Laser printer suggestions

[Khali]

I have been asked for a recommendation for a all in one, color, laser printer. Its been a couple of years since I even looked at buying a printer so I have no idea what to recommend. I personally have a monochrome, all in one, laser printer and it wasn't cheap at the time. The problem is you can't just pick a brand of printer and stick with it. Printer quality varies from one model to another. So I figured I would ask for ideas here.

The main uses of this printer will be monochrome and color printing of news letters and such for a senior citizens group. It will also be heavily used as a copier. Since they are on a budget they would like the best they can get for the money. Before any one suggests they can get a ink jet way cheaper, that option has been ruled out. They want a laser printer with no liquid ink. For what they spent on ink the last two years they could have bought a new ink jet printer every four months. Plus the last two printers had issues with the ink cartridges leaking all over the inside of the printers.

[Captain Ned]

I have a Brother HL-3045CN and am very happy with the print output. There's also an on-line trick for defeating the page counters in the toner carts so you can run them to exhaustion instead of throwing away perfectly good toner. It's a stand-alone printer, but I've got to believe Brother has an AIO using the same guts.

Looks like this is the one: Brother MFC-9125CN. Color, AIO, and networked. Uses the same carts as my 3045 so I'm guessing it's the same guts. Also, $100 off until 3/11/13 so it's just $279.99

[Khali]

I just came across this Brother LED printer. From what I am reading it looks like LED is the way to go since it has less moving parts than a laser printer. Okidata and Brother are the only two manufactures I can find with LED printers and the Okidata models are expensive.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16828113696

[Khali]

Looks like I should refresh my screen before posting. Funny we both ended up with the same printer.

[druidcent]

I've got a Samsung color AIO laser printer from the Egg for about $180... It's a little slow, but I use it more for scanning than printing anyway.. I forgot the model number, but it's worked well so far.

[Arvald]

Brother I found expensive on supplies (had to do with they have you replace the drum more often.

Samsung is nice and reasonable on supplies I have a CLP-325W currently as my main printer.

Cannot comment on multifunctions as I won't touch them again and find that the laser ones are overpriced

[druidcent]

That's the model number... CLP-3185...

Keep an eye out on various etailers and you can find one for a decent price..

[Scrotos]

IF you want to go HP for some reason, we use one of these and it's decent:

http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm ... html?dnr=1

If you don't care about fax, this is the model without the fax card:

http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm ... html?dnr=1

It ain't cheap and HP isn't really known for all-in-one machines, but this one is ok. I'm sure it's old now so maybe that means you can get a cheap refurb or something. A plus is that you can upgrade the RAM for pretty cheap and enable the built-in hard drive to do automatic secure wipes between jobs.

This may or may not be a feature you care about, though.

[Khali]

From what I took away from the conversations with my friends, all they really need is the printer and copier functions. No need for fax at all. Finding a printer that just prints and copies would be nice but most combo's have the fax added in.

Since this group is made up of of people in their late 60's and up most of them don't even have computers. So, to get the newsletters out they have to resort to printing them and then snail mail. Other wise this would be easy to deal with via email.

I got a laugh out of the fact that one member of this group is 89 and still uses a old dial telephone. Refuses to get a touch tone phone. How she deals with phone calls to places that want you to hit 1 for this and 2 for that is beyond me. She says that phone has done what its supposed to for the last 50 years and she sees no point in getting rid of it.

[Captain Ned]

I got a laugh out of the fact that one member of this group is 89 and still uses a old dial telephone. Refuses to get a touch tone phone. How she deals with phone calls to places that want you to hit 1 for this and 2 for that is beyond me. She says that phone has done what its supposed to for the last 50 years and she sees no point in getting rid of it.

Ahem:



Bought it off eBay 4 months ago or so.

[Khali]

LOL, I like it. I can do you one better, I have a old crank phone hanging on the wall. It still works, I can talk on it, just cant dial out since there is no dial at all. Just the crank generator that would send a signal out to get the local operators attention. Not that standing there holding the speaker part to my ear makes for a comfortable conversation beyond a minute or two. Have to get a picture of it to post.

[UberGerbil]

Not to take this thread totally off topic but

LOL, I like it. I can do you one better, I have a old crank phone hanging on the wall. It still works, I can talk on it, just cant dial out since there is no dial at all. Just the crank generator that would send a signal out to get the local operators attention. Not that standing there holding the speaker part to my ear makes for a comfortable conversation beyond a minute or two. Have to get a picture of it to post.

You should build an mITX PC inside it and use it for Skype calls.

[GTVic]

Just got a HP LaserJet M451DW, duplex, wireless, ethernet, color from NCIX for $410 plus I found a $5 shipping coupon. Still on sale and you should be able to google the coupon.
$240 in savings with this deal.

I had an older Brother, 3040 I think, but the cost to replace the toner was over $400 plus it made a high pitched mosquito whine in sleep mode, very slow start up between print jobs and noisy and no duplex except an automated manual method (print even pages, flip over and print odd). Also a clicking sound in one of the rollers. Their PDF USB stick printing does not work on anything but the smallest PDFs.

