New ink jet printers for teachers

[triton45]

I am looking for printer recommendations. The printers are for teacher's classrooms. This is fairly light printing in both black/white and color. They do not print pictures. If they need to print a lot, then the print job is sent to the larger printers. I was looking at the Lexmark Z2300 ($50), but the ink cost quickly adds up. This is for a private school, so it has to be budget conscious.

What other printers should I be looking at?

Thanks

 

[ghwellsjr]

If you or someone else knowledgeable is planning to maintain the printers, I would go with Canon printers that have individual cartridges for each color. I really like the older printers that don't have chips in the cartridges so you can readily refill them or buy cheap compatibles, but I don't know where you are going to find enough for a bunch of classrooms, so that is probably not going to work. How many printers are you talking about and where is the school located?

 

[websnail]

Being married to a teacher and also providing inkjet printers to four (primary / K-12) schools I would, ironically, recommend you steer clear of inkjet printers based on your intended usage.

The only reason to have an inkjet printer is if you intend to print regularly and then in colour. As you have access to larger printers which can undoubtedly print in colour, I would opt instead for a mono (black & white) laser in your classroom(s)..

The rational behind this recommendation is that inkjets tend to dry up, especially when used lightly and especially over extended periods of non-use (ie: holidays - particularly the hot summer one). Net result is usually clogging and replaced cartridges or worse, a printer that sits and does nothing because nobody knows/can-be-bothered to fix it.

One thing I've done recently in one school has been to put L7780 printers in the corridor shared by four classrooms. They were networked using powerline networking adaptors (because there were no network points nearby) and then shared out using login scripts, etc...

The printers themselves are around 200 but coupled with CIS kits (which I've made myself) at a further 250 the ink costs for this year are around 250 or so... and that's for around 35,000 pages so far (those are rough figures)... This works well because the printers are constantly exercised (at least one teacher or student prints to them every few hours) and located close to the classrooms. The fact that they're shared, shares the cost too... Obviously the down side is a single point of failure but you have the other printers so it could be worse.

I'd be happy to give you more pointers if you like but that's just one working scenario that I've developed in one out of four schools...

Hope if gives you some ideas

 

[triton45]

I am looking at 10 classrooms. We are located in Indiana.

Comments made me think about laserjet. Looking at the page yield of these might make them more attractive over the long time. Sharing these would make the color more affordable, but I need to check out the power options in the hallways/common areas.

Thanks