Printers, any that you can depend on?

PeaKr

Gawd
Joined
Sep 6, 2004
Messages
960
What do you have to do to get a decent laser printer. I've recommended brother laserjet printers for years but they are total garbage these days. 200$ plus and your lucky to get a year out of it before you have problems. One customer has gone through 3 in the last year and a half using brother toners even. Customer support is useless. I'm not buying Brother any more.
 
It doesn't really help, since it's no longer made. But I have a Dell 2810. It's close to 4 years old now and still going strong. Was probably a $200 or so printer at the time. Unfortunately, I don't think Dell is making anything like an entry level black and white laser printer any longer. Maybe Lexmark?

I agree about Brothers. I've always been under the impression that they only last about as long as the toner cartridge included with them.
 
I've had good luck with HP lasers. I haven't bought one recently though. Had an HP 4500DN Color Laser that was bought new in 99 and I ended up scrapping a few years back.
It still worked perfectly and I had an extra toner set but it was just so large and took so long to warm up from a cold start, about 15 minutes.

This was the last time I used it, printed a bunch of flyers for our Pontiac Car Club's Annual Car Show.
hp-4500-1.jpg


I have a compact HP laser that I use occasionally, it's probably 10 years old now.
 
I've been rocking Epsons over the last 9 years. I'm on my second printer from them. The first one in a brownout.
 
I've been using a Brother HL2070-n since about 2007 or so. I've gone through a couple of toner cartridges and thousands upon thousands of pages printed from it and the only problem I've ever had was a crappy generic toner cartridge from Amazon. Switched to Monoprice for toner cartridges and haven't had an issue since.

By the way, I paid $70 for the printer back then and even got free shipping. By far the best printer purchase I ever made.
 
Ya some of the old HP's and Brothers were bulletproof, just not the case anymore, especially if you need aio. I think you need to spend upwards of 1K to get something with any kind of durability for soho.

If you search online, sites recommend crap like this as the best of 2019 then you goto amazon and see these reviews. This unit costs 650$, 31% say its garbage.

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The brand doesn't matter much, canon, hp, brohter, dell all have 20-30% 1-star ratings for ~700$
 
Modern printers are so bad that I won't recommend any to customers anymore. I will give them specs required and contact info for the local Applied Imaging branch.
 
brother HL-L5*** series has been bullet proof for our school div. but the consumer ones suck ass.
HPs are ok, epsons are ok. oki ones seem good though, have a few of those in one school, never have issues.
 
Why buy brand new? There are plenty of older printers out there you can get that are both rock-solid and inexpensive. About 6 years ago I bought an HP LaserJet 4100 dtn withput NIC that had a bad fuser. I got it for $50 shipped on eBay and also picked up an inexpensive maintenance kit for it, which replaced all the rollers and the fuser. A $5 JetDirect NIC for it and I have had a super reliable printer ever since. Heck, nothing in the kit required any tools to install - even the fuser had plastic locking tabs holding it in... My wife prints her college school books on it, and toner for it is very cheap (~$50 for a decent 10,000 page cartridge).

I also picked up a Color LaserJet 4700dn locally for $200 and the only thing I've needed to buy for that are supplies. Note that cheap supplies for this printer are very hit or miss though (and even the cheap ones are kinda expensive). Still, the printer is fast and reliable.

These workstation printers tend to be very easy to maintain (and repair when necessary)
 
I've been very pleased with my Canon MF244dw laser. Going strong for almost 3 years. Not bad for $130.

IMG_20191220_135321.jpg
 
I appreciate all the suggestions. I'm basically looking for something I can recommend to home and soho users which means no used stuff unless you can still buy it new. I have an old HP from mid aughts that's still going strong.
 
I appreciate all the suggestions. I'm basically looking for something I can recommend to home and soho users which means no used stuff unless you can still buy it new. I have an old HP from mid aughts that's still going strong.

Sorry, dude. From my perspective they stopped making decent and reliable laser printers >10 years ago... Sure, they got CHEAPER (new ones now compared to new ones then, of course) but build quality seems to have really taken a dive, and toner cartridge capacities seem to have really shrunk for the most part as well.
 
+1 for HP Laser 4xxx, I have had a bunch at work that have put millions of pages through them
 
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