Choosing a Personal Printer For the Long Haul

The Optimizer writes "After 16 years of service, my laser printer, a NEC Silentwriter 95, is finally wearing its internals out, and I need to find a replacement. It's printed over 30,000 pages and survived a half-dozen long-distance moves without giving me any trouble. I believe it's done so well for two reasons. First, it's sturdily built and hails from an era when every fraction of a penny didn't have to be cost-cut out of manufacturing. The other reason was its software. Since it supported postscript Level II, it wasn't bound to a specific operating system or hardware platform, so long as a basic postscript level 2 driver was available. A new color laser printer with postscript 3 seems like a logical replacement, and numerous inexpensive printers are available. I'd rather get a smaller, personal-size printer than a heavy workgroup printer. Most of all, I would like it to still be usable and running well with Windows 9, OS X 11, and whatever else we will be using in 2020. Can anyone recommend a brand or series of printers that is built to last and isn't going to be completely dependent on OS specific proprietary drivers?"

Comments

HP

[Anonymous Coward]

I realize things have changed, but I still stick by HP laser printers. Try to get a midrange one with a network connection and PostScript Level3, and you should hopefully be set.

Re:HP

[i.r.id10t]

My mom is still using a laserjet II that she got for $25 on a surplus sale from the county. When she had it serviced, the built in utility reported that it had printed over 2 million pages.... still going strong, she's had it for 10 years.

So, I'd say haunt surplus sales, etc. and pick up an older HP laserjet .. built like a tank.

Re:HP

[pz]

I realize things have changed, but I still stick by HP laser printers. Try to get a midrange one with a network connection and PostScript Level3, and you should hopefully be set.

I'd go one farther. I've bought a handful of printers (4 total) to do some medium-duty printing (25k pages per year). HP's consumer-level stuff is reasonably well-made, but ends up being very expensive in toner. Many people use aftermarket toner for that reason. HP's entry business-level stuff is GREAT. Printers made with an anticipated lifetime of over 100k pages. The newest ones (like the 2055d and related B&W laser printers) are pretty small, too. They speak PS and PCL. You can get off-lease units on eBay for not too much, or wait for one of the sales at tech stores. If you get a used one, the most important thing to watch for is the number of pages on the print path, and try to find one with less than 10k. From time to time HP has trade-in bonus programs where you send them an old printer and get money back, when you buy one of their new ones.

But, if you elect to go the color route, be prepared for sticker shock on the toner. You should expect to start paying 3-4x the money because you'll be buying 4 times as many cartridges. Even if, like most, your printing is primarily black-and-white, you'll be replacing the K (black) cartridge quite often, because for a given size printer, the four carts for color reproduction (CMYK, cyan, magenta, yellow, black) hold less than 1/4 the amount of toner each as the single K cartridge in a B&W printer.

My wife and I have a Dell 1710 printer at home, that's a B&W non-duplex model made by Lexmark, and I'm waiting for it to die to replace it with an HP equivalent. The Dell prints great at first, but altogether too quickly , the output becomes shoddy. I've not had such problems with the HP printers in my lab (again, with 25k pages per year at work).

Re:HP

[afidel]

I don't think a 1xxx will fulfill his needs, the 1xxx series are almost all win-printers (host based). For duty cycle it would absolutely be enough as 30,000 pages is the monthly duty cycle for a 2xxx series printer. If you need a more substantial printer I think the 4xxx series are the best built printers HP still makes. They are nothing like the LJ3/4 printers though, I once repaired a decade old LJ3 that had over a million pages on it, the only reason it needed repair is that a tooth on the single plastic gear had broken (everything else in the unit was metal). Personally I have an old Lexmark laser with a 500 page feeder and the backup is a LJ4. My primary color need is photos and those are best done by a mini-lab on real photo paper.

Laser printers

[DurendalMac]

Get another laser printer. Take care of it and it'll last forever. Postscript means no serious OS dependence. Hell, I just set up a new Ricoh printer at an office that needed to be used with a Mac OS 9 application. It only needed very basic printing, so no biggie. It worked fine, so thank God for Postscript. Ricoh and Brother are good in my eyes, but I'm sure someone with more experience will chime in.

HP

[benwiggy]

You can't go much wrong with a decent HP Laser printer. As long as you don't get the completely bargain bucket, bottom of the range ones.

30,000 pages is nothing. I've got an 8-year-old HP5000 series that does 10,000 pages a year.

Anything with an Ethernet socket and support for PostScript (or even PDF natively, these days) is not going to need much in the way of drivers, particularly on OS X.

Brother HL-2150N

[gngulrajani]

Was 80GBP has cheap consumables and works fine with CUPS.
A lot of the Brother lasers get good reviews.

OSX 11?

[Rhaban]

Doesn't the X stands for 10?

HP P2015dn - I love it

[squallbsr]

Get yourself another laser printer, after I bought mine (HP P2015-dn for $300 2 years ago) I haven't looked back. 99.99% of my printing is black and white anyway, I use the crap out of the double sided feature and I love the networked aspect.

My only complaint is that it needs to be restarted every month or so - otherwise it takes 20 minutes to print 1 page.

One suggestion

[Anonymous Coward]

Brother has some of the best Linux support I've seen. And their products are well built.

http://www.brother-usa.com/Printer/Color_Laser_Printers/

The HL-3040CN is personal-sized, but packs a punch.

