Printer Advice For Small Office

gaza4

looking for a printer for a small office. main requirements are that its cheap enough to buy, cheap to replace cartridges and its reliable. doesnt need to be super fast or print colour as it will only be printing text.

thanks!!!

Irish Steve

Try and pick up a medium quality laser from a good second hand source.
The problem with cheap printers is that the cost of the consumables is almost always inversely proportional to the cost of the device, so a cheap printer will very often cost a fortune in consumables, and possibly not produce many pages from those consumables, especially if it is inkjet.

If you don't need colour, try and find a mono laser, it will be cheaper in the long run. ideally, a printer with separate toner, photoconductors, fuser and developer is cheaper to run in the long term. if everything is in the one unit, there are always compromises on the life of the unit, which tends to push the costs up.

Do your research carefully, and try to find a supplier that doesn't use chips on the consumables to life them, as this makes it harder to get alternative supplies, which are inevitably cheaper to purchase.

Depending on who you know, it may be possible to pick up a used printer that still has plenty of life left in it for a fraction of the price of the new unit. OK, it's not what you need, but as an example, a few years ago, I picked up a Ricoh colour device with duplex scanner and printing, all sizes between A3 and A5, with a finisher that could punch and staple, new it would have been close on 10-15K, this one was cheap on E-bay and cost me less than €500. does close on 40 pages a minute on the network, and toner is dirt cheap in comparison to things like HP and the like. The later generation of the same devices are now being sold for less than €200 on E-Bay, so the concept can work.

Hope that helps

gaza4

thanks for the advice...was lookin at the Samsung SCX-3405 Mono All-in-One Laser Printer. can be got for round €80 and comes with a 700 page cartridge...cartridges themselves come in round €60 and does 1200 pages.

wasnt originally looking at an all in one but for €20 more than the one i was originally looking at i thought it would be worth it...

White Heart Loon

Go with Brother, they have a 2yr to the door warranty. For something like a €100 printer they won't bother to send an engineer to fix it, they'll just ship you a new one. Ink is cheap for them too

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Brother-HL-2240-Compact-Laser-Printer/dp/B004540D5Y/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1389119615&sr=8-1&keywords=HL2240

Irish Steve

As an example, the Ricoh I have here (AP3800C and way too big for what you want), a toner (only) refill for that machine, does about 4000 pages can be had on E-Bay for about €30,

Check online to see what the consumables are, sometimes there are "issues" with very expensive fuser that has a short life, or developer, or similar. The Samsung you mention is the mono version of a full colour device, I've come across them, genuine Samsung consumables are not cheap, but can be got from other sources, and they need a chip to tell the device that they are OK, or refilled, whichever, a chip reset device is available, which helps. The Colour equivalent is quite a nice little printer, and Samsung as a manufacturer have a good reputation. having the option to scan and copy is always worthwhile.

Cheers

Steve

Firblog

Nephew got one of these, can connect to network, can print from anywhere in the world, Duplex, colour, ink is about €30 for black, prints roughly 2500 pages, (he's setup in draft mode so should get much more)

Irish Steve

Spec on that HP looks OK, and the prices have at last come down to slightly more respectable levels compared to a while back, one caveat with it is that the cartridges it comes with are described as "set up", so it won't be long before you're going out for new ones, so if you do get into any colour printing for any reason, allow €75 or so (almost the purchase price of the printer!) for a set of standard life colour cartridges.

Jeju

Printer Scanner fax Copier

Irish Steve

Jeju wrote: »

Printer Scanner fax Copier

Dear enough, €82 for 1600 pages gives a cost for toner alone of 5 cents a page.

Jeju

Irish Steve wrote: »

Dear enough, €82 for 1600 pages gives a cost for toner alone of 5 cents a page.

I get the 85AD which is a dual pack gives me 3200 pages for 87.79 ex vat or .027c per page.

Its a decent machine for what it does, the user needs to Fax, and also scan to a network folder or direct to their machine.

Firblog

Jeju wrote: »

I get the 85AD which is a dual pack gives me 3200 pages for 87.79 ex vat or .027c per page.

Think you have your maths wrong there, 8779c / 3200 = 2.743c per page not 0.027c per page