Scorpio, Happily Mac'd, Seeks Printing Nirvana

[ka8ncr]

Just ending a four year relationship with a Brother HL-5250DN. It was wonderful, but it's time for another $70 toner cartridge and even though the drum assembly shows 50% life, crappy toner cartridge construction has caused irreparable blotching on paper. The drum assembly is the price of a new printer.

I live in a monochrome printing world. I need fast, full-duplex printing and while the Brother printers have been remarkably reliable and affordable, their paper trays and feeding quite honestly, suck. Why give me a tray that will fit 2/3rds of a full ream of 20 lb. paper when really all it can work with is a hundred pages?

My choices are to get another Brother and run it hard for another 4 years and replace, or invest a little more for a long-term relationship. The reviews on comparable HPs have been rather tepid.

So Island brothers and sisters, please tell me what you use and what you like.

[kf0rt]

I've used HP printers forever, but think the next one might be something else. Use a Photosmart 8250 now; had it for a few years. It has a well-known problem where it falsely detects "no paper." The fix for that is a $20 kit from HP that includes a CD and a piece of plastic with a section of sandpaper on it. You insert the plastic in the paper feed tray and run the program on the CD. I guess it scuffs something up in the printer gizzards (tech talk). Fixes the problem. This thing uses 6 cartridges and all of the color cartridges are tiny (but "only" $10 a pop). If you do much color at all, they go fast. My real complaint though, is all the self-maintenance it does. I don't print that much, but if I try to use it after it's been sitting for a week or two, it goes through maintenance that takes FOREVER. It's also a total nag when it's running out of ink. There's a "running out" threshold and an "I ain't printing" threshold. If you're between the two on ANY cartridge, you have to push a button on the printer so that IT knows that YOU know you're running out of ink. PITA -- With 6 cartridges, one of them is almost always running out.

Other than the paper feed problem, it's been real reliable. It's just not very "I don't wanna think about it" user-friendly.

Printers seem to have entered the "disposable" category about 5 years ago, unless you're doing something exotic.

[K7SGJ]

We have a Brother monochrome laser and an HP ink jet. The Brother gets the snot beat out of it with alot of every day draft and invoice printing, and has held up well. The HP is used more for high quality bw and color printing. Both are wireless, and about 2-3 years old. We have had a number of HP color printers over the years, and never had one fail. The typical HP print quality follows technology and gets a little better, and the base price a little less as time goes by. I was refilling the HP ink carts so the price per page to print wasn't much different from the Brother. At this point, the biggest difference is print speed, and the laser will obviously run rings around the ink jet. If I had to pick one, it would most likely be the laser since we don't use or need the color printer much any more. If I ever do get another color printer, it would be a high quality photo printer, but I doubt that will happen any time soon.

[ka8ncr]

There's a pretty sweet HP we use at work, but it's also $700 and I can't imagine the XYL permitting such a generous budget.

I was over at a few stores today, poking about. The HP color lasers are compelling, but thankfully I took the Mac and used it to try out some of the typical PDFs I print. FOUR minutes for a two-sided color page. Uhm, maybe not color.

The newer Brother printers do have better paper handling, and they're cheaper than a new drum. The current Brother is rated 23 pages per minute, the one I looked at today does 35. Plus it has WIFI built into it and I already know how well it works on Bonjour. The HPs do fairly well too on that though.

[W4RLR]

HP Officejet 6500 wireless, which is on my home network. It prints, it copies, it faxes, it scans. It's only $150 at Staples. Since I got this one, all of the rest of the printers here don't get used.

[kd8dey]

I have a Brother MFC-420cn hooked into my wireless router. Constantly need to re seat the cartridges. cartridges not that big so they dont last long....PITA

Probably be nice to have a laser printer to use with multisim and make printed circuit boards BUT dont think I would want to spend that much.

[N2NH]

I like HP a lot too. I had a 6500 series and it was $130 a year and a half ago at Office Max. Great copies at a fraction of what it cost me with my Lexmark but it also copied, faxed and scanned with WiFi. It held a lot of paper, rarely jammed and had a jumbo sized ink cartridge for Black and White. I have to add an honorable mention for my friends Canon, it looks just like an office printer. Also in the same class but with enough buttons to go to Warp 8 (sorry knob fans, no knobs).

[NQ6U]

I got tired of buying ink cartridges for my old Epson C-80 so when it went dry a few months ago, I just let it sit. I found that I hardly missed it at all but the XYL likes to print out online coupons so today I broke down and bought a cheap Brother HL-2140 laser printer along with a spare toner cartridge. Total price for printer and extra 2500-page cartridge (the printer comes with a "starter cartridge" that's good for only about 250 pages) was a little over $100--about $25 more than it would have cost to replace all the ink cartridges in the Epson. The Brother has gotten good user reviews and it will be only lightly used here so it seemed like a good deal. Add in the fact that Epson no longer supplies an OS X 10.6 version the necessary software utility to check the cartridge ink levels (meaning I don't even know which one is empty anymore) and it becomes a no-brainer.

[W3MIV]

For color either HP or Epson; B&W, definitely HP laser.

It really IS that simple.

[w6tmi]

A bit pricey but the Xerox Phaser line does some good color (known for color accuracy in pre-press printing a few years back) and duplexing works well.

Mine's the Phaser 6350DP not sure what the current iteration is.