Cheap laser printers - are there pitfalls?

[D Cooper]

Most of my clients are home users. They don't blink at spending money on inkjet cartridges but they would balk at buying a laser printer at business prices. I recently noticed that Office Depot had a Brother black and white laser for $50. I've had good experience with Brother printers but I was surprised by the low price. I could understand it with inkjet printers because they make their money on the ink cartridges. Have they figured out a way to drive up the cost of toner? If not, why are these machines so cheap?

 

[Martyn]

Basically because there is not much in them. I have(and have installed) an HP Laserjet Pro P1102W. I bought it I think 3 years ago. They cost £65 or so and you can get about 2000 - 3000 sheets out of a cartridge you can buy for about £9 on Ebay. It's a printer only but it's Airprint compatible. Great little units. It has usb and wireless connectivity. Setup is a breeze using wps, did one this morning.

 

[Porthos]

Basically because there is not much in them. I have(and have installed) an HP Laserjet Pro P1102W. I bought it I think 3 years ago. They cost £65 or so and you can get about 2000 - 3000 sheets out of a cartridge you can buy for about £9 on Ebay. It's a printer only but it's Airprint compatible. Great little units. It has usb and wireless connectivity. Setup is a breeze using wps, did one this morning.

Have the same one and like it.

 

[SilverLeaf]

I've had an inexpensive Brother HL-2270DW for a few years now. It's been rock solid and so much more economical. Wired and wireless network connections, and excellent Linux (CUPS) support as well, which was a must for me. Since I rarely print color, this works great for me. Given my experience with this one, I wouldn't hesitate to try one of their color lasers if I needed that functionality.

 

[Martyn]

I've had an inexpensive Brother HL-2270DW for a few years now. It's been rock solid and so much more economical. Wired and wireless network connections, and excellent Linux (CUPS) support as well, which was a must for me. Since I rarely print color, this works great for me. Given my experience with this one, I wouldn't hesitate to try one of their color lasers if I needed that functionality.

I have also a 2250DN for the double sided facility

 

[Markverhyden]

As long as you accept the disposable nature of the devices the brand name ones generally work quite well.

 

[iladelf]

As I sit where I work, 6 years ago, I recommended our IT head to buy Brother HL-2170W printers for economic, easy-to-use, throwaway-if-broken operation. Guess what? As I sit here, I can see five of them sitting here, ready to either be re-deployed OR used as new. Plus, we have three of the later version, the 2270DW, brand new, ready to be deployed. These things are battle tanks; they just work. They do, however, throw oddball errors which have to be tracked down online (for example, what does the blinking "Drum" light mean?!?), but most are easily fixable, or can simply be tossed if beyond hope. At $100 a pop, it takes care of printer headaches; got a problem with one? Trash it and deploy another.

Are they for heavy use (several users printing several print jobs)? No, they'd go through toner like water through a sieve (yes, we still rely on the irritating, hard-to-configure-at-times HP warships for that), but otherwise, they are, as Billy Ocean once said, "simply awesome."

 

[HCHTech]

I have and recommend those Brother units as well. Cheap as dirt and fairly robust.

 

[D Cooper]

Thank you all. I think I'm going to test out one of these Brother models.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Brothers, HPs, Canons...in recent years there have been many entry level laserjets hitting the market. While still a little more money than the cheap inkjets, in the long run..they last longer, their toners allow many more pages to be printer, and the "cost per page" printed over a couple of year period will be much less than an inkjet. Inkjets are dirt cheap, but as most people know...those ink cartridges don't print a lot of pages per cartridge...thus the cost per page is quite a bit more. So in the long run, they cost way more.