<p>I've only got one printer, and my mom needs to use it so I can't take it. Do most dorms have a network printer or MFD that everyone shares, or should I have to bring my own printer?</p>
<p>I think you can print in grayscale on a network printer. If you want color, you need to use someone's printer or go to a lab.</p>
<p>You will be able to print without your own printer</p>
<p>Haha, gotsta love the mountains of paper in front of the athena printers.</p>
<p>Would that require going to a library or computer cluster to retrieve your documents?</p>
<p>Here's another way of asking: do most students have their own printers?</p>
<p>Yeah it would require that you go to a cluster or the libray.</p>
<p>A lot of dorms have Athena printers, too, so often it just means going downstairs or to the main lobby.</p>
<p>It's not rare to have a printer, at least where I lived, but it's not rare not to have one, either. My printer broke at the beginning of junior year and I never bothered to replace it, because it's easy enough to print to Athena.</p>
<p>If you have Windows and want to print to Athena, you install and use this</a> program.</p>
<p>Mollie:</p>
<p>That's pretty convenient, so at this point I don't know if it's worth it to buy a printer. I'm looking at a $160 Canon inkjet printer/scanner/copier all-in-one.</p>
<p>You could definitely go either way. I think having the scanner and copier functions will probably be more useful to you than the printer function. Most of the stuff you'll have to print out will be class notes and projects/papers, so it's not a big deal to print in black and white. Saves money on ink cartridges, anyway.</p>
<p>Then again, you could just wait and find a free printer on reuse. :)</p>
<p>Look up reviews for a cheap, decent, grayscale laser printer, ink is really annoying.. and you are highly unlikely to need colour for anything
I also agree, a copier function could be very handy</p>
<p>I think I know one student who has his own printer. Not only are there printers in building 66, which is right next to my dorm, but my hall has a printer and there's a printer at my dorm's desk.</p>
<p>There is one printer (in W20, the Student Center) that prints in color, the others are grayscale.</p>
<p>I had a printer my freshman year, just because I had an extra one at home and it was convenient. It was definitely not necessary, but was nice when I was in my room and didn't feel like walking up 5 flights to the dorm's printer. The only downside is the cost of ink, though you will find that you don't need to print too much at MIT (not many papers) and if you print something long, you do it at an Athena cluster.</p>
<p>The nice thing is that you don't ever need to buy paper since you can just take it from the Athena clusters</p>
<p>Is the copy machine free for the students too?</p>
<p>No, copies cost money either at independent locations (my dorm has one, for instance), or at [url=<a href="http://web.mit.edu/ctc/www/%5DCopyTech%5B/url">http://web.mit.edu/ctc/www/]CopyTech[/url</a>]. I think CopyTech copies are something like five cents a page, very reasonable.</p>