[MarkG509]

LOL, I like it. I can do you one better, I have a old crank phone hanging on the wall. It still works, I can talk on it, just cant dial out since there is no dial at all. .

I have seen small hand-held tone generators with keypads that you hold up to the phone and press the buttons to generate the touch-tones. I also had a friend long ago that had perfect pitch and could (though with a fairly high error rate) generate the tones by voice (at least, until his voice finished changing).

[auxy]

Sooo, since you got your printer suggestion, let me hijack your thread. ＼( ｀.∀´)／

I'm looking for a laser printer too, for my parents who print webpages all the time to read in the bed or while sitting in a comfy chair. They both dislike reading things off of electronic screens, even e-ink.

Key qualities in descending order of importance:

• low price
• high efficiency (in terms of cent per page for toner/drum)
• sharp black & white print quality (no color necessary)
• wired network
• rapid print speed

Anybody have any ideas? (｡◕‿◕｡)

[JohnC]

Sooo, since you got your printer suggestion, let me hijack your thread. ＼( ｀.∀´)／

I'm looking for a laser printer too, for my parents who print webpages all the time to read in the bed or while sitting in a comfy chair. They both dislike reading things off of electronic screens, even e-ink.

Key qualities in descending order of importance:

• low price
• high efficiency (in terms of cent per page for toner/drum)
• sharp black & white print quality (no color necessary)
• wired network
• rapid print speed

Anybody have any ideas? (｡◕‿◕｡)

http://www.brother.com Choose whatever suits you. HL2270DW is cheapest one, with duplexing+WiFi, though not very cost-efficient if you print a lot. For high printing volumes the 5450DN or 6180DW would be a better choice. Amazon often has best prices for them all. All of these have wired network jacks.

[auxy]

http://www.brother.com :wink: Choose whatever suits you. HL2270DW is cheapest one, with duplexing+WiFi, though not very cost-efficient if you print a lot. For high printing volumes the 5450DN or 6180DW would be a better choice. Amazon often has best prices for them all. All of these have wired network jacks.

Hmmh. The HL-5450DN looks nice -- just $135 on Amazon -- but the toner cartridges are outrageous! $125! For 3,000 pages, that comes out to around $0.25 a page. Ouch! ヘ（。□°）ヘ

I see there's a "TN750 compatible" toner cartridge for just $30... (¬_¬) I know refilled inkjet cartridges are really bad because they can screw up the print head, but it doesn't seem like that kind of thing would be a danger for laser printers. Are those off-brand toner cartridges really okay?

[JohnC]

http://www.brother.com Choose whatever suits you. HL2270DW is cheapest one, with duplexing+WiFi, though not very cost-efficient if you print a lot. For high printing volumes the 5450DN or 6180DW would be a better choice. Amazon often has best prices for them all. All of these have wired network jacks.

Hmmh. The HL-5450DN looks nice -- just $135 on Amazon -- but the toner cartridges are outrageous! $125! For 3,000 pages, that comes out to around $0.25 a page. Ouch! ヘ（。□°）ヘ

I see there's a "TN750 compatible" toner cartridge for just $30... (¬_¬) I know refilled inkjet cartridges are really bad because they can screw up the print head, but it doesn't seem like that kind of thing would be a danger for laser printers. Are those off-brand toner cartridges really okay?

Huh? TN750 cartridge for 8,000 pages is about $120 for a genuine thing... Sometimes less, when it goes on sale:
http://www.jr.com/brother/pe/BRT_TN750/ <---Out of stock for now.

[auxy]

Huh? TN750 cartridge for 8,000 pages is about $120 for a genuine thing... Sometimes less, when it goes on sale:
http://www.jr.com/brother/pe/BRT_TN750/ <---Out of stock for now.

Ohh? On the Brother site it says the TN750 is 3,000 pages. I got the $125 figure from Amazon (well, $124.99).

[JohnC]

Huh? TN750 cartridge for 8,000 pages is about $120 for a genuine thing... Sometimes less, when it goes on sale:
http://www.jr.com/brother/pe/BRT_TN750/ <---Out of stock for now.

Ohh? On the Brother site it says the TN750 is 3,000 pages. I got the $125 figure from Amazon (well, $124.99).

No, it says 8000 pages:
http://www.brother-usa.com/Printer/Mode ... UPWoIy9KK0
Anyways, just wait for a sale - these things often get price reductions. I would not recommend non-genuine cartridges - it's like playing a roulette, you might get a good one or you might get one with very little toner inside, or with toner "sticking" together into a hard "rock" (shaking it might not help), or an improperly plugged cartridge which may start spewing the toner all over the insides of teh printer, or with a bad toner quality which may not "fuse" to teh paper properly, etc.

[auxy]

No, it says 8000 pages:
http://www.brother-usa.com/Printer/Mode ... UPWoIy9KK0 :wink:

Oh, I see! The TN720 is what I was looking at. Why did they make it a 2 and a 5? I'm not especially dyslexic, but that just makes it all the easier to confuse them. Stupid Brother! (*￣m￣)

Let's see, 8000 pages for $120 ... about 66 pages per dollar ... about 1.5 cents per page. Not bad! (also I totally flubbed my math in the other post. I'm such a failure as an Asian! (/□＼*)・゜)