Choosing a Personal Printer For the Long Haul 557
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?"
Samsung (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:hmmmm (Score:5, Interesting)
My solution (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Laser printers (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Samsung (Score:2, Interesting)
My Brother HL4040CDN color duplexing laser was only $224 shipped - not a lot more than a color inkjet and a couple of ink refills. Factor in how much cheaper toner is per page, and that toner doesn't dry out sitting there if you don't print, and in a few years I come out ahead. Plus the Brother prints both sides without fiddling with flipping paper around, which is a plus. Inkjet prints can be more vibrant than color laser, but frankly the laser's 'good enough'.
Unfortunatly the HL4040 series aren't PostScript compatible.
Re:Not a printer expert but.. (Score:3, Interesting)
you haven't seen the brother series have you? The HL series is pretty damn good.
False economy. (Score:2, Interesting)
No matter what sort of printer you buy, toner cost will quickly dwarf the cost of the printer. Don't worry about getting one that will last decades, focus on having cheap toner. This will pay off enough in the next few years to let you afford to buy a new printer every 3 years and still save money.
Yes you can, HP of today is not HP of the 1980s (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Not a printer expert but.. (Score:4, Interesting)
I really like my Kyocera FS-1010.
It's technically a workgroup printer, but it's small and sturdy and prints a LOT on a single cartage.
It has linux support, but I deliberately bought a networkable printer so I would never have to worry about OS compatability
Re:HP (Score:3, Interesting)
LJII's rock.
My father-in-law had one. During the Northridge quake, it fell off the table it was on, and onto the floor. We picked it up, plugged everything back in, and it Just Worked.
Re:Samsung (Score:3, Interesting)
We've had a Samsung ML-1210 laserprinter (back & white) for several years (more than 4, maybe 6) and it works just as well as ever. It got quite a lot of use for a home printer since my wife was in a web-based grad program for 4 of those years and had to print lots of stuff for that. The only feature I really miss is that it's not duplex.
It isn't PostScript, but on Windows and Mac the Samsung drivers work just fine, and on Linux it works with foomatic no problem. They do also provide drivers for it for Linux, and those are good, too.
If you decided to get color, you should check cost per page. It varies a lot across manufacturers.
NOT DENIED! (Score:3, Interesting)
No Linux support on any models? Unlike you I don't claim to have experience with all Brother models.
However I do have a network Brother printer (MFC 7820N) which I have been using for a long time exclusively under Linux. It worked out of the box in Debian (not your fancy latest Ubuntu). Brother does provide a custom driver which is better. When I was downloading it I happened to notice that there were Linux drivers for many other models. Perhaps you simply didn't see them. Ah, the scanner also works under Linux.
Don't get me wrong though - it is not perfect. The same printer is faster and more usable under Windows. But is also perfectly usable and reliable under Linux with no effort and I would buy it again if it broke.
Used LJ off ebay (Score:2, Interesting)
I bought a LaserJet 6MP, added RAM and the postscript SIM, total cost incl shipping was about $100. I have yet to exhaust the toner that it came with, and it works with everything I have (OSX, Linux, XP, Vista).
Re:HP (Score:1, Interesting)
Oh come on. you have to be getting paid to say that.
Theres no way a hp printer is the best anything. Other than the best waste of money.
HP PRINTERS ARE CRAP!
And that's being nice about it.
From the driver bundle that adds in a half dozen programs to your startup that you dont actually need. To the ink/toner carts that are weight for weight more expensive than gold. To the refusal to print when the ink/toner is lower than the 'reccomended level'. To the chipped refills that dont allow generic replacement use...
You are a shill. Theres no possible way anyone can objectively say HP makes the best printer anymore.
Re:hmmmm (Score:3, Interesting)
I try and not use the PS driver since it is incredibly slow if there are any pictures in the image and instead use PCL.