I asked a color-ink-and-toner refill salesman at a show/fair thing what to buy so he could sell me cheap and reliable ink refills for it. I think the answer was "Epson or even better Brother" and get an external ink tank -- but this was a few years ago.
(Ended up fixing the cold solder joint on an old b/w laser, so didn't bother with replacing it with color.)
But perhaps asking the compatible toner salesfolk first may give insight at to returns, reliability, and price...
Thomas Prufer
Lots of poor reviews on Amazon.
I guess the use cases in the first negative review were totally disjoint with mine.
Printing on plain A4 it does a grand job. Scanning to email is good (subject to 300dpi limit). Colour printing of photos is not bad for a laser (you wouldn't actually print photos, but for the kids printing something to include in a school report it's good).
Whining about "no duplex" when the printer has no duplex unit is pretty lame. Personally I would never expect a laser to:
1) Do manual duplex well - the paper has been cooked once already.2) Print on envelopes. Too bulky and irregular.
I suggest reading the negative reviews and filtering out stuff that really does not apply or the user is being unrealistic.
I do usually take amazon reviews quite seriously, but sometimes you just get a few left by complete idiots.
On 12/08/2015 08:43, Tim Watts wrote: ... snipped
For mono printing my elderly HP1320n (lots available cheaply on eBay) does auto duplex and envelope printing perfectly and is cheap to run - I don't think I've ever had a problem with it. For colour, the Samsung CLP-680ND works equally well (auto duplex) but is more expensive to run and the toner may have a shorter shelf life than that in the HP printer; I haven't tried it with envelopes.
I have had several HP machines over the years (scanners, printers, all-in-one).
I would never, ever, go near one again due to their appalling software and drivers.
The older stuff back when they were a reputable hardware maker were pretty good. I still have a hand me down laserjet running in the VH.
Their physical hardware was always better than their drivers.
Their drivers are not all *that* bad - my ancient HP scanner would disappear off the radar if the machine ever slept but it wasn't exactly serious. It made excellent image scans for the day.
Fortunately, on Linux you don't need their software and drivers, and it actually works rather well when you do use it
I was happy with my Dell 1320, but the electronics died after a couple of years. Now have a Lexmark CS410dn which is also OK for photos.
I have a similar machine (4195, different letters after) - but minus the wireless (which to me seems like a pointless capability for a printer wired to a LAN which already has working wireless!)
Had it a couple of years and would say generally I am pleased with it. Print quality is good, running costs per page are not eye watering. The scanner and sheet feeder work well enough (but then again I have a decent standalone scanner for doing anything exacting or on transparencies). The copier works, sheet fed or single items on the deck, not tried the fax.
I got it mainly so the kids could do colour stuff for school etc without the faff of needing to get my colour inkjet working each time.
If buying again I would probably not go for that model however, as it has one or two niggles. The most irritating is that its network scanning is not standalone capable... it can scan to email, to USB flash drive etc, but it can't scan direct to a SMB share directly, but needs the assistance of a lame bit of windows software which in turn will only allow you to specify a local drive as destination folder. Fine in an all windows setup I spose if you want to run the software on every box, but not as nice as just pointing it at a NAS and saying get on with it.
The Amazon reviews seem to be skewed a little with complaints over reliability - small self selecting sample set so hard to read much into them. Bozos who did not read the spec before buying (i.e. whingeing that a non duplex printer does not duplex), and others who seemed reasonably pleased.
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