Quiet PCL laser printer recommendations

[Tea]

Well, the old Hewlett-Packard 6L is getting troublesome. As ever with the 5L/6L models, it's the paper feed that's playing up. The fact that it's winter here and the paper tends to get a bit damp doesn't help. I'll take it down to the local printer guy and get him to have a play with it, but perhaps it's time to just replace the beast.

This one lives in the back office. I replaced the showroom 5L with a Fujitsu/Xerox P8EX about six months or a year ago. The Xerox is excellent in most respects - much faster than the 6L - but it makes a lot of noise. When you print, the fan spins up and stays running for some time after the print is finished. Plus it seems to start up all on its own every once in a while. Out the front, sitting two feet away from a 4-drive SCSI enclosure with a Cheetah Mark 1 in it, this is neither here nor there. But I tried a Xerox in the back office for a while and wasn't happy with it. The noise bugged me.

So: the new unit, if I buy a new unit, must be:

1: quiet at idle. (A reasonable while-printing sound is OK though.) (Essential.)

2: True PCL. I absolutely and positively will not consider a GDI shitbox. If you can't run it off an HP 4L/5L/6L/4MP (etc) driver, it's not worth having on this multi-platform network.. (Essential.)

3: Good paper feed. The way the office is laid out, top-load is best, but I could live with tray-load provided that you can at least put a good big stack of paper in and just forget about it for a while.

4: As fast as the 6L or faster. (I can't imagine that there is a laser printer made today that isn't faster than a 6L.) Speed is nice but not that important.

5: Sensible running costs. Not too fussed about this, anywhere in the ballpark is just fine.

6: Print resolution is immaterial. As good as a 5L or better is just fine. It will only do text.

6: Good warranty. The Xerox 3 year one is great, but if I don't buy Xerox I guess I'll have to put up with the crappy 1 year that most of the others seem to offer.

7: Half-reasonable price. Not too fussed about this, but I don't want to just waste money. To give you an idea of the duty cycle, I get about 18 months out of a 6L toner cartridge. (The front one does about twice as much work.)

8: Prefer that it be any manufacturer except Hewlett-Packard. We have had major warranty service issues with HP lately; so bad, in fact, that we have sworn never to sell HP products again. Anyway, they charge too much for not enough printer.

Gentlemen, what do you suggest?

 

[Tea]

I forgot:

2a: Parallel interface. A direct network connection would do at a pinch, but it would mean a lot of messing about with recabling. I don't care if it has USB or not, but it needs to have a parallel port.

 

[Tea]

2c: Postscript would be OK instead of PCL.

 

[P5-133XL]

Get yourself a working used HP 4(+) or 5. On Ebay they go for a pittance.

 

[Mercutio]

Tea did say she wanted a quiet printer. HP LaserJet 4s are a lot of good things, but I wouldn't call 'em quiet. My personal opinion is that no printer is any good unless it's shaped like and built like a photocopier or an early-model LaserJet, but that's hardly anything to put on a desktop.

Thinking in terms of general impressions, Brother seems to make reasonably quiet laser printers. HP has a pretty nice midrange product, the 2200-series, that doesn't strike me as particularly loud. They retail around US$500 and do duplex printing, which is a personal must for me.

 

[Bartender]

Tea did say she wanted a quiet printer. HP LaserJet 4s are a lot of good things, but I wouldn't call 'em quiet. My personal opinion is that no printer is any good unless it's shaped like and built like a photocopier or an early-model LaserJet, but that's hardly anything to put on a desktop.

Interesting that you say that Mercutio. I look at printers and wish that they operated more like printing presses. This top load garbage doesn't cut the mustard, and this flip-over tray stuff sucks too. Has anyone heard of a reasonably straight path? Yes, I know, there is no room for that.

My LaserJet 4L works just fine for me. The noise? Not worth mentioning.

