Colour Laser Printers - Any Strong Opinions

I have a Brother HL-4140CN Colour Laser printer, all 3 colour toners need replacing all at the same time. And as these cost more than the printer would do new, I thought this would be a good time to replace a printer I have never been a fan of.

The Brother badly curls the paper, I know this is a common problem with such printers, but as soon as I plugged in the Brother it's something that has bugged me. I'm hoping to find something that handles paper a bit better.

This will be far from a heavy duty cycle printer, and I have an ink jet for any major colour work I need. I just want something to printer nice letters on etc...

Anyone got any strong opinions on what I should be looking at???

Cheers

Cris

I've been satisfied with my HP CP2025DN. It's networkable and has built in duplexing. Cost per page is average for this class of printer. Reliability has been good. A new pickup roller has eliminated paper jams.

I haven't had much experience with other color laser printers, so I don't know worthwhile my opinion is.

tanstaafl.

I've bought a Xerox Workcentre 6505 Colour laser all-in-one printer last year. It supports USB and ethernet (but no wifi). It's got a duplex module which works pretty good. The paper doesn't curl at all.

I'm not a heavy printer user, so I'm still using my first set of toners. The paper has never jammed on me yet.

I'm very, very , very happy with this printer. It replaced a HP inkjet all-in-one which had annoyed me for quite some time (slow, large ink consummation etc). I bought it via one of those "daily deals" kind of things (after doing some research on it), but I haven't regretted it for one second. In fact, this may be one of the best peripherals I've ever bought. I even find the photo printing quality to be very good. