TopBanana

Are they still stupidly expensive to run? Need to replace a rubbish multifunction thingy.

D16GER

Not as bad as they once were. You can pick them up from as little as £100. Problem is the toners will set you back around the same again each time.

Saying that though, you will get around 2k pages before needing toners.

I bought a Canon LBP 5000 in January for £150. As part of a promotion, Canon supplied a 2nd set of free toners, so I got 2 full sets with it, which should last me a long time.

David Lock

I got a Samsung 500 Series when they came out.

AVOID these like the proverbial. If I could have lifted the bloody thing it would be in my pond by now. Need a mortgage for toners and they break down.

If you find a decent alternative let me know. dl

mannyo

We use a Samsung CLP300 at home. The reason we went colour laser was the constant buying of ink cartridges for our old inkjet printer. Yes the toner can be expensive, in our case Staples sell a pack which contains all the colours for £99. The original toners are still in the printer and going strong 9 months later, so as yet we have not even opened the pack. We have saved a fortune in cartridge replacement as well. Drivers are available for XP, Vista and Vista 64.

pimmo2000

iTrader: (6)

23/8/05 I bought mine and its still working and printing no issues !

£100 for printer 2500l HP and £125 for the toners ! Love it !

mart360

Textronic phaser 550N

double sided thermal laser printer.


got 3 of them along with a cuboard full of inks.

enough black sticks to last a lifetime & 3 full fuser kits.


total cost to me


£0





Mart

pimmo2000

iTrader: (6)

I was going to post a picture of a lorry being hijacked ! But on searching I found this and gave up

http://www.broombroom.com/funstuff/c..._naturists.gif

Also
A man is enjoying a drive along an amazing, bendy, country road...
when a woman dressed in tweed driving an old muddy 4x4 comes hurtling round a corner.
He moves over to avoid her, but as she passes she leans out the window and screams "PIG!"
Astonished, the man turns and yells back, "STUCK-UP BITCH!"
As he rounds the bend he crashes into a pig.

Shark Man

What you need to keep an eye on is consumable costs: Especially drums/fusers/photocondutors and their rated lifespan.

We run three colour lasers: 1 x Epson C1100 and 2 x Epson CX11NF (they are the same printer, and all use the same toner/photoconductors, just the other two have a scanner plonked on top).So far its looking favourable, by FAR cheaper in running costs that any inkjet.


We've had the two for just about 6 months now (bought the third last month) and the most used one has just racked up 21,000 pages (about 900 of which are colour) and needed a new photo conductor a few weeks before, its on its 2nd black toner (high capacity) and is still on the factory colour toners (which are supplied half empty).

I have a spreadsheet keeping track of things: Black toner is about £40 (high capacity), Colours are about £65 (for high capacity toner) and photoconductor is about £120..., may sound pricey, but I tallied up the actual running costs at a 0.9 pence per page (not including electricity or paper ) Estimated running costs were about 1.3p black and 7p colour per page, so its not far off at all.


Pros: Fast black printing, cheap to run (mostly used in draft/toner save mode). Good quality prints in Colour/Normal Mono modes.

Cons: Big, Not the easiest to load the toner, not the quietest, colour isn't that quick printing (acceptable though). 30second warm up (goes into standby after 30mins -adjustable though), and it recaliabrates after 50odd pages which is annoying if your printing 52 pages and have to wait 2mins for the last two pages.

Drivers can be a bit glitchy: The C1100 needs to be set as black (mono) mode otherwise it'll treat a mono document as a colour one (and hence take five times longer to print, and needlessly wears out the photoconductor ). Also page size defaults need to be configured from letter to A4 (or bypassed) otherwise it waits for you to press a button to print (or waits 10 seconds).


Other than that, good printer(s) for lots of black, with the odd colour documents thrown in as and when needed.

Beware of the CX21N though...it may look the same and seem cheaper than a CX11N. But it uses different catridges...which are more expensive!

And while I'm on here: DO NOT buy your toner from any high street store. That is if your aim for having a laser is to reduce running costs: Better prices can be had shopping on-line.

Just realised my costs don't include VAT, so add 17.5% for personal use

mart360

what are you on pimmo?


how does naked naturists have anything to do with printers


Mart

spectrum48k

Pimmo smokes his crack pipe around 8.30pm

pimmo2000

iTrader: (6)

lol .. I dunno

TopBanana

Thanks all... well nearly all! Very useful. Looks like they're pretty affordable now.

Shark Man the CX11NF looks ideal. I'd be using it over the network. Do you know if the scanner works when connected this way? Are there decent drivers available?

The Chief

Being a small company we have been printing our own flyers and catalogues for years now. About 4 years ago my old fella bought a printer and it stood him at 16 grand, kept breaking down and was really expensive on parts and toner. it has been sat there for the last year as we now use an OKI is really cheap and the quality is superb.

having boaught Epson, HP, Canon, we now swear by Oki.

Shark Man

I've been happy with them so far. The only gripes is the seemingly constant low toner warnings (yets it last for ages) and the cartridges are a bit fiddly to replace (need to wriggle them about before the locking lever will latch over).

It does do network scanning (Plus multiple documents to a single PDF as well ). But its something we don't use often. But I can say it works well from the PC end (i.e run the scanning software on the destination PC.), software is stright forward and simple. There is a "push" scan facility to send documents from the printer to network PCs, but I haven't used it yet, might try it later Tried the OCR once, it was pants!

Drivers for the CX11NF are better than the C1100. There is Vista x64 and Xp x64 support (need to download them though). Generally quite straight forward Draft/best/colour/mono affair. The supplied install disks work with vista 32bit (there seems to be two identical install disks supplied, don't know why, I just used the one). You just pop it in click the required options, and leave for 5mins to do the rest.

The only thing that doesn't work in vista x64 (or XP x64) is the utility that configures the quick-dial phone numbers for the fax. Seeing its usually a one-time job. It just needs to be set it up on a computer that's not running x64.

Manual is on pdf, not the best, but the info is there - when you can find it.


The only annoying thing is the software does warn you that the toner is low VERY prematurely (i.e it usually chugs along for another 4000 odd pages before it actually does run out). But you can set it so it doesn't warn you.

We looked at Oki - it was our second choice, but it was more expensive to buy and when we checked consumable prices, it worked out at being more pricey with fewer outets selling the full range needed (the model we looked at had four drums, fuser unit, transfer belt AND the four toners as replaceable comsumables - made cost calculating a bit tricky ) so calculated running costs did appear slighty higher, prices change though, so that may not be the case now. Nail in the coffin was we wanted a stand-alone printer that took the same consumables (so we don't need to stock as much).

The advantage though is the Oki is much faster at colour prints. And having multiple image drums, its probably better suited for continunal colour use. Where the Epson is better suited for mostly mono work with the need for the odd colour document every now and again (as colour work does reduce the drum(photoconductor) life quite considerably on the Epson.

I'd say this is quite an accurate review of the CX11N (same machine, just doesn't have the auto document feeder): Epson AcuLaser CX11N - Multi-Function-Device - TrustedReviews

(also has a few other comparable printers, like the OKi C3530 MFP which we also looked at ).

TopBanana

Thanks Shark Man for taking the time to write such a useful reply!

I'm running Vista 64 on one of my machines, so it's good to know about the drivers. Scan to PDF is a very useful feature for me.... think I'm going to order one!

Shark Man

No worries - slow friday

Tried to push scan from it. Didn't work (no computers listed on the display to send the document to). Think it needs to be setup or file sharing needs to be configured or something, so that side of things isn't plug and play.