried Epson inkejet all in one Printers ? Any suggestions for models ? Thanks
Epson seems to have the best color injet printers for photographs. I still prefer HP for everything else. But you can decide for yourself. Today's modern printers usually have a memory card slot which allows you to print a file by simply inserting the memory card into the printer. Using this method, you don't need to connect the printer to a computer or network. So, if you feel ambitious, why don't you copy an image of one of your complex charts to a memory card (the kind that goes into your digital camera) and just bring it to the store. Ask the salesperson if you can test several printers using your memory card. They should not have a problem with this. In the big stores, they usually have their printers out on display and hooked up so you can print test pages. I'm not sure which filetypes are supported for printing from the memory card, so save your chart in JPG format to be safe.