<p>I know D's college will have printers available but should she have her own printer in her dorm? If so, it needs to be small..any suggestions?</p>
<p>Thanks</p>
<p>Maybe. Depends on roomate, availability of school printers, costs. Small inkjets/multifunctions and b&w lasers are cheap - watch for sales over the summer. Bough D a small well-reviewed Brother B&W laser with wifi from Amazon when it was on sale. She decided she can find a school printer or use roomate’s when she needs color. S has a color inkjet (Canon) - has held up well over 4 years, but ink is $$ and uses school printers for big jobs. Many (all?) of their classes require submitting electronicaly, so no printer needed unless they prefer to review & edit a hard copy.</p>
<p>I’d get a small inkjet printer for your daughter. It is true that ink is expensive, but you can get nice printers for less than $75, and any high-volume jobs can be done on a school printer. Our son and daughter both brought printers to school and found them useful in quickly cranking out documents for a class. The other thought is to get an “all-in-one” printer that can also scan documents. Our daughter has that, and it has been convenient to scan in graphics to use in papers, as well as making on-the-fly photocopies.</p>
<p>I like Canon printers myself; you can get a Pixma MG3120 all-in-one printer for about $80, or a Pixma IP2702 printer-only for about $50.</p>
<p>I second the cheap laser printer. I got a brother one like the second poster. The toner carts are cheap. Ours is the HL-2140 it was less than $50 bucks. You should youtube the tape trick for toner. We got atleast 2000-3000 prints out of a toner cart. And the generic toner carts are around $15-20 bucks. really great deal. You can get a fancy color ink. But the ink refills is whats going to kill you.</p>
<p>Depends on the major - my DD1 (1st year Architecture) got a lot of miles out of her little Canon multifunction job for scanning and copying as well as printing. Plus, color was used quite a bit. For other majors where color is not as big a deal, small lasers are very nice.</p>
<p>We paid $50 for the Canon MX495… Awesome printer/scanner/copier for that much.</p>
<p>I got an HP on sale at Target for less than $30 over the summer. It really came in handy when I wanted to print something late or early. My school also didn’t have free printing so the printer, pack of paper and extra ink cartridge definitely came in handy as opposed to spending $0.10 to $0.20 per page and walking to the library at all hours of the night.</p>
<p>The convenience of having your own printer cannot be understated. I suggest a small B&W laser. These days, they’re relatively cheap, very reliable, compact, and handles 95% of what you’ll need.</p>
<p>As for the last 5% that really do require colors, there’s always print shops for that.</p>