Nonetheless, I have had success selling Brother laser printers. They warm up reasonably quick, produce an appropriate amount of noise for a brief period of time.

 

[Bartender]

BUCK! You've been using my login again! Drunken fool. Tea was right, all you do is fall off the bar stool, drag yourself back up for another drink!

 

[Buck]

BUCK! You've been using my login again! Drunken fool. Tea was right, all you do is fall off the bar stool, drag yourself back up for another drink!

pffft! I'll use what I want.

Whatever you do Tea, please stick with laser printers. P5 has a great suggestion regarding used systems.

 

[time]

You may recall that I swear by Kyocera. Still built like a tank (or photocopier, as Mercutio suggests).

You need an FS-1010.

Although it's a toy compared to this 50ppm monster:

1: quiet at idle. (A reasonable while-printing sound is OK though.) (Essential.) Noise while printing is subdued, the most obvious parts being motor whirring and a couple of little 'clanks'. After printing, the fan does indeed spin for a while, but I had to put my ear up to it to hear the faint hum.

2: True PCL. I absolutely and positively will not consider a GDI shitbox. If you can't run it off an HP 4L/5L/6L/4MP (etc) driver, it's not worth having on this multi-platform network.. (Essential.) Standard emulations include PCL6, Diablo 630, IBM proprinter X24E, Epson LQ850 and Postscript Level 2.

3: Good paper feed. The way the office is laid out, top-load is best, but I could live with tray-load provided that you can at least put a good big stack of paper in and just forget about it for a while. Trust me, cassette (drawer) load is the only way to go in a damp environment. 250 sheets standard and the outtray on top holds 150. Exceptionally small footprint as a result, BTW.

4: As fast as the 6L or faster. (I can't imagine that there is a laser printer made today that isn't faster than a 6L.) Speed is nice but not that important. 14ppm and a 200MHz Power PC CPU to handle the graphics you don't need.

5: Sensible running costs. Not too fussed about this, anywhere in the ballpark is just fine. The high volume models are unbeatable here, but this baby one is only slightly better than average at about AU1.6c per page (plus markup and GST).

6: Print resolution is immaterial. As good as a 5L or better is just fine. It will only do text. 600 real dpi.

6: Good warranty. The Xerox 3 year one is great, but if I don't buy Xerox I guess I'll have to put up with the crappy 1 year that most of the others seem to offer. 3 years, no worries. The bigger models have onsite included.

7: Half-reasonable price. Not too fussed about this, but I don't want to just waste money. To give you an idea of the duty cycle, I get about 18 months out of a 6L toner cartridge. (The front one does about twice as much work.) My buy is AU$552 plus GST. Cartridges are good for 6000 pages.

8: Prefer that it be any manufacturer except Hewlett-Packard. We have had major warranty service issues with HP lately; so bad, in fact, that we have sworn never to sell HP products again. Anyway, they charge too much for not enough printer. I agree. There are service agents everywhere for Kyocera thanks to the Mita connection.

 

[LiamC]

Brother 1200/1400 series. I bought a Brother 1270N to replace a GDI shitbox . The 1270N has a 10/100 NIC and parallel port. The 1270N has been superseded by the 1470N

1200 x 1200 (I find 600 x 600 more than adequate)
works with Linux and HP drivers so it might even run under/with OS/2
Postscript & PCL 6.0
can be upgraded with standard SIMM's (not proprietary)
silent when idle. Fan doesn't stay on for very long
only has a tray load ~ 100/150 sheets I'm afraid.
Cheapish (for this type of printer)

worth checking out.

 

[Pradeep]

I second the Kyocera FS-1010. Fantastic value for money, and very quiet when idle (goes into a sleep mode after a while).

 

[Tea]

Hmmm.. I already have some second-hand Hewlett-Packards. Though I guess something like a 4MP would do the trick.

But, damn it, the Kyocera sounds just about spot-on. Now I'm hoping that the HP really is incurable. I think I'll just order a 1010 anyway. I think it's time I did something extravagent to cheer Tannin up. He seems grumpy lately.

