Laser printer for occasional use?

matrhos

matrhos

matrhos

Associate
Joined
24 Jun 2005
Posts
86
Location
sunny North Wales
I'm looking to replace my HP inkjet printer. I use it mainly for b&w text and the occasional colour page.

Trouble is, the printer can go weeks between uses at times and my current printer (and my last inkjet printer) clogs up.
I waste a lot of time and ink just to get the think working at times and it seems like I'm buying new cartridges far too often!

So will a colour laser solve this problem, or do they too like to be used daily? Anyone get a sub £250 colour laser they can recommend?
Thanks in advance...
 
£250 is the very top end of the budget. I have been considering a Dell one for £180 and I have seen a HP for £150 in Currys too.

My biggest concern is about how happy lasers are to be left unused for 2 or 3 weeks.
 
matrhos said:
My biggest concern is about how happy lasers are to be left unused for 2 or 3 weeks.
Click to expand...

Were I work our colour laser (mostly HP 3600s), will sit unused for 6 weeks over the summer. We don't any particular issues when the kids come back.

I don't have any experience with the cheaper HP kit, but the 3600s are ace. If you've not in a rush to buy keep an eye on the HP web site. They sometimes do cashback offers.
 
You are doing the right thing looking at a colour laser one of the biggest strengths of laser printers for home use is they do pretty much work first time even after not being used for ages.

Inkjets that do not get used very often as you have found can become very very expensive to run.

There are colour lasers around even the £100 mark and for occasional use they are perfectly adequate for most peeps.
 
got myself a samsung clp 315 from the shops for about 150 a couple months back. colour and runs a treat. it's not network ready though, but the one up from it, the clp 315n is. Not sure if the shop had that model though, not bothered personally :)
 
If you decide to go for a non colour printer and use your inkjet for the occasional page

Which would be the best value if you can stand having 2 printers in the room that is.

I use the brother 2030,
I use it every few weeks without a problem, the toner cartridge does 3000 pages

cheapest per page printer around and under £100
I highly recommend it for casual use
 
Last edited:
J.B said:
Thats a big budget, id go with the HP CP1515n
Networkable, and around 150 quid.
Click to expand...
Do you have experience from it?
It's on my current list for network colour laser printer with Xerox 6130 and Samsung CLP-350N.
(Xerox has nice clean software: only couple megabyte size PCL and PostScript printer drivers, for rest there's web server based interface)


bilston said:
got myself a samsung clp 315 from the shops for about 150 a couple months back. colour and runs a treat. it's not network ready though, but the one up from it, the clp 315n is.
Click to expand...
Network version is CLP-315W.
BS... err PR/marketing department slapped also IEEE802.11 aka WLAN to it.
 
Im interested in a networkable laser myself . . .

HP CP1515n
CLP-315W

Which one is the easiest/best to use in the fact that it works like a more expensive one (I have had bad experience with independant cheapy printer servers)
 
Chaos said:
Mind factor in toner costs as they usually cost a lot unless you can refill them.
Click to expand...

Toner costs are not the real problem nowadays since refill kits exists, the main problem is one of the other components (I think the drum iirc but I will have to check) if that goes (and they are classed as a consumable part) they can set you back over 100 quid to get replaced.

I find the best option with a colour inkjet is to simply remove the cartridges if you know it is not going to be used for a while and put the little sticky film back over the end of the cartridge to stop it drying out.
 
PhillyDee said:
HP CP1515n
CLP-315W

Which one is the easiest/best to use in the fact that it works like a more expensive one (I have had bad experience with independant cheapy printer servers)
Click to expand...
Hard to find reviews nowadays because Google&Co are interested only from giving commercial links but here are some.

Here's review of CP1518ni (CP1515 with added PictBridge compatibility and useless card reader incapable to to reading over 2GB = FAT32 formatted cards)
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2330954,00.asp


And reviews of CLP-315 I found while searching reviews of CLP-350
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2329122,00.asp
http://www.trustedreviews.com/printers/review/2008/09/16/Samsung-CLP-315-Colour-Laser-Printer/p1
315 has very small for laser printer, 1000 page colour cartridges (IIRC standard is 5% coverage so for graphics/photos drop one zero straight away) but at least they're also notably cheaper than 2000 page cartridges of CLP-350... which is more serious printer with PCL and PostScript support but again doesn't seem to be designed to handle glossy and photo papers considering range of supported media weight is really limited.
Also Samsung seems to be plagued by one button is enough for everything ideology meaning everything has to be done through (probably very bloated) driver/software.

Neither is HP that small in drivers (installation packages are from 20 to 50MB for PCL and Postscript printer drivers) considering printer is supposed to have own "brains"/processor instead of relying on software in PC but at least you can do settings through printer's own control buttons or web server interface...

