Small laser printer replacement - recommendations?

I'll raise you a Porthole into Southampton Docks, no chance to pour over the remains thinking " Maybe I shouldn't have done that".

G.Harman

Reply to
damduck-egg
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Good man. I found it very satisfying. I bought a LJ5M on eBay for £35 about 7 years ago and it's been fine ever since, although it can be very slow. It's not unknown for it to take 15 minutes to render a page. But it Just Works.

Reply to
Huge

Indeed. The local photo booth that used to project digilat colour images onto photo paper now has a megebucks digital ptrintyer that does amazing stuff that is way beyind my menas.

My inkjet that I skipped (A1 sized HP plotter) because no one wanted it used to produce prints that fade in a couple of months of sunlight.

It's cheaper to take drawings round to the print shop these days.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

With all printers the manufacturers tend to sell them cheaply and then have a hefty mark-up on the consumables. Typically you can get third-party ink or toner for a third of the price of the or less of the official stuff. So the thing to research is whether 3rd party toner is available for the model you choose. I'm told that HP are getting much cleverer in their newer models so that you are forced to buy HP brand toner, but don't know if that's true for all brands.

Reply to
Clive Page

IME with Brother, only their toner works properly.

Reply to
Capitol

Heh, I got a Brother HL1430 (similar spec to the LJ5M) from Freegle, a drum and a couple of cartridges for twenty quid on eBay. It's hard to believe the hassle we used to put up with from previous inkjets (although the mono HP I was given was a lot less bad than the several Epsons we had).

Reply to
Rob Morley

Have 4 HPs of various ages, been very good. Only the ancient one is less th an reliable now. The one thing I don't like about the smaller ones is the U I, it's anything but clear.

Brother, had one, wouldn't get another. The drum was not part of the print cart and effectively not replaceable.

Lexmark corporate type machine was very impressed with. Print quality absol utely flawless every time, no reliability problems. Only downside was the c arts were chipped & overpriced, so refilled them before they emptied. You g et what you pay for I suppose, they're over 1k so not for home use.

DIY refilling laser carts is easy enough. The key word is cleanliness, any bit of fluff can ruin the print quality. I'd stay away from anything that t ook chipped carts, unless prepared to pay a significant premium for a top q uality machine like the Lexmark.

NT

Reply to
tabbypurr

sales bullsht. I wouldn't touch an inkjet today. Slow, short lived, unreliable compared to lasers.

NT

Reply to
tabbypurr

The first inkjet I ever had was trouble from the start. It had a 1 pixel printhead that whizzed back & forth very fast, and took grey-black powder, probably carbon. First thing it did was fry the computer it plugged in to. I should have learnt then.

NT

Reply to
tabbypurr

Clive Page grunted in news: snipped-for-privacy@mid.individual.net:

Thread hijack alert...

I'm just about to buy a new laser printer myself; although the vast majority of my needs are for monochrome print, I'm quite tempted to get a colour machine just for the occasional convenience. I'm interested in the HP Color LaserJet Pro M254dw

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which is ?114 after HP's cashback deal. I'm well aware of the toner cost issue, especially with colour, but at least this model includes 700-pages- worth (allegedly!) of colour toner, which would last me a very long time!

So can anyone confirm whether this model will definitely work with 3rd- party toner carts?

Secondly, if I were to run this printer until the bundled colour carts ran out, and never bothered replacing them, does anyone know if the printer would keep working in black-and-white? Or would it give up until the colour carts were replaced?

Thanks David

Reply to
Lobster

I presume that the amazon seller "technology geeks" wouldn't sell a bundle of the printer plus 3rd party toners if it didn't ...

Reply to
Andy Burns

I can only relate the story of a larger HP model (a 2600n, fairly old now). I got it on Freecycle. It worked "sort of", but there was a magenta cast over all the pages. Took me a while to work out that the magenta cartridge needed changing (and, to a lesser extent, the other two colkour ones).

Further investigation showed that the printer had doen about 4000 pages in its life. The black toner had been replaced once (with a third party toner that it occasionally bitched about). The colour toners were completely empty.

In common with a lot of HP printers, the toner cartridges include the drum and the toner waste container. The waste container on the magenta cartridge was overflowing.

Not sure if that's still the case.

Reply to
Bob Eager

Andy Burns grunted in news:fb7bvvFkhdfU1 @mid.individual.net:

Well spotted! :) I went ahead and ordered one, so will see how it turns out...

Reply to
Lobster

Actually feed back to the group on what 3rd party toners do work with what lasers would be damned helpful.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

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