Thanks Time, Pradeep, and all.

 

[James]

I might be too late, but I'll also throw in a positive vote for the Brother low end printers.

I wasn't a Brother fan - they used to be good, but went downhill bigtime for a number of years - but these printers have singlehandedly restored my faith in the brand. That's saying something.

 

[Pradeep]

But, damn it, the Kyocera sounds just about spot-on. Now I'm hoping that the HP really is incurable. I think I'll just order a 1010 anyway. I think it's time I did something extravagent to cheer Tannin up. He seems grumpy lately.

From something I remember reading in The Inquirer or similar, the page feed problem in the 6P is due to the pad wearing away or some crap like that, and HP were providing free replacements? Or maybe that was the HP 1100 or somesuch.

 

[Tea]

I doubt that HP would be providing free replacements for a five year old printer, Pradeep! Hell, as I posted at length in another thread a while ago, HP can't even provide proper service on their brand new products. I think it must be the 1100 that your memory applies to.

PS: Someone please tell Tannin that I ordered the Kyocera 1010 on his account (and ... er ... with his money). Maybe that will cheer him up and encourage him to come back here and chat a little. He seems a bit withdrawn lately. I wouldn't actually go so far as to say that I miss him, but I'm getting a bit tired of having to do everything on my own.I don't think he like the cold weather either.

 

[Tea]

James, I went through a moderate yen for Brother lasers a while back, after I got tired of Hewlett-Packard. We sold perhaps a dozen of their then-current entry-level model, an 8PPM thing if I remember correctly, and found it to be perfectly OK. Can't remember if it was quiet or not. I think we had to get warranty service on two or three of them, which was not bad but not great.

Out of a similar number of the Zerox lasers (P8ex or some such) we have had just one need service - a paper feed problem - although we have observed that their driver software is a bit weird. Sometimes, for no particular reason that I am aware of, you get "printer not responding" error mesages under Windows half way through a print job. I haven't worked out what the exact problem is, but if you swap the driver for the other one (they come with two different drivers), and play with the port settings in the BIOS they seem to come good. Only happens with some machines, Don't know why. My own is attached to the network via an OS/2 workstation, thinks it's an HP Laserjet 4 or somesuch, and has never missed a beat.

 

[i]

I doubt that HP would be providing free replacements for a five year old printer, Pradeep!

True. However, you can get a new pickup roller (assuming that's what you need) for your HP LaserJet 6L by visiting here:

http://partsurfer.hp.com/

It shouldn't cost more than about $20 Australian, and they are trivial to replace.

You haven't done anything drastic and thrown the printer out, have you?

 

[i]

*sigh* I'm such a pack-rat. Just ignore me.

 

[Tea]

(Tea strikes pose, affects posh accent.)

(Ignores fact that her cool, haughty, hand on hip pose looks ridiculous on a four foot six ape.)

What are you saying? Me? Work on a printer? Darling, I don't do printers.

 

[Tannin]

Tea! I was just trying to be helpful. There is no need to be like that about it.

 

[Cliptin]

Out of a similar number of the Zerox lasers (P8ex or some such) we have had just one need service -

I just happen to run into a P8ex yesterday. I don't know how long the fans stays on but it was not quiet. I was slightly quieter than a Delta.

 

[Tea]

Yup. A bit quieter than a Delta. That's about right. I don't think it stays on for all that long. I'm a little over-sensitive to it because when we had the p8ex in the back office we also had a cheap auto printer switchbox which kept triggering the damn thing every ten minutes or so, even when there was nothing to print.

