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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?"
Pencil and Paper? You want a well built device that is not going to rely on OS specific closed source drivers? I'd say that leaves a pencil.
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.
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.
I went for Samsung printers for precisely that reason. I have an ML-3051ND at home (and its replacement, an ML-3471ND at work) because they're well built and they use PostScript, and hence aren't tied to any obscure software drivers. They're not colour, but then I remain unconvinced that colour laser printers are worth while yet. Cheap inkjets give significantly better print quality, at the cost of having to keep two printers around, one for colour and one for black and white. But it's a solution that works for me, at least.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
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.
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.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
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.
Was 80GBP has cheap consumables and works fine with CUPS.
A lot of the Brother lasers get good reviews.
Doesn't the X stands for 10?
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.
Sleep: A completely inadequate substitution for Caffeine.
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
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.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
This makes it to the front page of Slashdot?
You're not seeing the big picture. *Of course* this isn't about finding a personal laser printer. The submitter is *obviously* building something big... like sharks with lasers!
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
I bought a LaserJet 2100 and a 10/100 JetDirect card for it. It lives on my network so that provides wifi printing, it has an appletalk port and a parallel port, I got a belkin USB to parallel adapter for $1 at a yard sale, and it's even got front-panel IR. Then I added a Postscript+4MB RAM DIMM to it. This gets you 300,600,1200 DPI modes plus a 600-dpi-with-variable toner blob size high speed mode. Then I had to rebuild it, which is surprisingly easy actually.
This printer was meant to print 20,000 pages a month and to be rebuildable, which is nontrivial but honestly not all that bad. The only downside is lack of duplex, and the lack of a screen. I guess that's two down sides. You manage the printer via web browser+java plugin, which is fairly cross-platform anyway. It prints PCL5, PCL6, and Postscript.
It's not particularly fast in anything but 300 dpi mode, but it has really beautiful output and refilled toner carts are trivially available. You can pick all this up under $200 these days; I didn't, but you can. And pretty much anything can print to it, which to me is a huge feature. Finally, it doesn't require an external print server, which is also critically important to me, I have far too much clutter as it is.
If you get something newer, it's probably shabbier and faster. The 2100 is cool and competent. It's also useless without a memory expansion of some kind. You could skip the postscript, PCL is perfectly usable from Unix these days, but you must upgrade the RAM. IIRC it just takes parity EDO DIMMs or something, but you'd have to look it up.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You obviously dont actually understand how a real office works, do you?
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.
"This food is problematic."
the one that uses the same toner cartridges as the one at work.
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.
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.
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I won't even look at an HP printer any more. They used to be fabulously reliable, but no longer.
Now granted, most of my experience is with their larger machines, but my experience with their SOHO inkjet machines has sucked too. The last of those went in the dumpster last year, when it told me the cartridge we'd had on the shelf for a year had expired and it refused to print with it.
Last year I took a Torx screwdriver and a hammer and dismantled and threw out my office's HP 9500hdn and the old HP 8550DN.
Both of these printers were used lightly during most of the year, to print the occasional office print job (5 person office), and then for two months of each year they'd be run about 6 hours a day continuously, to produce duplexed and stapled documents for a conference.
The 8550 you could charitably say had worn out - over firve years we'd gotten over 150,000 prints out of it, but the monthly duty cycle rating was supposed to be up around 100,000 pages anyway, so that's not much. At the end it jammed more often than it printed, but long before the mechanical parts started to fail, the formatter board had decided that it wouldn't boot with the internal IDE hard drive attached (or any other IDE drive attached), and this was the second formatter board - the first one died years ago. This meant that it could no longer produce more than one copy of any multi-page document. This, coupled with the constant jams and the 4 page per minute print speed spelled the end of this machine.
The 9500... well, that was a huge disappointment. We got about two years out of it. It was a lot faster than the 8550, but after about 18 months it started to jam. A lot. We spent close to $2000 on having HP's on-site support people take guesses at the problem, and they honestly had no idea why it was jamming. We'd tried everything including putting it in a special room with controlled temperature and humidity, and even using a power conditioner and a variac to play with the line voltage - at this point I would have brought in a Voodoo priest if I could have found one. I don't think we even broke the 150,000 page mark on this piece of junk.
Both printers were replaced with a Ricoh Aficio SP C811DN-DL. Talk about a night and day difference. We're on our second year with the Ricoh and it has jammed once, when someone put a folded piece of paper in the supply drawer. It is a thing of beauty. We also have one inkjet machine, a Ricoh GX5050N - totally trouble free, prints two-sided and has huge ink cartridges.
We also had an HP 3500N. It actually costs more to buy a full set of all four toner cartridges than it does to buy a Brother all-in-one color laser fax/scanner. So that's what we did. We have two of the Brother machines, and they only complain when they need toner or a drum.
In short, my advice is buy a Brother or a Ricoh, but whatever you buy, research it - find reviews from people who own the printer model you're looking at.
Putting moderation advice in your
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!
The joke translates: find one with readily available cartridges.
No it does not. It translates: "Find one with FREE cartridges."
It is a common mistake.
"FREE!!!" is the base of many words in Freeloaderian language, so the actual meaning often gets mangled when translated to English.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
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.
Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others.