On Monday 03 July 2017 10:41:13 rhkramer@gmail.com wrote:
On Monday, July 03, 2017 07:41:31 AM Whit Hansell wrote:
Can anyone recommend a monochrome (black toner) laser printer that
is currently available and reasonably priced (<$300). I am
interested in finding one as i am sick and tired of buying ink every
month even when I'm not printing much.
Why are you buying ink every month if you are not printing much--to be
more specific, I'm asking if something is happening to your ink (or
ink cartridge)-- is it an ink jet printer and the nozzles getting
clogged, or maybe a laser printer in a high humidity environment
making the toner get too humid to work properly?
If either of those are a possiblity, I wouldn't order a new printer
until you've considered the cause of the problem...
Yes I would, buy a new printer. The just over $100 USD brother HL21XX
b&w laser printer I have is going on 6 years old, is on its third toner
cartridge, has printed 30 or so reams of paper, at 19ppm if the driving
computer can feed it that fast. And its still printing like it was
brand new.
The one disadvantage for linux purists is that you must use the free to
download and install, brother driver.
And, because I needed a tabloid format printer, 11x17 inches
occasionally, I bought one of the brother ink jets, an MFC-6920DW
which also claims good ppm's but does NOT deliver. Its about 1.5ppm at
best, and gain you must use the brother drivers which are partially
broken in the when it wakes up the printer to start a job, the first 6
packets it sends have a bad tcp checksum before it sends good data.
Thats 6 seconds wasted right there. Its actually a pretty fast copier.
So the network connect is a bottleneck. It self exercises at about 4
hour intervals, keeping nozzles clean, but doesn't seem to waste a lot
of ink doing it as I'm perhaps halfway thru the first set of refills at
a dozen reams of paper, some of it glossy and most std 24 lb copy paper.
I have it setup at an address on my local network because the inputs are
internal, and I'd have to buy and put another usb hub near it because
the input connectors are a rather circuitous route thru trenches in the
top of the printer floor under the scanner and that uses up around 30
inches of a usb cables maximum length. It was expedient to use the LAN
connector as my switch was well within reach. But I don't think it runs
at gigabit speeds, and thats the pages a minute bottleneck. My network
is all gigabit, but the printer spends a lot of time waiting on data.
OTOH, the asking price at the local Staples was under $300, so I guess I
got what I paid for. Ink is individual tanks, and easily outlasts the
last Epson ink jet I had, which despite its exercise that wasted 2/3rds
of the ink I used, clogged its head in about a month the first time.
And I kept it for its scanner for a while but the scanner in this
brother is 10x faster, does better color, with an ADF to boot. Other
than its print speed, whats not to like? 20x the ink lifetime at less
than the Epson price per color on the pegboards at the store. I'll buy
it again if it lasts as long as its baby brother laser has. Its in its
second year and I have NOT had to "clean the nozzles".
No, I don't work for brother, I'm just a retired 82 year old fart,
puttering about in the garage with metal cutting machines, CNC versions
which I've done the conversion to CNC myself.
Cheers, Gene Heskett