(Why have a switchbox and an extension parallel cable when both PCs are on a network? Because, for some reason entirely unknown to me, when I print a particular supplier's monthly pricelist - a really handy one with all sorts of odd-bod stuff you don't normally keep track of like dot matrix printers and specialised things - which comes really close to the outer margins, Excel prints just fine to a local printer and yet can't fit the thing into the margins and spits every second page out all-but blank when you print to the exact same printer with the exact same settings using the exact same driver if you are printing it over the network. I have no idea why this happens, or why it is only Excel that seems to have the problem. After spending a half-hour trying to sort it out, I figured it was easier to just use a 5m parallel cable and a switch box. The cheap one was hopeless. Then I spent $80 and got a good quality one, which works perfectly. And - damn it - before that I had a $25 cheap one that worked perfectly but I gave it to a customer who needed one in a hurry and the replacement cheap one was a problem so I wound up having sold the first one for $30, bought the second one for $25, threw it away and spent $80 to buy the third one. Total expense: $130, total revenue: $30. Grrrr.)

By the way, if you will all excuse me being on-topic for a tic, I daresay my local printer man will replace the appropriate wheels and pads on the 6L and restore it to its former glory. But, using only the poor excuse that I didn't want to limp by with only a single laser printer in the place, I ordered the Kyocera anyway.

(With my money, you tart!)

(Sorry Tannin. I couldn't help it. They wouldn't take imaginary money.)

(And you knew you were doing the wrong thing. You didn't even tell Kristi, you sneak. Just in case she said no.)

(Well she seems to be looking forward to it just as much as I am. She like new toys too.)

Anyway, we will find a home for the 6L somewhere when it comes back. Bound to be someone in the family that wants a laser printer. We could take it home, Tannin.

(We already have a 5L at home, Tea. We don't need a 6L. Anyway, we hardly ever use it.)

(That's because it doesn't work, Tannin.)

(Yeah. Paper feed gets stuck. Bloody Hewlett-Packards.)

 

[e_dawg]

I posted the same multi-feeding problem with my HP LJ 6L on SR. Apparently, the separation pad deteriorates after a couple years of use and needs to be replaced. Go here to get your free separation pad repair kit from HP:

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?docId=927

I see you are getting the Kyocera anyways, but for your customers, I recommend the Samsung line of laser printers. You like their hard drives so much, so you might want to take a flyer on their lasers. Their ML-1210 is an excellent low cost printer, based on presumably the same print engine as the Lexmark E-210. Unfortunately, I think this is a GDI printer, although it seems to work with Linux as well. Their ML-1450 is said to be a workgroup printer for a personal laser price. PCL6 support should give you full compatibility.

 

[time]

I looked at the Samsung printers a few months ago, and I just checked specs etc to catch up. They're quite popular with dealers, chiefly thanks to the good pricing, but also because they give less trouble than HP (but what doesn't?).

My view then and now is that despite what CNet et al say, their lower end models aren't particularly attractive, but they become quite interesting as the price increases. I think the 1650, for instance, is a terrific buy. Costs more than the HP 1200, but totally blows it away in every respect.

In Australia, the Samsung 1450 costs about AU$40 less than the Kyocera FS-1010, but running costs are nearly double, so break-even is only 3000 pages.

Although Samsung sometimes quotes 1200dpi, their German site gives the game away by qualifying it as "with SRT", or "Samsung Resolution Technology". Frankly, I suspect HP of playing the same game. In any case, 600dpi is more than adequate for anything except prepress.

The only real advantage I can see is that Samsung offers a 500-sheet input feeder as standard, compared to 250 for the Kyocera. I think I'd question the need for this given the expected duty cycle of such a printer. A second input tray, available as an option on both printers, would be more useful for most people. Still, it's nice to have. BTW, how many people realize that these numbers are usually quoted for 60gsm paper, rather than the normal 80-85?

The advantages of the Kyocera include 16MB standard instead of 4MB, a 205MHz PowerPC processor instead of a 66MHz Jupiter3, Postscript, and three years warranty instead of one.

So given the price, the Samsung 1450 may be competitive, depending on your criteria. Although I'd like someone to explain to me why it needs a driver for DOS. :-?

