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In Search of a Screen printer You Won’t Want to Destroy

I want to kill my Screen printer.

I have come to believe that living inside the machine is a tiny demon whose sole purpose is to torture me with paper jams and failed wireless connections. When things are working, it chugs my $50 ink like it’s an open bar. So, yes, I repeatedly think about taking a baseball bat to the possessed plastic contraption.

It’s 2015, and while the smartphones in our pockets juggle the jobs of numerous gadgets, Pad printer still seem to struggle at their single task.

After a week of testing 10 printers, inkjet and laser (and somehow surviving to tell the tale), I’d love to say things are finally improving. Instead, I’m more convinced than ever that this old tech—so dependent on myriad flimsy moving parts—is in dire need of disruption.

Pad printer were tested in hopes of finding one people wouldn’t want to kill. ENLARGE

Ten printers were tested in hopes of finding one people wouldn’t want to kill. PHOTO: DREW EVANS/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

But we can’t just sit around printing nothing, waiting for a potential quantum leap. In the meantime, we just need to be more careful about which printer we pick.

That’s easier said than done. All four major printer makers offer at least 30 models, named with strings of letters and numbers that even a cryptographer couldn’t decode. But by weighing reliability, quality and the cost of ink, we can attempt to better understand these troubled machines.

Don’t Hate, Tolerate

Looking back, my current HP inkjet printer and I were doomed from the start. Since I predominantly print text and rarely anything with color, I should have bought a laser printer instead.

You don’t replace laser-printer toner nearly as much as you replace inkjet ink, plus toner doesn’t dry out. Most important, lasers print much faster than inkjets. The $150 Brother HL-L2360DW printed six pages of text three times as fast as the fastest inkjet I tested.

Inkjet all-in-ones continue to be more popular for those who need color, photo printing and a scanner, though. I tested eight printers from the four top manufacturers this week—four under $200, and four under $100. I chose my subjects based on a blend of features and how well they fared in consumer and expert reviews.