I’m going to buy a laser printer this afternoon. Help me decide which one to get! Tell me about your laser printer, and why you love it or hate it. I’m particularly interested in a printer able to handle glossy photo-quality paper, because I know some of them are not designed to use thick paper. Other important qualities are price, how much space it takes on the desk, and how expensive the ink is and how often you have to replace it.
The very-low-end HP printers are awful. Avoid. I really liked the HP 1320s, but they’ve been replaced and the replacements aren’t as good.
Laser printers take toner, not ink.
Be very careful with colour laser printers: some of them (HP for one) use colour toner to enhance the black unless you explicitly tell the printer to print monochrome.
Unlike inkjet printers, laser printers don’t dry out, so you might want to consider buying two printers, not one: one monochrome, and one for colour printing.
I assume you are looking at B&W printers. In my opinion, Brother printers are the best value right now. I have an 8840DN and love it. More current models have built-in wireless, which I guess is an advantage. I have my printer on a wired leg of my router. Works great as a scanner as well.
If you are looking for color, that gets more complicated. Tektronics makes good printers, but any color printer is going to be expensive. Useful if you can afford it though.
I agree. The color vs B/W difference is a significant factor with laser printers.
I did not know as Quartz points out that HP uses colo(u)r toner even when printing B/W.
Seems a bit… rapacious to me considering their market position.
Uh, this is a quality issue, not a toner revenue generation one: the total amount of toner used is going to be the same in either case: multiple layers of toner generally don’t adhere to paper well and will flake off (try printing a document twice sometime (on the same piece of paper, so you get a double-thick toner layer)).
Assuming they really are doing this (my HP laser doesn’t, so far as I can tell), I’m sure it’s to get richer blacks (inkjets often use the same trick, as well as it’s inverse: something called “black generation”, where you replace some of the cyan, magenta, and yellow with black) to get better color.
Ditto rbroome. I have a Brother HL-5250DN and it is very nice, even prints on both sides, one sheet at a time so a multipage document lands ready for stapling or reading. It also has several more condensed modes that put multiple source pages on each page of target paper, including arranged so you can fold it into a book. Price was not bad, either.
Yet another vote for Brother. HL 1440 in my case, reported to do 3000 page prints with one cartridge, is still going with the original one.
Speaking of color, I have found that I don’t need it unless there are specific works for it, so then I use an old Epson color printer. Unless you need to print all your work in color, I would recommend a B&W laser printer for regular prints, for color pictures and documents a cheap ink jet or go to Walgreens.
I’ve had good luck buying older HP’s (like the 1320’s), often used, from Craigslist. They are cheap, work fine (better than some new ones), and work reliably.
Then when you need color, buy a better-quality color printer, or take your photos to one of the online photo-printing chains.
Yet another for Brother. I have a cheap monochrome Brother laser hear and it’s been providing rock-solid light duty printing for 6 years now. Any ink jets would have dried up in that time.
I equipped a client of mine with a Brother color laser printer, and they use it to turn out 100 menus and signs every day and have had it in service for a year so far. They used to go through several ink jet printers a year - the paper feed would crap out. I convinced them to spend the money and they got a multi-function unit. They love the fax software, and have not had to print any of the spam faxes.