The 1210, on the other hand, is a mere AU$100 or so cheaper than the 1450 over here. For that, you get running costs more than 50% higher than the 1450 (plus the starter cartridge is only good for an incredibly miserly 1000 pages!), horrible limited capacity near-vertical input and output trays, no USB, and maximum memory of only 8MB (pricelists here state 2MB is standard). If it was AU$100 cheaper again, then I'd be impressed.

While I'm bashing it, I'd like to ridicule the 12000 pages per month duty cycle that Samsung claims for it. That's five toner cartridge changes a month, folks, with a retention mechanism that's one of the flimsiest around. You'd also have to refill the paper up to six times a day. Ludicrous.

 

[e_dawg]

Ah, well researched, time. Case closed. Kyocera it is for you Aussies We don't get them over here (at least I have never seen them in my limited travels), so I never knew they were so competitive -- certainly didn't expect them to outcompete Samsung on features per dollar. Do you know if they sell them on this side of the pond under some different name?

 

[Tea]

Well expressed research indeed, Time. My Kyocera arrived a week or so ago, and we are very happy with it. To summarise in an impressionistic sort of way:

Speed to first page from full cold (i.e., on standby for 24 hours):
Fuji-Xerox p8ex: a noticable delay. Almost 30 seconds to complete page.
Kocera 1010: A much shorter delay, about 12 seconds.

Speed to first page from idle (i.e., a a few seconds after previous page):
Xerox: About 12 seconds.
Kocera: About 6 seconds.

Speed (subsequent pages):
Xerox: Rated at 8PPM, actually better than this, at least on the simple business douuments I use it for
Kyocera: Rated at 14PPM and I don't doubt it. Very impressive.

Paper tray:
Xerox: top-load, about 150 sheets. Very convenient, no problems at all so far.
Kyocera: tray-load, about 200 sheets. Not so great, as in a cramped office it's difficult to find the space to slide the tray out. Still, a fairly generous sized tray helps.

Non-standard paper feed options:
Xerox: has some. I've never used them.
Kyocera: has more. Never used them either.Seems to allow an almost straight path if you are hand-feeding.

Documentation:
Xerox: very good.
Kyocera: fair.

Quirks:
Xerox: Some slight oddness with the drivers, which can be overcome without much difficulty.
Kyocera: Two: the cartridge retention mechanism floats around in a very flimsy-seeming way. Seems to work OK though, once you get used to it. Second, a really alarming one: when you first put the toner cartridge in, it sits with the error lights blinking and nothing on earth will make it do anything in the slightest useful. I messed about for 10 minutes removing the cartridge, putting it back in again, looking to see if I'd left some shipping material somewhere, and so on, and was all set to send it straight back on RMA until I found, buried in the fine print at the back of the manual, a notation that this is normal: you have to wait 15 minutes after you change the cartridge. Weird! What happens if you run out of ink half way through an urgent job and have to change the cartridge?

Noise (in use):
Xerox: a bit loud, but acceptable. Not as good as a 6L.
Kyocera: ditto.

Noise (standby)
Xerox: fan spins for quite a while (five or ten minutes?). It is noticable.
Kyocera: fan is very quiet, about the same as a 486 CPU fan, and spins for only about 1 minute. Excellent!

Drivers:
Xerox: fair. Windows drivers a little odd, USB requires an extra (supplied) driver.
Kyocera: Excellent. Comes with lots of utilities (which I haven't troubled to test out) and drivers on CD for everything - when you see a 2002 model product with out of the box OS/2 drivers, you can be confident that it will support your hardware and OS no matter what. (OK, I already had a more recent OS/2 driver, but what the hell - it was a great effort from Kyocera.)
Note that both printers use PCL, so drivers are really a non-issue in any case. If it runs PCL, you can use it on any computer I've ever seen. (OK, Tannin has seen older ones, but I haven't. I'm too young. )

Price:
Xerox: $350 x-tax
Kyocera: $559 x-tax

Running Costs:
I have no idea. The Xerox is still on its first cartridge and, having done six months or more on that one, is clearly in the ball park of the reasonable. And I doubt that Time would have recommended the Kyocera if it was not competitive.

