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Welch
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Office Printers... Advice?

Fri Mar 02, 2012 7:52 pm

So I've got a customer across town that needs some new printers. They recently bought new printers (within the last year), of which I told them not to buy HP... but they did.

Now they have a mix of HP P2030dn and P2055dn printers, which are just plain out crap. If your wondering why I say they are crap, its because of the most piss poor driver support I have ever seen in my life. I actually had tech support from Quickbooks laugh when I told him the issue my customer was happening. He instantly knew that the issue was with that generation/model of HP and noted that most of the time when they recieve tech calls regarding printing that its a known issue with HP drivers. Sad, nothing that I didn't really expect. I've never liked HP printers but it sucks for my customers that bought the printers, I told them not to buy them but someone in the office thought they knew better and could save money, now they need to spend more lol... Trust your tech damn it!

Anyhow, so I'm in search of finding a replacement printer for them, but want to make sure its a quality unit that networks well (Windows 2008 R2 print server), has good support (drivers) and will have a low per page cost on toner.

One that I found listed online that looks like it would do the job was the Brother HL-2270DW, any feedback on it? These printers just need to be black and white as they can print color to the big copier in the office, which is rare that they ever need color. So mono is fine, no ink jets, doesn't need scan features, ect.
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Re: Office Printers... Advice?

Fri Mar 02, 2012 8:37 pm

Getting Brother should actually save money, don't know what those guys are smoking.

Can't do lease, have to buy? I saw those larger Xerox ones that can double as a real copier and they look good. I would not buy but lease them though.
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bthylafh
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Re: Office Printers... Advice?

Fri Mar 02, 2012 8:53 pm

Yes, a Brother. Their network implementations suck less than HPs in my experience; our HPs are uniformly too stupid to renew their DHCP leases if the power comes back up before the network does after an out (don't have that problem with the Brothers), and their drivers don't suck quite so much.

Might be worth it to buy a model that's got a duplexer so they can print on both sides automatically & save paper.
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Re: Office Printers... Advice?

Sat Mar 03, 2012 12:08 am

Check out Samsung and Keocera.
 
Welch
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Re: Office Printers... Advice?

Sat Mar 03, 2012 3:34 am

Kyocera's are nice, I know the guy in town who is the only dealer for them. Unfortunately for a desk-top style printer similar to what I've listed, they run near 1 grandish. I'm sure they will pay off eventually, but there is no way I'm convincing my clients to spend that kind of cash when they want to put these smaller printers in each persons office. It was like pulling teeth today to explain why upgrading to Brothers would fix their problems and save them money, and I was trying to get them to just buy 3 of them (99.99 a piece), she only wanted to get 1 :O!

Anyhow, I noticed a hell of a lot of bad reviews about what look like Quality control issues on the model I listed above, anyone have any feedback on this model or say another? This model looks to take 250 pages of paper, which is alright but I was hoping for one that would maybe hold more.
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Re: Office Printers... Advice?

Mon Mar 05, 2012 8:41 am

I have a non-networked variant of that brother printer - it's the best printer I've owned. Toner seems to last forever.
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Welch
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Re: Office Printers... Advice?

Mon Mar 05, 2012 8:55 am

Good to know, I was a bit worried about the horrible reviews some people made about it not working so great.... But again like I keep running into, lots of those bad reviews end up not materializing into any issues at all for me.
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spitfire650
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Re: Office Printers... Advice?

Mon Mar 05, 2012 9:50 pm

Honestly, any laser printer that costs $99 is probably cheaply made and will have a lot of bad reviews, it's basically a throw-away model at that price (and intended for light home use). If I were you I'd get one myself and test it out before selling it to anyone. You'd probably just be replacing bad with bad, though. If you really want quality, you'll probably need to pay a bit more.
 
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Re: Office Printers... Advice?

Mon Mar 05, 2012 10:07 pm

spitfire650 wrote:
Honestly, any laser printer that costs $99 is probably cheaply made and will have a lot of bad reviews, it's basically a throw-away model at that price (and intended for light home use). If I were you I'd get one myself and test it out before selling it to anyone. You'd probably just be replacing bad with bad, though. If you really want quality, you'll probably need to pay a bit more.

At work we've got a trio of HP LaserJet 1022s for the field staff and I can't say enough good about them. One has a full-on hard-shell travel case but the other two go from job to job in their original boxes and have never once fussed at anything. Toner life isn't the greatest but surely beats portable ink-jet (still have one holdout who believes the job entitles him to color printing). We've had them for roughly 3 years or so without a single problem and they crank out pages far in excess of their modest duty cycle specs. Google says they're $139.99. Windows-only, though, as they're host-based printers (i.e. the computer's CPU does all the work).
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bthylafh
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Re: Office Printers... Advice?

Mon Mar 05, 2012 11:04 pm

1022s are good hardware, but their drivers suck hardcore. I've had several of them on WinXP and Win7 that will get some job or another stuck and the only fix is to kill the spooler service and then delete the spool file from c:\windows\system32\spool\printers\ , then restart the spooler and hope the user doesn't try to print that same document.

It used to be safe to say that if an HP printer supported PCL6 or PostScript you were likely golden from a driver standpoint (certainly true of my old 2550L), but even this is no longer true: the CP1525 doesn't seem to have a plain old "use the Windows Add Printer wizard to attach this" driver anymore; now you have to use their poxy proprietary installer to make it work, even with a network-attached one.
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Scrotos
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Re: Office Printers... Advice?

Wed Dec 26, 2012 1:42 pm

Sorry for the thread necro, I'm lookin' at printer threads to give a recommendation for my dad for a home printer and it's hard for me to recommend what I have at home since it's a workgroup printer I got fer free.

ANYWAY, I just wanted to post about the 1022n. We had one at work for a while and it was a decent little guy. The one caveat I recall was that the browser interface stopped working for Internet Explorer. You had to use Firefox (maybe something else, didn't try) as IE gave something like a 401 error or something.

All the printers we run here go through a Win2K8 R2 print server and deploy to the clients pretty easily using the HP Universal Print Driver (v5.2). XP and Win7 clients. I don't know that there's any special difference between "HP Universal Print Driver" and the one that has (v5.2) in the name, but whatever we installed 2 years ago is what we're usin'.

We used to have more issues with our HP fleet (currently: P2055dn, P4015x, P4515x, CP3525n, CM3530fs, 4250tn, CP4005dn, used and removed: 8150n, 9000dn, 1022n, 1200, 4000tn, 4050tn, 4, 4+, color 2600n, color 2605dn, color 4600dn, color 4700dtn, non-HP: Xerox DocuPrint N4525CN, Brother MFC-8460n, Printronix P5210, Printek FormsPro 4503, some old Tally 6000-series linefeed monsters, MFPs: Xerox WC 7665, Savin 8025, Savin 9050, Savin C6055, Savin C9020, some old Konica 7000-series that was a total pile) when running our print server on Novell Netware 6.5 as some of the color print jobs would get huge and get stuck spooling and we'd have to jack around with the spooler process. In the past, before Netware, apparently we ran Win2K or WinNT 4 and the print spooler stank and we'd have to manually mess with that all the time (it was before my time), but I haven't had any issues with the HP print driver or Windows spooler in the last 2 years.

YMMV I guess.

As an aside about the P2055dn printers, we have 5 of them and I haven't had any issues reported for printing. We ran QuickBooks 2009 and recently upgraded to 2012. We keep the firmware updated to the latest on all our printers so perhaps that was related? I have also heard from various managed print providers that the P2055dn is decent but the P2030 and other P20xx models that aren't the 55 use a different print engine, use different toner, and have reliability issues. I don't know that that would extend to the driver, but there ya go.

I, uh, I wouldn't necessarily take Intuit's tech support or anything they say as gospel, but that's just my opinion. I know this is far too late to be of any use to Welch's post but am just posting it for anyone lookin' in the future.
Last edited by Scrotos on Wed Dec 26, 2012 2:19 pm, edited 1 time in total.
 
lilbuddhaman
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Re: Office Printers... Advice?

Wed Dec 26, 2012 1:47 pm

I know it isn't what you're looking for but our office switched to a Xerox 7530 Workcentre and it's been pretty damn good. It's one of those color-lasers with very expensive toners though.
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Scrotos
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Re: Office Printers... Advice?

Wed Dec 26, 2012 2:13 pm

We gots a Xerox WorkCentre 7665 with a finisher and it's a right workhorse. Xerox used to be pretty expensive a few years ago but it seems like they are finally getting to price parity with their competitors. We have several Savin MFPs (Ricoh print engine, they power Lanier and Gestetner and probably other brands) and I'm a fan of their UI and setup. We're looking to refresh our Savin MFPs and I am leaning towards getting the same brand for that reason, though I'm also looking at Konica and Canon and Xerox machines as well.

Those larger MFPs are way out of the usage/price range for the OP, though, as you already mentioned. Most larger MFPs are designed to be accompanied by a multi-year maintenance/toner contract wherein you pay per page/impression on a monthly basis and the toner is "free".

A potentially important consideration is who you get for service and maintenance. If you really hate the people servicing your Xerox and that's the only Xerox authorized dealer in the state besides going to Xerox corporate direct, you're stuck. Same with any other vendor. That's another reason I'm leaning towards the Ricoh-based stuff since I know there are several dealers here and I can switch after our maintenance contract is up if need be. Then again, we outright buy equipment, not lease it, so we have more flexibility in that regard. If you're leasing, you're boned anyway.

That's also why we standardized on HP for our regular printer fleet. EVERYONE services HPs. We've had vendors try to sell us on Canon or Xerox or Konica or whoever to replace them, but what happens if we dump that vendor? Who ELSE is going to try to maintain a Canon fleet? Our options would be limited or we'd be forced to refresh our printer fleet to a supported brand. I know there is some hate from home users on HP and some driver angst, but I guess we've been lucky. I run a 4350n at home with default Win7 drivers and it works fine, not using that universal print driver stuff there. I've had to try to maintain some wireless-based HP inkjet MFPs on Windows and Mac and it was a huge pain in the butt. I stay away from inkjet and wireless for home printer recommendations. Ethernet, static IP, DONE.

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