Finding a Reliable Laser Printer?

SpottedKuh asks: "Perhaps the days of sturdy laser printers are over, or perhaps it is just my bad luck. I've recently been the proud owner of two paperweights: First, an HP LaserJet 1100, which continually misfed papers and smeared toner. After selling that printer, I foolishly purchased a LaserJet 1012, not realizing just how poorly it played with my BSD systems. Naturally, I've learned my lesson about checking LinuxPrinting.org; but, more than that, I'm gun-shy about purchasing yet another printer to replace my current LaserJet. I look at one of my friends who has had a LaserJet 4P for probably around ten years, and it's still going strong. Are the days of such quality gone, or am I just looking in the wrong places?" "Though compatibility with *nix is a must, it is not all that I want. I want a printer that will be sturdy and reliable, with few toner smears and jams. Also, if I'm going to be dropping all this money again, a duplexing printer is a must! I've heard that there are a lot of design problems with the LaserJet 1320, mainly regarding the manual feed mechanism. Maybe the LaserJet 1*** printers just aren't well-built? So I'm thinking of purchasing a LaserJet 2420d; but, I haven't been able to find many reviews of that printer.

Can the Slashdot community provide me with feedback regarding the printers I have mentioned, or any other reliable duplexing laser for in my home office?"

Comments

Samsung Laser Printers

[Gulthek]

Definitely check out the Samsung ML-1750 (and the cheaper ML-1710 although I believe that is not a PCL printer). I have the 1750 and it plays well with Linux, OS X, and Windows. I have printed off thousands of pages and it has never smeared, and only had two or three paper jams.

Samsung.

[m0rph3us0]

Seriously, I've gotten Samsung's Linux drivers to work in OpenBSD with out emulation. Their printers work like a charm with cups + ghostscript. Even works with Windows via Samba. Something like this: Samsung ML-2250 is what I would recommend because it supports PCL6 and has memory upgradable using standard SODIMM laptop ram. The GDI printers work great too they just offload too much work on to the CPU.

OId HP for me

[Ridgelift]

I bought a LaserJet 5m and duplexer off eBay for less than $200. The older LaserJet's are built like tanks, and with the design of the toner cartridges, they really don't wear out.

600dpi, Postscript, built-in network adapter, compatible with Linux. Just because newer printers print at higher resolutions with more pages per minute doesn't necessarily make them better in my view.

Professional Postscript Network Printer

[Tux2000]

Try to buy a professional printer. Not those with a big bright "professional" label, tools with such labels aren't "professional". Look at the vendor web pages what printers they offer for business ("enterprise") use. They may be ugly, big and expensive, but they offer better quality and longer a lifespan than those toys sold for SOHO use.

Search for a printer with Postscript support. It makes life easy with any OS (*BSD, Linux, MacOS, MacOS X, and even DOS and Windows can print on Postscript printers), and at the same time you can be sure that the printer has a real CPU and not just a chip that does nothing more interfacing the printer's hardware to a Windows-only "GDI" driver. Make sure the printer has some RAM, 8 MBytes is the absolute minimum, better try to get 32 MBytes.

The printer should have a build-in (ethernet) print server, or at least an external print server from the same manufacturer. I've seen HP printers refusing to do more than the absolute minimum work (unidirectional printing without any status reporting) until they have been connected to an HP print server. The reason for the print server: Ethernet does not die, it justs becomes faster. Parallel ports become more and more rare these days, many laptops already omit them. USB will some day be as obsolete as ISA is today. USB limits you to 2m printer cable, a parallel port may work with up to 5m, but ethernet gives you 100m. Plus you can share the printer with as many computers as you like, without the need to power up a dedicated computer for printing. And as a nice extra: With a WLAN access point or WLAN router, you can even print wireless.

My Hardware: HP Laserjet 1200N, a LJ1200 with 16 MB RAM plus an external ethernet to USB print server in the box. Yes, it's a SOHO toy (with Postscript support), and I would prefer a LJ 4000/4050/4100, but I got it for free. I've printed 1500 pages without any problems, from Windows, Linux and MacOS 9.

Tux2000