Cheap Color Laser Printer

CougTek

CougTek

Hairy Aussie
Joined
Jan 21, 2002
Messages
8,729
Location
Québec, Québec
I have the choice between a Brother HL-4040CDN and an HP LaserJet CP1215. The brother is 10$ dearer than the HP, which is a non-issue. The Brother has several more features than the HP (duplexer, twice the sheet load capacity, prints directs from USB, higher speed and claimed printing quality), but HP has a strong reliability reputation according to many people I now. On the other hand, I know personally a certified Brother technician, so support would be easy.

Cartridge last longer for the Brother, but overall, the powder cost is roughly the same. The Brother has the possibility to use high yield cartridges instead, in case I need a higher printing volume.

Both wipe a much cheaper Samsung CLP-310, I'm sure. I use one lowly Samsung monochrome (xx-1610) and I'm not impressed at all with their printer, especially the printing quality which pales compared to an equally cheap Brother HL-2140.

Which one would you get?
 
The duplexer sells it and the high capacity toner seals the deal.

I've had less problems with Brother 2940s than some of the other departmental printers I have to put up with.
 
The brother. But I'm still not sold on color laser printers. Most color stuff I want to print is photo oriented, so I get it printed. I'm still a fan of good monochrome laser and printing photos through a service or drugstore.
 
The purpose of the printer isn't photography printing. I'll use it to give a profesional look for my invoices and for printing advertisement brochures. Serious business use serious printers. At least, that's the idea...
 
And thanks for the feedback. I guess the answer was too obvious so I was looking for the catch 22. If you tell me there isn't, then I would be a moron not to choose the Brother.
 
HP has the longest standing reputation, but ask yourself when was the last time their products stood out from the competition. I think it has been many years.
 
ddrueding said:
HP has the longest standing reputation
Click to expand...

For what exactly? Most bloated drivers, worst support for different OS, most appalling customer service?

How about slowest printing? Warmed up, the first black page takes at least 24 seconds. On HP's own info page for this model, the very first user review says:
"We are a small cat hospital and wanted to use this printer at the front desk. It is horribly slow and I have to stand there waiting around for it to print the clients invoice. There is always a small picture of the cat on the invoice which is why I wanted a color one-but this slow is crazy-I'm switching back to our HP2200d work horse!"

It's also host-based, so forget about printing from Linux etc. One quarter of the print resolution. And it comes with 'starter' cartridges with unstated capacity. Given the replacement ones are 2200 pages black and 1400 pages color, I shudder to think how many pages you'd get out of the starter carts.
 
HP made some real workhorses in the day but I certainly haven't been a fan of their drivers. The laserjet 4 and 5 were real tanks and I am still using a color laserjet 5 from 1997.

Tell you what coug, I want a photo printer so you can have my CLJ5 for free but you have to drive the 5 hours to get it. Needs a drum and black to be in good shape again but for something like this vintage that sets you back like $50 on ebay.
 
We have a HP 4240N (B&W) at work and it's a pile. It's got a page count of like 25k pages and the fuser already seems to be shot (despite being rated for 200k pages). There are "echoes" down the pages mostly on the left and right edges of the prints from toner sticking to the fuser and not being transferred completely to the page. I've done the printer cleaning page thing many times, which gets some toner off the fuser, but the next print out of the printer will have the same problem.
 
Thinking about what my customers have, all the HP printers are either more than 10 years old (lots of 4500Ns and Laserjet 3s and 4s), or they were bought, used and scrapped.

I've been advising my customers to look at workcenter-type copy machines from Canon or Kyocera or Minolta if they have serious printing needs. The consumables are much cheaper, and if the copiers are leased they have a service contract associated with them.

Workgroup printers are still hard to deal with. Right now I don't know what to recommend. Last time I talked to a printer service guy he was telling me Lexmark has actually gotten good. I find that really hard to believe, but maybe the standards for everything else have gotten low enough that Lexmark looks better by comparison.
 
Tannin hates all things HP. Or Santillia and Maxtor. Or me and Western Digital. Or me and S*ny. Or me and nVidia.
 
My favorite HPs are the Deskjet 550C into the 900s, and the LaserJet 4-5. Those are the printers that got them where they are, I just don't think they have done anything good since.
 
For home printers we use the OfficeJets as I like having the scan & copy capabilities. Don't really care about FAXing. We don't print a huge amount (probably under 10 pages a week on average) and the HP inks don't dry if not used frequently (I had problems with Epson & Canon ink drying out in the past). They're even adequate on photo paper - my wife's more than mine - although I'm sure other printers are better. The scan/copy function in mine has a document feeder which has been quite nice.

They work for our needs right now, although should one of them die I'll probably go with some form of color laser to replace it. I'll keep one multifunction around, though, since as I mentioned we do scan & copy things on occasion.

Since we don't go through tons of ink the cost isn't that much of a factor. Also, I turn in empty cartridges to OfficeMax for a $3 credit.

Having a multifunction, I scan in rebate forms & receipts to my PC. Should I have to dispute the claim I'll print it out then. No reason to waste the paper & ink if not necessary.
 
The Epson inkjet tanks have chips. I can't image how it would be without them.
 
How do you know the status of the cartridge/tank? Is the printer psychic? Do you wait until one of 8 tanks is out and ruining expensive, time consuming prints? Sorry, I just don't see any better alternatives.
 
I suppose it depends on the size of your prints, but I'm certain that not having chips would open the gates to 3rd party ink suppliers, which would drop their cost massively.

And why can't the printer know how much of a certain kind of ink has been used since the cartridge was put in?
 
MaxBurn said:
Tell you what coug, I want a photo printer so you can have my CLJ5 for free but you have to drive the 5 hours to get it.
Click to expand...
Someday, I hope I will make the five hours trip, but not for the printer. Right now, working too many hours a week, wasting a day's work to get a used printer, no matter how good it might be, isn't rational. New Hampshire's close enough to Boston so I'm sure a meeting with both you and Handruin will be possible one day in the future, but it won't happen because of a printer.

I completly forgot about the bloated HP drivers, although they shouldn't be that bad for LaserJet printer as they are for inkjets. I use a 1100 at work too and it's ok. Much better than the crappy Samsung.
 
LunarMist said:
How do you know the status of the cartridge/tank? Is the printer psychic? Do you wait until one of 8 tanks is out and ruining expensive, time consuming prints? Sorry, I just don't see any better alternatives.
Click to expand...
The chip doesn't have anything to do with knowing how much ink is in the tank. The printer has those sensors and as I understand it they're optical. The chip is there so Epson can prevent you from refilling the tank, or from using a 3rd party tank.
 
It was more of a joke, I wouldn't make the trip for that either.

On a side note the drivers for those old HP tanks are built into windows but you need the PS option card as they dropped other support starting with Vista. Drivers are very light weight, have nothing to do with HP and just do what you expect.

Didn't I read about some sort of lawsuit about chipped consumables being an anti compete no no? Would have been over a year ago.

At any rate the last cheap knockoff black toner I got turned out more of a dark gray than black, there are reasons to go with genuine stuff.
 
HP OfficeJet 6000:

"IT Professional" Drivers: 11MB.
"Full" Drivers: 204MB. And the total time to install (from a local file) on a 2.2GHz C2D is about 20 minutes.

For a fucking Printer.
 
Nice. That must have a whole bundle of shit no one wants too, is there even an option to not install that extra stuff?
 
I installed the Brother HL-4040CDN this evening. The text is resonnably sharp, but the colors are awefully soft. Even when I configure it to print in bright colors, everything looks like it came out of a pastel shop. I bought this printer to add punch to my publications and that's its weakest point.

I'm midly disapointed.
 
Perhaps we misunderstood what you were printing, does it include photographic images?

Found this in an Amazon review:

the colors printed are not going to be exactly what you envisioned, a graphic of a nice red stop sign is going to more of a pastel, maybe even purplish, a green will be muddy, the only primary color that will be close is yellow. I know this is a product of CMYK printing, but keep this is mind if you're doing brochures.

It's probably worth trying to tweak the driver further. Maybe even contact Brother for advice?
 
I'll try tweaking. The box is opened and the printer is now used (5 pages old), so I have to keep it. There must be a way to "fix" the colors to add some punch. Our old Lexmark C510 is much better in that regard and I thought the Brother would equal it.

On the good side, it is fast. A full page photo took less than 21 seconds to come out. The old Lexmark takes close to a minute to do the same. My neighbor has a higher-end Lexmark C532 and it is much slower too. Nothing to complain regarding the printing speed.
 
Back to this again, new record slow print time on my old CLJ5 was 26 minutes for a one page visio network diagram.

What do you guys think about this:
http://kmbs.konicaminolta.us/content/products/models/magicolor1650en.html?info=Features

Seems to have the features I am looking for like postscript and duplexing. Haven't found anyone really griping about it in searching actually found a couple saying the color was pretty good and it seems to go for around $230 ish. I wish I could get one local.
 
Specs-wise that looks nice.

I wish they'd give us a cost per page metric we could work from.