If you want to find out more about features and using them just go to pages of manufacturers and download manuals...
Xerox in my list has only compact PCL and Postscript printer drivers (processing of image/rasterization is done fully by printer's own processor) and you can do about all settings from printer's own control panel and through web server interface so I'm kind a fond of that clean and efficient no bloated nonsense aproach to printer controlling and software. (check quick start tutorials)
Here's review of Xerox Phaser 6130 if you're interested:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2260469,00.asp
(this Dell has same "internals")
 
Paladine said:
Toner costs are not the real problem nowadays since refill kits exists, the main problem is one of the other components (I think the drum iirc but I will have to check) if that goes (and they are classed as a consumable part) they can set you back over 100 quid to get replaced.
Click to expand...

I have the same concerns myself.

I've been looking at the samsung and HP networkable lasers and thinking how useful they would be since I have a number of PC's.

The drum kits cost around £100 - £120 depending on printer and will last for 20 - 24000 pages, samsung being a little better in this respect. The rub comes with colour printing. Each page is passed through the printer 4 times so a single print counts as 4 pages meaning that the drum kit will expire after 5-6000 pages at near the cost of a new printer. Ouch.

I need to think on this one for the moment, looks like my HP inkjet might get a new set of cartriges for xmas after all.

AD
 
decto said:
I've been looking at the samsung and HP networkable lasers and thinking how useful they would be since I have a number of PC's.

The drum kits cost around £100 - £120 depending on printer and will last for 20 - 24000 pages, samsung being a little better in this respect. The rub comes with colour printing. Each page is passed through the printer 4 times so a single print counts as 4 pages meaning that the drum kit will expire after 5-6000 pages at near the cost of a new printer.
Click to expand...
At least HP CP1515/18 models have imaging drums integrated into colour cartridges (page count is smallish 1400 for price) so they don't have separate imaging drum unit.

And just calculate how much replacing imaging drum unit costs per page even assuming worst case scenario.
Then consider that inkjet inks last maybe few dozen pages at most (using more realistic coverage value for graphics/images) and how much cost of that is per page and to top of that add cost of better than normal photocopier paper if you want sharp results and you'll notice that for actual printing inkjets are cheap only in dreams.
 
Interesting.

The Gadget show ran a test two weeks ago on photo injet printers.

The Canon Pixma IP4600 (£70) came second producing 68 full colour A4 prints from a set of £40 cartriges. The winner was another canon multifunction so it was a bit more expenive and had a better page yield cost ration still.

A full set of HP cartidges racks in at around £200

Seeing as manufacturer page prints for both inkjet and laser printers are done to comparable standards @ approx 5% coverage per page it's fairly obvious that for full A4 colour printing the toner isn't going to last all that long either. Especially seeing as photos actually overlay a number of colours so ink toner usage can be very high.

For canon the 500 pages at is quoted on 20% page coverage (5% per colour) So a full colour page will yield just 100 prints assuming equal usage of each colour. Therefore £0.40 per page.

For the HP, the 1400 pages is quoted on 20% page coverage (5% per colour)
So a full colour page will yield just 280 prints assuming equal usage of each colour. Therefore £0.72 per page

I'm not saying for a moment that laser printers aren't good, I am saying that they're no cheaper to run than an inkjet.

Also consider that inkjets tend to do a clean and waste ink between changes. Though many lasers also have a waste toner bin....

AD
 
decto said:
Especially seeing as photos actually overlay a number of colours so ink toner usage can be very high.
Click to expand...
Apparently nearly all printers use all colours for making darker grays... and even black text unless printer is specially set to use only black!
Isn't hard to guess why they're having that kind of "feature".

My photohobbying neighbour has one of those Canon's Pixma MP multifunction printers and he has often mentioned it to consume lot of of ink cartridges... apparently printer does some occasional automatic cleaning of printheads because with longer pauses between print jobs ink levels can drop even without anything having been yet printed.
Also when expensive glossy photo paper is used/selected as print media inkjets propably use really much less ink than with normal paper used for ordinary prints... so like I guessed they used that in tests. Also content of test page again affects to number of pages so would need to check how much they got pages compared to advertised standard numbers.


decto said:
Though many lasers also have a waste toner bin....
Click to expand...
Every laser should have those (some have that built into toner cartridge) because they don't have full 100% efficiency in getting toner to paper and you really wouldn't want to have that wasted part of toner floating around your room.

Neither are inkjets without waste... guess what they use for shooting ink drops from nozzles?
Pressure of vaporized ink!
 
I recently purchased a dell 1320cn laser printer for £80 delivered. Seems very good for the price, being both colour and networkable. Only downsides I can see are its quite large and the replacement toner costs are expensive. However as its an occassional use machine it will probably be about 2 years before having to replace the consumables. The web based network interface is also pretty decent giving you toner levels and a running count of pages printed.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom