The Last Of The Great Lasers

[Piyono]

My mom bought an HP LaserJet 4 in 1996. It cost damn near CAN$2000. It's running today like it did when we first set it up. It's needed repair once, but only because my sister dropped it. A workhorse if I've ever seen one.

We have a Color LaserJet 4600 which has been nothing but trouble from day one. It's slow. It streaks. It has terrible color reproduction. It's frickin' huge.

When friends need a black & white laser I still advise them to get a LJ4 and they buy one and they're happy they did. Trick is to find one with low mileage, which really isn't all that hard. I dare say this is the last really good printer HP ever manufactured.

 

[ddrueding]

Seconded. I deploy used LJ4s to the nastiest industrial sites. With regular cleaning, they never actually die.

The driver is also my default of choice, most stable ever. If all that is needed is B&W single-sided output, I usually don't even bother with other drivers.

 

[P5-133XL]

I'm sorry to disagree, but I think LJ 5's were actually an improvement. LJ 4's had a tendancy to c.u.r.l. (the periods are there so that I could use the word) pages, with specific brands of light weight paper, which was fixed with the LJ 4+ and 5: The paper feed assembly ran faster, so the paper stayed in contact with the fuser for less time and thereby didn't heat up as much.

P.S. Perhaps I'm biased because I have a LJ 5 built 1/15/1996 with a page count of 290,750. The only problem I've had was because of the page count: I had to install a roller kit because of worn rollers causing paper jams. It really is over due for a fuser assembly, but I'm not going to complain or even do anything about it till a problem creeps up.

I'm a big believer in getting used HP lasers, even if what you have to do is install a roller or maintance (includes a fuser) kit. For the reliability of an old laser, what you lose is the modern high speed. I've found, that for most, they really don't need the high speed ...

 

[ddrueding]

For the reliability of an old laser, what you lose is the modern high speed. I've found, that for most, they really don't need the high speed ...

For one workgroup, the speed was an issue. Not wanting to go with a full-blown copier-with-ethernet, I pooled some LJ4s

 

[P5-133XL]

For one workgroup, the speed was an issue. Not wanting to go with a full-blown copier-with-ethernet, I pooled some LJ4s

I really don't disagree that there are people that need the speed. I would just argue that most don't. Pooling is one speed solution, but that requires that the be enough space for multiple printers. Generally, multiple printers cost more to get the equivilent speed, but then you do get redundancy ...