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Budget Laser Printers?
Johnzo asks: "I'm in the market for a new printer, and I've noticed that a lot of sub-$300 laser printers are popping up on the marketplace. I don't need colour, as most of what I print is text -- but I want that text to be crisp and sharp and damp-resistant -- so a cheap laser would seem to be ideal for my needs. So, my question: can one buy a good laser for less than three bills? Does anyone have any input on specific models to look for or to avoid?" Interesting thought. The printer market seems to be chainging from year to year, and now B&W laser printers are becomming affordable for your average computer user. What recommendations do you all have?
Used Apple Laserwriter II NT and NTX 's make great cheap laser printers. For home use they will just about last forever. They are a bit slower than modern printers, but fast at making multiple copies of the same page. They use the same toner cartidges as HP Laser Jet II series which can be had for resonable prices from cartidge recycling companies, or still purchased new wherever toner cartrides are sold. As a bonus these printers are native postscript :)
Stay away from Okidata unless you only print text. Their greyscale and photographic quality is pretty bad; the pixels are not evenly distributed and the images get spotty.
Brother printers are pretty low quality as well... I remember a brother 960 (i think) a few years back that had a defective power regulator component in it (worked for a brother service center at the time). We saw tons of them come in with the same problem, and it took the company almost a year to fix it.
Hewlett Packard has always performed well in my experience, and I usually reccomend them to anyone who asks. Their drivers are funky tho, you will want to uninstall all the 16-bit status monitor apps and whatnot. Lexmark makes good printers, but the Optra E+ that I have has problems rendering text at the right sizes; stuff is just a leeeetle bit off and it's annoying. The problem goes away if you tell the driver to RIP everything on the host first and print as an image. The HP 5L we have works great.
Beware the WinPrinters! The Oki 4W printer works ONLY with Windoze 9x, no NT, no *nix, no DOS. The 4W means FOR WINDOWS. Plus, after about two thousand pages, they can't feed paper worth anything (went through THREE of them, replaced for this same problem).
Learn how a CPU works before you learn to program. Seriously.
I've been using a HP LaserJet 6L for the past two years. It's been doing just fine, and I've printed about 2300 pages on it over that time. Haven't even had to replace the toner on it yet (knock on wood).
The main reason I got it was because it got pretty good reviews from everywhere. And because of the HP name. I'd gone through two HP Deskjets before, and was very impressed with both of them. Gave the last one (HP 660C, IIRC) to my sister and she's still using it. That thing is probably 5 or 6 years old by now.
This 6L is wonderful. It can print 5 or 6 PPM, plenty fast for me. It does work under Linux, though I'm not sure how well since I have it shared using Samba and print from the various Windows machines. Graphics are nice and crisp. Economode is great for printing out stuff off the net that I won't be turning in to anyone. High quality mode makes text look really professional, my friends even use it to print their resume`s on everynow and then.
I forget how much I paid originally, but I see em going for $300 on www.pricewatch.com right now. $8MB memory upgrades for about $40, toner for about $45.
I've been recommending refurbished HP printers for years - the older (II - III - 4) series last well and seem to be better built (less flimsy plastic) than the new ones. One source is www.p3si.com/cat_prn.html. I ordered from them a year ago, got a HPIIID (prints on both sides of a page with the right drivers), and it's still working. These may be the most popular laser printers ever. Repair parts and consumables are easy to find and cheap.
Disclaimer: I am only a satisfied user. I own stock in HP, not Xerox.
This is the only budget laser printer that has built in PostScript. Built in PostScript is the ultimate in compatibility and guarentees great output on any OS.
0 .html
It's also a 600x600 dpi printer, with "up to" 8 pages per minute. This is the most excelent printer for Unix OS's I have found for less then $500. The list price is $399, but it can be found for as low as $300.
http://www.lexmark.com/printers/laser/Optra/E31
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups.
Things to look for:
- Brand name (easier to find support/toner/drivers for brand names.) Best choices are HP and Apple. Until recently there were only 3 printer engines in the world (most HP & Apple were Canon engines) so the engine should be the important issue. Unfortunately since the support electronics can vary so much it's best to concentrate on the label and all that goes with it.