Warranty:
Xerox: three years
Kyocera: three years

Summary:
Xerox: still unchallenged as the best value entry-level laser printer around. True PCL at a GDI price.
Kyocera: faster, quiter, probably more rugged (though there is nothing wrong with the Xerox in this regard that we know about). Best printer I have ever owned, and if you care about speed or silence, undoubtedly worth the extra.

Thanks Time. Very happy with it.

 

[Pradeep]

Based on my experience with the FS-1000, it came with a factory "starter" cartridge, the replacement ones you buy have twice the page capacity. I dunno if that's the same the FS-1010.

 

[time]

Pradeep, many printers come with "starter" cartridges, sometimes even workgroup ones. It's understandable if the standard cartridge is higher capacity than average. Manufacturers have to compete on purchase price and most people don't realize how weeny HP cartridges are. I singled out the Samsung 1210 for what must surely be a record: a mere 1000 pages, or just two reams of paper!

Good to hear the Kyocera fits, Tea. The looseness of the cartridge retention bothered me too, but I think we're just expecting a click or something. I'm as confused as you are about the 15 minute delay though. Can't you just switch it off and back on again?

With regard to running costs, I estimated 1.6c per page (AU$ excluding markup and tax). The first cartridge is rated at 3000 pages but the standard ones are 6000. I get rather more excited about the running costs of the workgroup models with their 20000 page cartridges. At 0.6c per page (so probably about 0.3c per page in US$), they're considerably cheaper to run than virtually anything else. 8)

 

[Pradeep]

Well not having to replace the developer drum till 150,000/300,000 pages does tend to keep the costs down

 

[Pradeep]

I had the 15 minute experience on first turn on too. It's standard. There was an add in sheet explaining not to panic.

 

[e_dawg]

Some interesting information I found... Lexmark is the OEM for the low cost Xerox and Samsung lasers.

For example, Tannin's beloved Xerox DocuPrint P8ex is a budget version of Lexmark's Optra E310 printer, much like the Samsung ML-5100A but with the optional PCL6 support.

The Xerox Phaser 3210 and Samsung ML-1250 are likewise deluxe PCL versions of the Lexmark E210, which is what Samsung rebadges as the ML-1210

 

[Cliptin]

How cheap would an old HP laserjet need to be to be worth purchasing? I have experience with the III, 4, 5 ,8000 ,8050 ,... but nothing older or less than workgroup size. The under $200US price for a personal laser looks appealing but I'm not sure it would be worth buying an old printer for that.

 

[P5-133XL]

My experiance is that the personal lasers are not generally a good deal when buying used. It is the workgroup lasers that seem to be indestructable. The III tends to be too slow nowdays. But the 4's and 5's can be had in the $200 range

 

[time]

I'd agree with Mark. The people with big smiles on their faces have usually picked up a heavier duty used printer. Apart from anything else, BTW, running costs are usually lower.

Good detective work, e_dawg. I wonder if it isn't Samsung that is the manufacturer, however?

Are the Lexmark versions any cheaper?

 

[e_dawg]

Yeah, the older, heavier duty printers never die and have lower operating costs, but if you don't want your printer to take up half your desk, you either have to get a bigger desk or a smaller printer.

I am fairly sure that Lexmark is the manufacturer, as they state on their quarterly reports that they develop all their own printer technology, manufacture all their own printers, and have OEM manufacturing contracts with Dell, IBM, Samsung, and 15 other companies.

From what I have seen, the Lexmark versions are slightly more expensive than Samsung. I don't know about Xerox, though. Samsung has been trying to break into the laser printer market and build market share using some aggressive pricing to that end. It is no coincidence that they offer some of the best values in the laser printer market in N.America. Unfortunately, Kyocera-Mita are not sold here.

