Colour laser printers

[Evening Star]

Really hacked off with the excessive drinking habits of my inkjet printer. Notice that colour laser printers are now a good price, but normal bewilderment at choice. Criteria include reasonably compact, Mac compatible and budget no more than say £175. Had mind one of the HP ones, especially as they are doing refillable toner cartridges. However, managed to destroy an early, very expensive, version at work once so a bit wary. Any recommendations?

[Bushfiva]

Depending on where you are, consider something like the Samsung CLP315, Brother HL4040 or a Xerox Phaser. Prices seem to be very variable: our QMS was actually free, with a contract to buy toner cartridges through the supplier, who also guaranteed to be cheaper than the two major office catalog suppliers.

The toner never dries out or clogs the heads, either. Check the price of the drum unit, if it ever needs replacing: on my B&W Samsung printer, the drum unit cost more than a new printer.

[Jofm5]

I have a samsung CLP 310N attached to my network, it is always on sleeping and any of my computers on the network can print to it without having to worry about anything being switched on.

I bought mine about 18 months ago for £126 when misco had it on offer - its about £160 now which could be to do with the pound vs the dollar now.

A word of warning when buying colour laser printers is they quote the pages per toner by xxx pages at y% coverage so on average say cyan will last 3000 pages at 5% coverage per page. This is quoted for the refills you buy and not for the toner cartridges you get with the pack. If you look close most will offer only half capacity toners that actually come with the printer (if indeed they do come with any at all - which most do).

However saying all that, I am still on the original set of toners I bought got with the printer, I dont print much just my weekly invoices and the odd bits here and there and still going strong (about half full according to the nice system tray utility you can install).

Setting it up on a network is not hard, best to put it in a static IP range or very high up in your DCP range - that can be sorted out easily enough if you buy one.

One other word of advice is make sure that the printer you buy has individual toner cartridges, some of the cheaper HP models have all the different toners in one big cartridge which means when you run out of any one of the four toners you have to replace the whole pack which is more expensive.

One nice thing is that as well as the samsung being small and quiet the toner cartridge for black is about twice the size than the others which makes sense as you will use black the most (most inkjets are like this but not all lasers are).

Another consideration is if you want to print photo's out, you will not achieve the same resolution as with an inkjet - but its not bad (I have not tried with laser photo paper yet).

And why I moved to laser was exactly as bushfiva said, you will not suffer from the drying out of the heads when the printer is little used - plus you can print one hell of alot quicker and quieter with a laser.

[amanoffewwords]

At work we were given a Brother HL-4040CN to try out - found that the toner cartridges didn't last that long (*) compared the HP CP-1215 we were also testing. The print quality when printing photographs was visibly grainy compared to the life-like and vivid prints from the HP (on standard A4 paper) . The HP was also faster both on 1st print out + output in general, the consumables are cheaper and it's a lot smaller than the Brother.

(*) Made the Brother toners last longer with the old masking tape trick - 6-9 weeks longer in fact - after the dead toner message came up.

[IcePaq]

If you leave inkjet printers on all day, they will use ink without having printed a single page.