This isn't really a bash towards staples, because I like shopping there.

Anyway, my stepbrother had an epson et2760. He was selling it for $150 but he ended up trading me for some pokemon cards. I have doubles of all of the ink and a full bottle of black. The printer was filled up on all ink as well.

When I got it (he said he had trouble connecting it) it took me a bit but I connected, and the first print was terrible. All I got was a small faded yellow and that's it. Eventually after numerous head cleanings and nozzle checks I got each color, except black (that's what I primarily need!)

I called staples and asked if they recommended anything and all the guy said was "you should have never traded/bought a used printer. That was your first mistake. The printer head is bad and there's nothing you can do to fix it, except buy a new printer)

So long story short I came across this video, did the power cleaning, and my printer magically worked! Now I have all colors including black!

So i want to include the video that helped me, incase anyone else is running into this issue! I was about to give up on it until I found this! https://youtu.be/VEHk19i-S20?si=6EvKJ-rFD_VMPoS8

I walked into a Staples to buy some stuff and came across the floor model of Epson ET-5150 for $99 since its the demo model. I dont really need a new printer, I only print about once every 3-4 weeks. However, my current HP is horrendous. I always need to do an alignment and header cleaning, which drains like half of my ink, so Im purchasing ink like every 3-4 months. The Staples rep the Epson would be a horrible decision based on how low printing I do. He is saying that the tubes of the printer would get clogged and essentially destroy the printer. He's saying that the printer 'needs' to print about 7000 pages a year so that tubes dont get clogged.

Any thoughts on this?

I own a Brother HL-L3210CW color laser printer. The prints it produces are just ok.

Recently, I sent documents to my local Staples which I also printed on the Brother and the difference is night and day. The Staples prints are literally 10X better than what my color laser printer produces.

The issue is, I need to print documents for customers and mail them out on a regular basis and driving to my local Staples is getting old...

Does anyone know what kind of printer Staples uses?

I was hoping maybe Inkjet would win out and bought a HP ENVY Inspire 7255e, but I tested it just now and it's actually like 10-20% worse than the Brother Color Laser.

The other thing of note: I am using non-OEM cartridges in the Brother printer, so maybe if I sprung for the $260 OEM cartridges I'd get a better print quality but I really don't know.

One other thing I could try is maybe the paper but I doubt that is really the issue here.