 

[James]

My father was in the market for this sort of printer until I managed to find a site that has a hacked driver that supports 2000/XP for his Canon Multipass L60. Until then it looked like he would be stuck at Win98 until he changed printers - Canon really are a bunch of so-and-sos for not producing updated drivers, instead putting a statement on their web site that essentially says MS raised its standards for hardware and drivers in XP and 2000, and their piece of crap wasn't good enough to meet those new standards.

Say, does anyone have any ideas of how to get his Canon to run off his shiny new Accton residential gateway with print server? It seems like the dreadful applet that talks to the L60 doesn't like it when the printer isn't directly attached to LPT1.

While I'm into this, what are your thoughts on multifunctions in general? Any good ones? My father only needs B&W and would only consider laser. He receives few faxes, but prints a fair amount, and doesn't use the scanner. The attractive thing for him is that a multifunction unit takes up less room than a fax plus a printer and is a bit cheaper.

 

[James]

In case this thread gets used as a reference on an ongoing basis - like I just used it - I'll state for the record that at home we have an NEC Superscript 870 and a Lexmark 2420 with a network card. We're extremely happy with both. The Lexmark is blazingly fast and seemingly indestructible (we use it for large printouts, or if we need a few pages urgently before we run to a meeting!), and the NEC is solid and dependable, although the paper feed isn't perfect it's a great little printer.

I bought the Lexmark for AUD350 second hand. As has been mentioned before, there's a lot to be said in favour of getting second hand workgroup printers cheap, because you get great performance and dependability for a low price. Mine had only 79,000 pages on it which is tiny for a printer with a duty cycle of something like 100,000 pages a month.

 

[Tea]

James, please be more careful with your language. The correct term, as I'm sure you know, is "mulitdysfunctions".

 

[Tannin]

Just so, Tea. Horrible damn things. I've had the distasteful experience of dealing with a Brother and two or three Hewlett-Packards. The HPs in particular were as crabby as a three-year-old with severe sunburn, and not half so pretty.

They absolutely, positively refuse to run on any port other than LPT 1 (so if you want a colour printer too you are SOL), they throw hickey fits under Win 2000, especially if you don't have SP2 applied, they cost vastly more both to buy and to run than the equivalent seperate components, and if there is anything nice about them I haven't noticed it yet.

Much, much better to buy a good laser printer - that Kyocera 1010 that Time recommended to me is very nice - and a decent but cheap scaner - I suggest the Canon 670 or a similar model. For all their almighty crappiness in the printer arena, Canon make very nice little scanners - and so far they have been entirely trouble-free for us.

As for faxing, use the modem you already have. If you have a seperate fax line, then it's best to use a seperate modem as well. That way you can be on constant receive without any conflicts at all with your internet modem. Most people will be able to find or borrow a perfectly usable 33.6 modem kicking around the place somewhere. Remember that for faxing, the modem data speed is irrelevant - any modem from 2400 up will have standard 14.4 fax abilities. For software, other people can no doubt recommend something fancier. I use an OS/2 native one, of course, but I notice that our Soltek motherboards give away a free copy of Winfax Pro with every one. (Hard to beat that value.) And most modems come with rudimentary but usable fax software. The reason that most people find it difficult and don't use it is that they keep tripping over their data connection. Once you go to two lines and seperate modems, it's a breeze.

End result is you have a real printer that just works. You have a real scanner that works too. You have an excellent fax facility. And if you want to photocopy the odd thing, the scanner and laser printer combination is every bit as usable as one of those multidysfuction things. Not as good as a real stand-alone copier, of course, but a decent copier is $2000 or so.

 

[Pradeep]

Do they even make multifunktions using laser tech? I was under the impression that they were all inkjet based, all the better to copy your colour photo in a record time of 30 mins!