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

No, we can't recommend anything

[BadAnalogyGuy]

The problem is that you are assuming that printers made today have any sort of longterm lifespan. They do not. They are cheaply-made and will not last you more than a couple years at the longest.

Add to this that you would lose the ability to buy toner after a few years due to planned obsolescence, and your dream of buying a cheap personal printer that will last you two generations of Windows is simply impossible.

Re:No, we can't recommend anything

[green1]

The big problem I've seen evolve in the printer market is the difference between a "home" and "office" printer (they used to all be just printers)

Office printers are expensive to buy, but they last forever, they get TONS of printing out of their ink/toner cartridges, which are dirt cheap to replace (on a per-page comparison) and because of their simple designs can usually be re-filled easily, and will be available to purchase for decades to come. Office printers also use standard formats like postscript and don't require a special program running on your PC...

Home printers by comparison are the opposite, they're cheap to buy, and don't last long, their ink/toner cartridges cost a fortune (again, on a per-page comparison) and print very few pages, and often contain all sorts of proprietary chips to try to prevent you from buying generic cartridges (this same added complication ensures that you often can't re-fill the cartridges, and the original manufacturer is likely to phase them out after a fairly short period of time). Home printers also usually require bloated software running on your PC which tries to make you buy all sorts of "accessories" every time you open them, and hog half your system resources even when you aren't printing...

So basically my recommendation is that it hardly matters what brand you buy, just as long as you look at their office line-up, and not their home printers. (even some of the worst offenders in the home market still make amazing office printers)

Re:No, we can't recommend anything

[mobby_6kl]

Oh fuck, is this the whole "they don't make them like they used to" thing again? The cheap laser printers you can get today might not have as much attention to quality as the magical NEC from 1993 or whenever, but that's the thing, they're cheap, and the NEC wasn't. How much was it back then?

LaserJets from mid 80s were apparently about $3500, and according to this magazine review, the Silentwriter 95 was $1749 back in 1992, so that's about $2500 in today's money. Go ahead and buy a monochrome laser printer for two and a half grand, I'll just get one for $150 which will last me most of a decade, if not more.

Anecdote time! The KonicaMinolta Page Pro I got 6 years ago for maybe $90 still works perfectly fine today. I can still get original KM toner if I wanted to, and the only thing that went wrong with it was a tiny piece of plastic which held up part of the paper tray. Now if I shake it, it wobbles a bit more than it should. This might be explained by the fact that I put all the shit that didn't fit on my desk on top of it though, but oh noes! Obviously it's not as good as the one from back when you were my age. And get off his lawn, you damn kids!

Not a printer expert but..

[Chas]

Most of the stuff out there now is cheap plastic crap for "personal size" printers.
You get 18-24 months of moderate use out of them before they die, and ALL of them are proprietary drivers.
If you want more flexibility and longer lifespan, you pretty much HAVE to go up to workgroup printers.

As to a specific model, again, I'm not someone who goes through printers that often. I'm fairly happy with my LaserJet 3005x though.

Get a model that's been around a couple of years

[davidwr]

Find several models that have been around at least a year, preferably two, then search for their reputations.

You might try consumer-product-rating magazines and web sites that have a reputation for independence.

30,000? Junk!

[sirwired]

30,000 is a measly 60 reams of paper. All but the cheapest, lowest-end piece of crap should be able to handle more than six cases of paper before kicking the bucket. If standards are that low, just about any SOHO printer should do the trick.

SirWired

cost of consumables

[petes_PoV]

Don't just look at the ticket price of the printer itself. if you're planning on printing another 30,000 pages with the new printer over 16 years (hint: you won't - modern stuff just won't last) the paper, toner, drums and even electricity consumed. will far exceed the cost of the hardware.

Re:Buy pda instead

[pyster]

You obviously dont actually understand how a real office works, do you?

get another one

[MooseTick]

In the day of eBay and world reaching online marketplaces, the easy answer is to get another one just like what you had. It met all your requirements and the only thing that you state has changed is it has worn out. I'm sure there is a brand new or nearly new one out there waiting to be found. Also, it should be cheap since it is so old. Yuo may find though, that you don't get as lucky as you did the first one. Some people have cars for 15+ years also, then get a replacement that only lasts 5.

Re:No cost cutting in manufacturing?

[TheRaven64]

This was back in a time when people expected printers to last for many years of high-volume use and didn't buy anything from the company ever again if they didn't. Companies like HP made a name in this market by charging a premium but providing good value for money. They didn't need to try to cut costs, because they could pass their costs on to the customer, and the customer would be happy because it meant less downtime.

Re:No cost cutting in manufacturing?

[TechForensics]

Companies like HP made a name in this market by charging a premium but providing good value for money. They didn't need to try to cut costs, because they could pass their costs on to the customer, and the customer would be happy because it meant less downtime.

This is so true re HP. I bought my LaserJet 5MP about 1994 for $700.00 (a lot in those days) and it has been completely trouble-free for 15 years. Replacement toner carts are as easy to get as the day it was made.

Re:Didn't read the title, let alone the article?

[pyster]

Personal printer... Office printer... in the real world we still print things. You are clueless. Thanks.

Re:HP

[adolf]

I remember back 5 or 10, maybe even 15 years years ago: Lots of folks sounded just like you do now. "Oh, yeah. Those old HP machines were great. The new ones are all flimsy and hard to work on and break down all the time."

Except, now that we've in Teh Future, the heavy 5-year-old printers you're reminiscing so fondly of today about were yesterday's new-product, flimsy HP garbage.

I submit the following as fact:

Some printers last a long time. Some do not. Some are maintained. Some are not. Some are abused. Some are not. Some are properly budgeted[!]. Some are not. Some are remembered. Some are not.

A couple of years back, I retired an HP Laserjet III due to power supply problems, after it had printed something like 1.2 million pages over more than 16 years. Do I miss that durable, old workhorse printer? Fuck no! It was slow, it was noisy, it was expensive to power, it had lousy output even when it was working properly, it was way heavy, it always did smell funny when printing, and it was hard to work on! It was pretty reliable, of course, but that doesn't make up for the fact that it was generally a lousy fucking printer.

And it was expensive when it was new: $2,395 list, in 1990 dollars...which accounting for inflation, is something like $3,900 in 2008. $3,900! Holy fuck, batman! No wonder it got 1.2 million pages out before it got kicked to the curb.

Your memories are clouded. And most printers these days are so inexpensive that a direct comparison to the products of old is useless anyway.

However I must say that I, for one, am much happier with modern HP machines, where a neatly printed sheet of paper emerges within a few short seconds of clicking "print" than any of the lumbering antiques that morons like yourself seem to have always worshiped as time marches on.