- PostScript level 2 - accept nothing else. The various HPGL's are nice too but nothing beats PS. It's the standard. Accept no substitutes ("It's just like PostScript" - yeah - right.) Save the worry and get the real thing.
- Built-in network support. Sure you can hang the printer off of a parallel port on a box but it's way nicer and faster to just toss the printer onto your local network. Make sure the device supports TCP-IP and LPR, anything else (SPX/IPX & Netware, Netbios and Windows, AppleTalk & MacOS, etc.) are all nice gravy but can be duplicated with TCP-IP & LPR.
- 16 MB RAM Minimum. Most of the older generation printers will take standard cheapo SIMMS (a use for those old 8 & 16 MB's from your junked PC) and the additional memory can pay off in speed, resolution, and fewer errors. A SCSI port for adding a drive to the printer (think 'local fonts') is nice but generally not a big deal.
- A good return policy. Make sure you can return the printer for 30 days if a problem occurs. When you take it home run it through it's tricks to avoid any surprises. Try some PostScript test files, different grades of paper, etc. Look for smudges, leaks, and slipping rollers.
- Finally, particularly with older laser printers - make sure it's on it's own electrical circuit. Generally these printers go through a reheat cycle every few minutes which can be a significant electrical draw. Other devices on the same circuit will take the hit and after an extended period this abuse can cause marginal equipment to fail. I can't list the number of fileservers I've seen with crashed drives that were on the same circuit as a big ole laser printer. Coincidence - I don't think so.
There are a ton of places to buy an older generation laser printer. First check with your employer to see if there's any they want to clear out of the back room. Have some friends do the same with their employers. Call your local printer-repair shops and see if they've any hanging around. Do the same with any local office liquidators (though they won't offer any guarantee.) Run a check on the online auction sites too though be warned that many folks don't price their equipment reasonably ("...but I paid US$1500 for it 3 years ago! Whaddya you mean it's worth US$250! now?!") An hour or two of looking should buy you a better used printer then you could ever afford new.I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Cockroaches
Cher
HP LaserJet II, III, & 4's.
My staff had to resort to faking failures to pull them off of desks after we no longer supported them (II's & III's didn't interact with our mainframes well.) We ended up giving them to the staff we grabbed them from for home printers where they likely yet live on.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
NEC SuperScript 870 is great - pretty output, fast as hell, and 10/100bT ready. IIRC it's Linux compatible, but I'm not sure. Definitely check that out before you buy it. I use it on our home LAN of 7 Windows PCs and it hasn't failed me yet - nothing like printing seven simultaneous jobs and having everything work like clockwork. :)
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I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
I used HP Lasetjet 5L for the last 5 years. For
the last couple of years the paper feed is quite
bad. It sucks in large number of pages (10 to 20)
at a time. I checked the web and everybody
was complaining about the feed problems on
Laserjet 5L and 6L. Apparently, these feed
rollers need to be changed once in a while.
My brother has a Laserjet IIP. It still works
like new after 8 years.
My suggestion is buy a higher end used HP, that
has a different feed mechanism. Check the web
for printer repair FAQ for more information.
Once upon a time, HP invited me out to their facility near Rancho Bernardo, CA for a course in how to write printer drivers. Before the course started, they took us for a tour of the plant. It was all mildly interesting until we got to the testing area.
When I saw the tests that those printers go through, my jaw hit the floor. They repeatedly (thousands of times) shock the printers with special equipment that makes really cool inch-long sparks, they strap them to giant shakers and shake them as hard as they can, until something flies off, then redesign so that the part will stay on. They do tests that I wouldn't dream of.
They weren't the cheapest printers, and deservedly so. If I had to bet my life on the performance of a printer, I'd spend the extra few hundred bucks and buy an HP.
I bought an HP LaserJet 5L at a swap meet a while back. It prints text just fine, which is actually what I want it for, but it messes up on postscript. After some investigation we decided either the memory or the postscript chip was bad. ( PS pages had stripes that were shifted and smeared to the right. My friend used gs to send the postscript commands for a diagonal line, and that also was messed up. )
I was told by someone that you can buy a replacement postscript chip for around $25 from hp's web site. I searched but couldn't find it. Where would I get a new postscript chip ? I haven't even taken the thing apart yet to check if you really can replace the PS chip. Has anyone else done this ?