I've stuck with Brother for "decent" printers. I kind of hate their web site, but their printers have been largely trouble-free. Nobody complains about color, which I mostly take to mean that no one using one actually cares about it.

My local Walmart has a Canon multifunction inkjet printer with 802.11 and duplexing on sale for $60. That's absolutely jaw-dropping.
 
Well mine didn't have one and i guess if I am going to consider inkjet I should hang on through the end of the week.
 
HP printers

I've had a HP Laserjet 6Lxi since the mid/late 90's. I've gone through maybe seven toner cartridges over the years (last 2 refurb/re-filled originals) and it's still going strong.

AFAIK HP laser printer quality seems to be inversely proportional to the size of its driver.
 
snowhiker said:
AFAIK HP laser printer quality seems to be inversely proportional to the size of its driver.
Click to expand...

I can't fault that statement, there hasn't been a driver you could download for my printer for the last two msft operating systems.
 
My HP LJ 6xi is about 11 years old. Print is just fine; I don't print much. Probably 4th or 5th cartridge. But the paper pick up & feed problems are really bad. I feed one page at a time. Now even that is becoming an issue where it keeps trying to suck the page in but half the time can't. HP got sued some 7 years ago for this problem and shipped a correction kit (cardboard) that could be user installed, which I have.

Have to ditch this printer soon. Wondering if color is the way to go. Certainly don't want inkjet.
 
I've only had two main printers in my life. both were expensive printers in their day. The first was a LJIII which died when a circuit board failed. I replaced it with my current main printer, a LJ5 that I bought new which was made Jan 15th, 1996. I bought used a duplexer, 500 sheet paper tray, and a JetDirect network card off ebay when I saw them cheap. Like the energizer bunny -- it keeps going and going and going even the accessories. The only work done on it so far was a roller kit about 6 years ago and a massive toner cleanup from a bad HP toner cartridge that inconveniently dumped its load a few years back. You can't imagine how angry I was at HP when I thought one of their cartridges had killed my printer (about as angry as I have ever gotten)...

I'm a big believer in these old LJ's. They are big and heavy for they were built to last unlike most of the modern ones. New ones are much faster and yes you can get color but for the most part I just don't see the need to go beyond what I have. I have the feeling that this one is going to outlast me.
 
Yeah those beasts are primarily why I was looking for another laser, but it occurs to me the stuff of today likely doesn't stand up like the my old LJIII, LJ5 and this CLJ5. Mubs, on your feed problem you might want to look at the rubber rollers etc, likely the rubber and cork they use to grip paper is dried and hard as plastic now. I could put another drum and good toner in mine and make it print really well but you can't fix slow, close to a half hour print time is just unacceptable.

Right now I am eyeballing the Canon MG5220 at walmart for $99 and I hear really good things about canon and their printer support on consumerist. Has duplexing and individual ink tanks. Don't really care for having a scanner built in though. I kind of like kodak for their ink prices and again they have treated my parents well on support and exchanges several times.
 
mubs said:
My HP LJ 6xi is about 11 years old. Print is just fine; I don't print much. Probably 4th or 5th cartridge. But the paper pick up & feed problems are really bad. I feed one page at a time. Now even that is becoming an issue where it keeps trying to suck the page in but half the time can't. HP got sued some 7 years ago for this problem and shipped a correction kit (cardboard) that could be user installed, which I have.

Have to ditch this printer soon. Wondering if color is the way to go. Certainly don't want inkjet.
Click to expand...

Rollers age and wear out! Try getting a roller kit from Printer Works. They tend to be relatively inexpensive (less than $50) and are very likely to make your pickup and feeding problems disappear. They include instructions but you'll still have to have some minimal mechanical skill to replace the rollers.
 
MaxBurn said:
Yeah those beasts are primarily why I was looking for another laser, but it occurs to me the stuff of today likely doesn't stand up like the my old LJIII, LJ5 and this CLJ5. Mubs, on your feed problem you might want to look at the rubber rollers etc, likely the rubber and cork they use to grip paper is dried and hard as plastic now. I could put another drum and good toner in mine and make it print really well but you can't fix slow, close to a half hour print time is just unacceptable.

Right now I am eyeballing the Canon MG5220 at walmart for $99 and I hear really good things about canon and their printer support on consumerist. Has duplexing and individual ink tanks. Don't really care for having a scanner built in though. I kind of like kodak for their ink prices and again they have treated my parents well on support and exchanges several times.
Click to expand...

All Inkjet printers are considered totally disposable printers by me. I actually seriously consider replacing the printer rather than replace the cartridges when they run out of ink.
 
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