What new printer to buy?

Question

My niece needs a new printer to use with her 3 year old iBook. It doesn't have USB 2.0 and I think she's running 10.2.8. Her free printer that she got when she purchased the iBook has died. She prints mostly text and the occasional photo or color page. She's looking for an inexpensive or reasonably priced printer that works well. It would be great if the ink cartridges either lasted a bit longer than the norm or were reasonably priced.
Any suggestions?
  Mac OS X (10.2.x)  

Answer 1

Avoid HPs. The hardware is magnificent, the software *****. if you must buy HP, get 3rd-party software. Usually free. Usually far better than HP's software. I have several HPs here, but I also use 3rd-party drivers for them, HP's own software irritates the **** out of me. If HP would wake up and produce even half-assed software I'd say that HP printers beat every other vendors' stuff.
Epsons work well. They drink ink something awesome if you use best output and do a lot of graphics. If the print heads jam you might as well just get a new printer, that boy's history. There are Epsons which sell for about $40-50. They're basically disposable printers, as the black cartridge for them costs about $20 and the colour cart about $25, so what Epson's saying is that when you run out of ink, buy a new printer.
Canons give very good output but the ink's expensive. A lot of Canons (and several Epsons) now come with ink in separate carts, so that instead of two carts, one black and one tricolour, you have four carts, one black, one each magenta, cyan, and yellow. (High end printers can have additional colours: light magenta and light cyan are commonest, but there's also light black and light yellow. And metallic colours, such as gold and silver.) Typically each cart in a four-cart machine will cost about $10-15, so they look cheaper than the carts for traditional two-cart machines. But you get less ink per cart, and four carts still add up to $40-60...
If she doesn't really need colour, and the budget can extend to a low-end laser, HP and Brother and other vendors have sub-$150 monochrome lasers. Brother's HL2040 lists for $150, and is commonly available for $100, for example. The HL2070N is the network version of the 2040, and lists for $200. I got mine for $135. I spent more than that on ink for my herd of HPs over a year.