Laser printers.
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You get what you pay for. Taking your points in order... A £50 printer will work fine, but it will not be fast, will not have a huge storage capacity (both RAM and Paper Reservoir) and will not be as sturdy. For a 'Good' printer you need to start looking at about £100, (I would recommend a Brother 3040cn at about £85 for a minimum in this range) Printing speed: Go for at least 16ppm with a cold start time of about 30 seconds max. Any slower print is annoying, and any longer wait is thumb-twiddlingly boring. Modern toners do not degrade over measurable time (ie several years), they are NOT chipped to expire, but can be chipped to be non-refillable. There is often a 'Window' in the toner that by judicious use of a black marker pen and kinetic agitation can extrend the life by 10-20%. Yes, you certainly do pay more for wifi printers but not much more, it really depends on your set up as to whether or not it is worth it. Best tip I can give is STAY AWAY FROM CANON. They are excellent printers but the toners are pricey and suppliers are not often able to reduce costs on them. Brother or HP are the best for value/running costs. From a technical side Xerox are the Gold Standard but are hideously expensive.
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Good points Dave, I have an old Brother HL-1440 that has lasted forever and was relatively inexpensive. I might add the problem with the newer laser printer is that they provide toner cartridges with a lower page print count so you will need to buy a new toner cartridge sooner.
Dalek Dave wrote:
There is often a 'Window' in the toner that by judicious use of a black marker pen and kinetic agitation can extrend the life by 10-20%.
I put a pieve of tape over this window and it extended prints by 1K+ or so.
VS2010/Atmel Studio 6.1 ToDo Manager Extension The problem with the gene pool is that there is no lifeguard. -Steven Wright
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Moving aside from my recent thread about refillable ink cartridges I'd like to ask about laser printers. What is it that makes a good b/w laser printer? What I'm saying is that you can spend £200 and more from one manufacturer and £50 from another. Are the £200 jobs immeasurably superior to the dumpster-priced £50 printers? I want a decent printer in the sense I'd like sharp text and that can display reasonable images on the occasions I need to. I know DPI is important and you can apparently have too much DPI? Printing speed for example: If I have to wait 20 seconds per page I'm ok with that. A minute per page I'd probably get a bit fed up. Sometimes I like to print multiple page PDFs so double sided printing would be nice. Do modern toner kits "degrade/expire" like some ink cartridges? Are they chipped to expire? Do you pay more for WiFi printers over cable types? So, essentially, I don't print a lot but I'd like reasonable print quality at a price that lines up with my occasional use. There are so many printers to choose from and so many high-fives in one review but which gets a kick in the ass on another. If someone can give me some essential points to look for it would be much appreciated.
If there is one thing more dangerous than getting between a bear and her cubs it's getting between my wife and her chocolate.
Like others have said, you get what you pay for. If you are serious about a low cost B&W laser that will continue to function as a piece of office equipment for years, pony up and get a good one. Take care of it and it will last years, my parents just got rid of their LaserJet III that we had in the early 90s. And yes, it still worked. I've been less than thrilled with the lower cost home models myself, I just feel that they are not as well made and more prone to failure. I spent a few years selling office equipment in a big box and saw a lot of Brother and Canon models returned. My bias is and likely always will be for HP LaserJets. I have used a handful of different models, from office to home use, including some of the color lasers. Beyond those 3 brands, nothing else every really sold well, Kyocera here and there I guess. With lasers it all depends on how much you are going to be printing. They are usually rated for an expected monthly usage. To far over that and you will wear out the machinery. To little use and you might need to clean the fuser. If you get a good model, you will eventually need re-lube the rollers because the rubber dries out and begins to crack. A good laser printer will last that long. I had a LaserJet 4050 through college and it was the best $250 I spent. I picked up a very seldom used one, at the time it was priced $800 new, but had less than 2000 pages printed through it. A few years ago, I gave it to someone else and it is still going strong last I heard. The toner cartridges were about $175 each, but gave you about 10000 pages at the standard coverage. The toner is still about $175, so a little less than $0.02 per side. It took a bit to warm up, generally 20-30 seconds but then printed at 17 ppm. Toner really doesn't expire, it might settle but a quick shake can fix that. I had the same cartridge for almost a decade (which shows how much I printed through college and after), never had any problems with it. As far as HP is concerned, they do not chip/expire their toner but they do recommend you run software that lets you know that you have a genuine cartridge. They claim this is because of counterfeiting, which can cause your warranty to be voided as well as cause damage to your printer. Honestly, if you spend the money on a good printer, get the right toner IMO. They do have standards when they are producing them. It is the same with ink carts, no matter what the generic manufacturers say, the ink is not the same quality, plus unless you are constantly cleaning the
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You _buy_ paper ? I thought everybody would "borrow" it from the office.
~RaGE();
I think words like 'destiny' are a way of trying to find order where none exists. - Christian Graus Do not feed the troll ! - Common proverb
The last ream I bought. I was unemployed at the time so there was no office to "borrow" from. I must remember at any future interview when asked "Do you have any questions you'd like to ask?" I will reply "Only one. Can I take a ream of paper?" :-D
If there is one thing more dangerous than getting between a bear and her cubs it's getting between my wife and her chocolate.
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Moving aside from my recent thread about refillable ink cartridges I'd like to ask about laser printers. What is it that makes a good b/w laser printer? What I'm saying is that you can spend £200 and more from one manufacturer and £50 from another. Are the £200 jobs immeasurably superior to the dumpster-priced £50 printers? I want a decent printer in the sense I'd like sharp text and that can display reasonable images on the occasions I need to. I know DPI is important and you can apparently have too much DPI? Printing speed for example: If I have to wait 20 seconds per page I'm ok with that. A minute per page I'd probably get a bit fed up. Sometimes I like to print multiple page PDFs so double sided printing would be nice. Do modern toner kits "degrade/expire" like some ink cartridges? Are they chipped to expire? Do you pay more for WiFi printers over cable types? So, essentially, I don't print a lot but I'd like reasonable print quality at a price that lines up with my occasional use. There are so many printers to choose from and so many high-fives in one review but which gets a kick in the ass on another. If someone can give me some essential points to look for it would be much appreciated.
If there is one thing more dangerous than getting between a bear and her cubs it's getting between my wife and her chocolate.
Your decision is, I believe, very much like the one you face buying a car. What's your budget, what are you going to do with it, how much are going to use it every month, what's the price of buying new toner-cartridges, how many pages per month do you expect to print. How long do you expect the printer to last; how long is the warranty; and, is local servicing available. Most of all: what is the quality of output that is the "bottom-line" for you. You may not need even 600x600 dpi resolution to get the quality you want. If you are involved in the graphic arts, you may wish to decide if you want a monochrome laser printer with genuine Adobe PostScript, rather than a PostScript emulator: there is real difference in quality for certain types of output, and very real differences in quality of certain types of content: for example, very small type in various font formats. The HP and Lexmark emulators of Adobe PostScript have had a very bad rep, but it's been a while since I looked the current crop. I worked as a PostScript programmer at Cricket, IDD, Emerald City Software, and Adobe (those were the pixellated days, them was), so I may have a bias towards Adobe PostScript. I can say of Adobe PostScript, as Pele said of soccer: "been very good to me." Alack, alas, these days I can't even achieve tessellation, even starting at square one. good luck, Bill
Google CEO, Erich Schmidt: "I keep asking for a product called Serendipity. This product would have access to everything ever written or recorded, know everything the user ever worked on and saved to his or her personal hard drive, and know a whole lot about the user's tastes, friends and predilections." 2004, USA Today interview