Network-ready
17 ppm
LED instead of laser (higher dpi, fewer moving parts)
under $300

Older generation HPs

[citking]

The older generation of HP printers are about the best one can get. The LaserJet 4/5 series were built like tanks, using steel for the frame and being very, very simple to repair.

Since HP 4s and 5s use standard PCL and PS languages they are very easily able to work across platforms. (One note however - if using PostScript with a LaserJet 4 or 5 be sure to have enough printer memory or you'll have a few issues with the printer becoming overwhelmed).

Before Carly Fiorina destroyed HP they used to be the leader in printers (or at least in the very top tier). Now they crank out plastic pieces of shit that break after a year, are difficult to repair using off-the-bench tools, and try to market a new toner cart to you when the old one is still at 20% capacity. Seriously, our LaserJet 4200 will not go into powersave mode when it is telling me to order a new cartridge with 1/5th the life remaining. It is very annoying.

While the LaserJet 4/5 series of printers are not small, personal-type lasers they are workhorses. As I stated before parts are cheap and are easy to replace should that be necessary. Toner carts are prevalent and are reasonable. I'd go with these tried-and-true printers if you are looking for another decade-plus of worry-free operation. Personally I'd go specifically with the LaserJet 5m, but if you don't like the size/heft of that perhaps a LaserJet 4p would be more to your liking, though they can be a bit more difficult to work on because of their small stature.

Re:Samsung

[datapharmer]

I second the samsung printers. We purchased a ML-2851ND for work and have been very happy with it. For a laser printer it is relatively small (not as small as an hp-p1005, but the hp already requires you to track down a driver for osx - at least for 10.5, which worries me); the ML-2851ND printed on windows, osx, and over the linux network just fine without any special drivers. There are easy configuration drivers on cd for several operating systems, but for osx and xp I just listed it as generic postscript and it prints great. It offers duplex which is nice and the dual usb/ethernet interface means it will be more likely to survive changes in technology over time... there is bound to be something that can convert to either usb or ethernet 20 years from now. The memory can be upgraded or replaced if needed and it is fast out of the box.

Do you really need color?

[localman57]

One question I ask people when they're looking for a printer is if they really need color. They typically say, "Of course! I print photos!" but the fact is you can run a few hundred digital prints from Wal Mart for what a single color Inkjet cartridge costs. The quality is better, the fade resistance is better, and most people don't get a few hundred prints from a cartridge. And, assuming you're going there anyway and you have a typical cheap inkjet, it's easier to send them to the photodepartment via their web site and pick them up when you go shopping than to print them at home.

Re:Not a printer expert but..

[drinkypoo]

Making the printer physically larger means that the polar moment of inertia is increased, and that the forces of the reciprocating print head reversing direction are dissipated through a longer lever arm. Or in even simpler terms, making it bigger makes it shake less. This translates into a longer lifespan and overall cheaper design phase. MemJet has promised to deliver print technology which will permit portable printers with good quality and absurd print speeds but, uh... where are they? I'm still waiting. You can buy a report about the technology, but you can't buy a printer. M'aidez!

Can't go wrong with HP? Disagree ....

[King_TJ]

I'll give you a prime example. About 2-3 years ago, I decided it was time to buy a good, solid color laser printer for use with my side business. (I wanted to print my own business cards and advertising 3-fold fliers, among other things.) I finally chose an HP Color LaserJet 2550N since it got good reviews for print quality, offered OS X as well as Windows support, had built-in ethernet, and so on.

Well, it turns out it has several big problems most of the early reviewers neglected to mention. For starters, it has a really annoying habit of rotating the carousel the toner cartridges drop into, every 4 hours or so. There's *nothing* about this in the owner's manual, but people complaining to HP tech. support were supposedly told it's "normal behavior" and done "to ensure the toner doesn't clump up/settle in the cartridges over time". All fine and good, except the loud racket it makes, with a big "Cha-chunka, ka-chunka, ka-chunka, ka-CHUNK" drives you crazy when it wakes you up in the middle of the night, and you have to wonder how much extra wear and tear it makes on the internals.

  But wait, there's more! The second "surprise" HP had in store for owners of this printer is that each time it cycles the toners around like that, it counts it as 1 print cycle. The toner cartridges and the developer drum all have computer chips in them that track page count, and when it reaches HP's predefined "limit", the toner or developer reports it's "empty" to the printer, and stops working - no matter how much longer it could *really* go! So theoretically, if you leave this printer powered on, so it's available to print to on your LAN, but never even print anything - it will eventually tell you all the supplies are used up and need replacements!

After I owned this printer for the first year or so, I noticed it was quickly replaced with a newer model that uses totally different supplies, too. This is typical for HP's products these days - and becomes a real problem when you run out of a toner and want to grab a replacement locally, so you don't suffer a lot of downtime. At least with cheap inkjet printers, you can usually find what you need, even for popular older models, if you check several office supply places. But they don't like stocking > $120 each color toners for a printer that few people purchased before it was discontinued. So basically, I can't get anything locally for my 2550N!

It's a huge waste - but honestly, when my toners run out, my smartest move (money-wise) is to sell the printer for "parts" on eBay for $25 or whatever, and buy a new color laser that comes with the supplies. The supplies are often as costly to swap as it is to buy the whole printer with them!