Getting very fed up with our jet ink printers, we just don?t do enough colour printing to avoid cartridges gumming occasionally. My B/W laser is dead reliable.
Could I expect similar reliability from a laser colour printer?
I don?t need photographic quality (although that would be nice) and would prefer something which doesn?t cost an arm and a leg for consumables. It wouldn?t be seeing heavy use.
Any recommendations?
Tim
None that are currently available, but Samsung printers have always served me well. As you say, you don't get photo quality with four colour printing, but it is acceptable for most purposes.
Samsung printers are now HP printers, still be some old models still being cleared out of warehouses.
Just shows how long mine have lasted :-)
I have had a Dell Color Laser Printer | C1760nw for some time. I use non Dell cartidges which are cheaper. Most of my printing is black and white may be a couple of pages per week. The printer cost me about £108.70 on
19/1/2014. They are still available, but at a higher price.I use it instead of my ink jet printer which I now just use as a scanner.
Ive run HP laserjets for about 10 years at low volumes.
They are good enough for me. I use third party cheap replacement drums/cartridges at about £20-25 a cartridge/drum. Had one drum that striped, replaced iot - otherwise the third party are good enough if you don't want photo quality.
I have an M252n Couple of used ones on Amazon for £200 odd
Yes.
I'd recommend Brother. They're behind the curve on toner cart chipping, which means it's easier to get third party cartridges for them, or refill your existing ones. On mine (HL-L8260CDW) a complete set of aftermarket toner carts is about £30 (probably not as good as the £300 OEM, but good enough)
There are sometimes cashback deals - think mine was about £150 after cashback.
If anyone recommends HP based on the thing they bought in 1994 and is still going, be aware they're a quite different company these days - and they just love toner chipping. That means even to refill your own cartridges costs £10 each just for the chip, let alone the toner.
Theo
have a look at Morgan Computers - they offer free printers if you buy consumables from them.
That is why I recommended a somewhat older S/H HP machine.
Like many things, oldies are betters.
They are roughly 4x more complicated mechanisms for CMYK and so correspondingly 4x less reliable than their monochrome cousins but still way more reliable, faster and cheaper per printed sheet than any inkjet.
Near photoreal colour laser printing became possible around the time of the Dell 1320C nearly two decades ago. I still have mine.
Only you know your usage profile. You may never get your investment on a colour laser back if your print volume is so low that inkjets clog up!
FWIW I would recommend a big heavy ugly one intended for office use (which is what I have). They tend to be cheaper second hand since domestic users don't like them. It can take an inordinate amount of hammer. It is on its second print engine. I bought a spare from Morgan just to get hold of the double set of free cartidges included with it.
4 colour laser units are never going to be small which is something to bear in mind. They can make them more compact but harder to mend too!Worth picking one where aftermarket non-OEM toner cartridges are available and have good reviews. Other than that take your pick from any of the ones where the running costs look acceptable to you. Most of them by now should be able to do almost photoreal - but some are more equal than others. Highest quality printing may still require OEM toner.
I've just sold a Brother HL3040, consumables were cheap enough but not great capacity so it wasn't economical for the volume we do.
Decent machine, small, quiet and quick and simple.
You can reset the toners and drums via the menu too so you change them as it suits *you*.
They appear to be silly money on ebay though, I sold mine for £30 and the buyer complained I hadn't supplied a lead!
I can back up Theo's recommendation. Last year I bought a Brother HL-860cdw network capable laser printer for
182.56 with 100 cashback! It works a treat and the toner cartridges do not have a chip, just a mechanical flag to reset them. The black starter cartridge has the flag but not the colour ones do not, although it is easy to transfer across.I found a refill kit company who sold the flags to upgrade the cartridges and have done so.
As for print quality I would be hard pushed to tell the difference between inkjet and laser output. In fact a couple of friends have framed a laser prints I have given them.
Running costs are pretty much very low as compatible carts cost typically
35 pounds per cart for 2500 pages, refill kits a little bit less but more messy.As far as I am concerned inkjets are history.
Thing is a relatively cheap inkjet give decent results - and with pattern carts quite cheap to run. So why not simply do a test page or whatever once a week or so? That's what I do.
My cheap laser mono printer failed just after I'd bought a new drum for it. ;-
Mostly. 4 colour cycles instead of one does increase paper jamming a bit.
They come close, up to or better than newspaper 4-colour printing quality (and on better paper of course). I've got laser prints behind glass and it's really not noticeable they are't photo prints.
Used a Konica 2430DL until the toners ran out 10 years later.
Owain
Currently running a Lexmark CS410dn which has been fine for several years.
I have a Brother mono laser and A3 inkjet which both work well, but Brother have started getting a bit precious over alternative cartridges. For the inkjet, my current ones are about a fifth of the price, but the printer knows and will only use about a third of the ink.
I have an Oki MC342 colour laser, it just works (it is rather massive though).
I have an HP Color Laserjet M252dw which seems to be fine so far. I go for months without printing, and then print off a few documents or PDFs. Inkjets just clogged up when the volume of printing went down.
I have had one batch of third party toner which has been fine so far. The original toner was a relatively small amount.
I don't think I paid a massive amount at the time. Ah! Paid £130 in February 2016. Cool Toner replacement pack October 2018 for £67.99.
They now seem to start at around £300 for the latest version M255dw. I could probably sell mine at a significant profit if I wanted to.
The key feature for me was auto duplex for printing double sided documents.
I think I will just go and cherish mine a little!
Cheers
Dave R
We've got an HP MFP M283fdw. We got it on an Amazon Black Friday deal the other year, but I can't remember how much we paid. It works perfectly and doesn't need a test print to be done every few weeks to keep the ink flowing, as was the case with our old inkjet printer. Still on its original set of cartridges. Like other network-connected printers, the connection occasionally fails when I submit a print job - either it doesn't respond to a ping, or else the printer shows as offline on my Windows PC even though it's pingable. Powering the printer off/on sorts that out. It's got a sheet feeder for photocopying/scanning a stack of pages, which works nicely. My only criticism is that the scanner does not produce very good scans of photographs: there is a lot of noise in the dark tones. So I still use my ancient Epson 1200 (about 20 years old) for photos: I just need to avoid the scratch on the glass :-(
The quality of printed photos is very good. It always used to be said that inkjets produced better photos than lasers, but this one is perfect. And I love the duplex printing: no more having to print all the odd pages, turn the stack upside down and put in the paper feed tray and print all the even pages if I want duplex. (As an aside, I once had an HP inkjet that did duplex and it was very weird watching it print the reverse side from bottom to top.)
If you don't care about having manufacturer's original toners, then there are a huge number of toner suppliers, making many printers cheap to run. My last set cost me around £50 (originals would have been over £250) and have been in use for more than 18 months.
Looking further may find you a cheap printer as well. We use a Samsung CLP-680ND at home (office grade, networked, with duplex printing) - which I bought as spares and repairs on Ebay. It'd been bought for a print run of leaflets and was sold (without cartridges) right after that, having only printed 2300 sheets and being under spares and repairs only because the mains lead (standard computer power lead) was missing. I only paid £2.50 and I actually felt guilty picking it up at that price!
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