In the past 7 or 8 years I’ve gone through darned near as many printers.
They’ve been both Lexmark,and Hp jets.
Now I’m about to "deep-six"my current LEX-510.
Is the laser printer a better machine that the jet type?
I refer,of course, to quality,longevity.ease of usage,sspeed etc…
it’s brain pickin’ time at the old 'puter 'corral.
HELP
EZ
I’ve been using and Epson Stylus Color 600 for about 12 years and it just started to have problems. I will probably buy another Epson.
Yes, yes, yes, and yes.
Okay, it’s not actually quite that simple. The quality is quite high, but color lasers are expensive. Longevity, they can’t be beat; the guts are made of steel, not plastic, and they’re very durable. Ease of use is about the same, I’d say. Speed varies, but for the printed word, a good laser printer will run neck-and-neck with a good photocopier. Pictures, as always, take a bit longer.
But think of all the headaches you’ll save! Toner never dries out if you don’t print anything for a while. You can print thousands of pages before you have to change toner cartridges. There are no print heads to align or special “ink level monitor” programs to install. A laser printer just sits there patiently and does its duty when called upon.
I’ve had my LaserJet 2100M for almost six years now, and I still haven’t replaced the original toner cartridge. Of course, I’m not a real heavy user, but still.
I agree with Max Torque. I have had my HP Laserjet for several years without changing the toner cartridge. I have retired my Epson Inkjet printer because it cost me too much to print pages.
I’m on my third laser printer. The first one, a Texas Instruments microLaser, lasted about 5 years until the internal motor that pushed the paper broke. I replaced it with an HP Laserjet 6MP, which still works fine - I gave it away a few months ago in favor of a new HP Color Laserjet 2550. I’ve loved them all. The text is much sharper on a laser copy than on an inkjet, and generally they are faster. I also like the fact that copies that have a lot of printing on them don’t come out wet or smear and don’t bleed if you get a drop of water on them. The color on my Laserjet can be a bit funky with photos, but spot color/solid color quality is terrific and really ‘pops’. I do have a large-format inkjet and an four-in-one inkjet I can print on if a photo on the laserjet doesn’t print it as well as I’d like. The four-in-one can take special photo ink cartridges but as of yet I’ve not tried that.
I am “The Printer Guy” at a large law firm. We’re an HP shop and most of the HP laserjets are built like tanks - they will last and last and last. I was just at the HP Core 100 conference last week and an amazing number of companies still have lots of old LaserJet II and III printers clanking along. Although we have almost no desktop printers those that exist include several LJ III and LJ 4 models, many many years old and still going. They’ll eventually die but it’s going to take some time.
HP has made some mediocre laser printers (the 5P and 6P come to mind, they are pretty flimsy IMHO) but overall the hardware is solid, speed, print quality and long-term value are very good. My HP inkjet on the other hand, was slower, the toner carts cost almost as much as the whole printer did, and they just kinda died early.
You can get an excellent b/w laser printer for a few hundred dollars and a color laser printer for not much more. I just picked up a LJ1320 for about $300 and it’s quite nice. The cost per page is much lower in the long run than inkjets.
As far as ease of use…all types are pretty simple to set up and hit “Print” with however it’s less bother to replace the toner cartridge on a laser and they are faster.
My thanks to all who responded to my plea for printer opinions.
your help was the push I needed------the ink jet machine is in the trash bin-there’s a new laser machine in my puter corner----------this octogenarian doffs nis hat to you!
EZ