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

Re:Laser printers

[TheRaven64]

Try to make sure it supports PCL too. I had a Brother laser printer (I don't anymore; I have it to my mother, who still uses it), but it only had a 50MHz MIPS CPU. Complex PostScript documents took a very long time for it to print. Some LaTeX-produced pages containing just text took 20-30 seconds before it would start printing. PCL, in contrast, is a much simpler language and converting form PS to PCL on my computer and sending the result let it print with only a couple of seconds between pages. I'd also recommend getting one that supports network connectivity. This pretty much guarantees that it isn't doing anything magic in the drivers, as some USB printers do, and will work with any OS you care to try.