<p>i will be buying a mac in a few weeks. under the apple program, there is a $100 rebate for printers. i can spend $150 for a printer. what is the best printer for $150 or less?</p>
<p>Printers from the Apple store are all overpriced.</p>
<p>Look around for deals on the Samsung ML-1630 for about $60. It’s a nice and sleek black-and-white laser printer that used to be exclusively sold by Apple.</p>
<p>Once the contract between Apple and Samsung was over, it went on the open market, and all the sudden, the price dropped from $220 to $100 to $60. Nonetheless, it’s still a very nice and reliable printer.</p>
<p>I just bought a printer with the same $100 rebate, a Canon Pixma MP490. This is an inexpensive printer ($100), but I have the previous version and it has proven to be reliable and versatile (fairly fast, good photos, good scans). If you want to spend more, they have faster and higher-quality inkjets - I personally prefer Canon, so one good choice would be the Pixma MX870, which is also wireless.</p>
<p>If you want a laser printer at your price range, there are only a couple of Samsungs available from Apple, and it may indeed be true that you can get them for about $100 less elsewhere, negating the rebate the Apple offers. The Samsun CLP-315W is a very nice wireless color laser printer that will cost you $150 after the rebate, but I think that you can get the same printer online for about $150.</p>
<p>Although laser printers are so much nicer than ink jet printers, I’d skip them and would go just for the ink jets. The reason being is that the high cost of a printer isn’t the machine itself, but the cost of ink. With ink jets, you have the cheap alternative of buying ink in bulk and injecting it into used cartridges yourself.</p>
<p>So in my case, instead of getting my printer for free and paying $80 for the two new ink cartridges I needed over the year, I instead paid only $10 for a bottle of ink, a syringe, and refilled the cartridge myself</p>
<p>thanks for the info. any other opinions?</p>
<p>You should check if your school has a printing allotment for you to use as well. Most schools do…mine is about 800 pages per semester. You’d still want a printer of your own, as it’s a pain to run to a printing station every time you want to print - but for large documents and reports, you wouldn’t need to use your own printer.</p>
<p>If you have a decent print allotment, I really wouldn’t get a laser printer or anything fancy, just something cheap that handles everyday light printing.</p>