We need a new printer at our law firm. It should be commercial-quality, not home quality – something we could use to print up color brochures in-house – and possibly one of the new printer-scanner combinations. Any suggestions?
Will this be dedicated to color work, and you’ve got other printers dedicated to regular black and white printing?
Reason I ask is I’ve worked in law firms, and they take paper consumption to a new level. You don’t want to be running nuts and bolts stuff like answers and interrogatories on a color printer - that would waste a huge amount of time and money.
Looks like color laser all-in-ones are selling for $600-900 now. It’s mainly a question of whether you prefer HP or Brother, and if you want a document feeder and if you want it to plug into the network so everyone can use it or if it’s tethered to one person’s PC.
No, we want to do it all on the same printer. (It’s a small office.)
What’s the prospective volume of printing? Of both black & white and colour. How much scanning are you actually going to do? How big do the prints / scans need to be.
Ordinarily, I would strongly suggest going for two printers. A high-volume black & white and a lower volume colour. You can always put one on a higher shelf than the other. For high-volume offices, I would recommend a Xerox Document Centre / Workcentre - which will also replace your photocopier.
Oh yes, are there any confidentiality issues? Like you can’t have printouts lying around? If so, you need a printer with mailboxes.
Hello. Sorry for the hijack but I’m just checking in to thank you, BrainGlutton, for NOT titling this thread: “Please recommend me an office printer”.
Man I hate that.
Printer with mailboxes?
Is it ungrammatical? “Please hand me that piano” would be grammatical.
It’s a confidentiality thing - the printer stores print jobs and only prints them when you walk up and punch in your code. Unless your printer is located in the building lobby, it’s probably not a feature you need.
I strongly suggest you re-think the “one printer for both color and b&w” plan.
Two big reasons:
As a general rule, color printers are slowwwww, and black and white printers are fast. Do you really want a senior partner standing there, tapping their foot while the printer is slowly putting out pages? We’re talking minutes per page, vs pages per minute speed differences here.
Color printers are also a lot more expensive to run. On a pages per cartridge basis, my color laser printer will cost anywhere from twice as much per page to eight times as much per page to print, vs the black-only laser printer. You’d probably save enough in the first year to pay for buying two printers.
For the record, my friend does IT for a very small firm (3 lawyers) and they have 3 printers - the big expensive behemoth leased jobby that prints out the 500-page docs, a B&W laser and a little cheapy inkjet that is for quick print-offs.
Nobody ever got fired for getting one of these two brands. For feature comparison, a site like tigerdirect will show what’s available from multiple companies along with fairly comprehensive features and specifications.
Reading your question, you already have a good B&W laser, just need the color sometimes? Along with color copy, scan-to-fax, and scan-to-email? If you are replacing all needs, go with a separate high speed B&W laser AND a good color MFC Laser as mentioned in posts above.
You’ll need a high capacity document feeder for the scan/fax/copy function. Duplex also required along with network connections. Don’t fall for “manual” duplexing. Means you have to flip over/reshuffle/deal with jams. Auto duplex is the only way to go. Minimum paper capacities should be at least two trays; one with 500 sheets and the other at least with 250.
Looks like a good selection in the $500 to $1000 range. Page duty cycles, access to replacement toners and supplies should also influence your decision. Don’t scrimp. A good deal isn’t when the machine is dead.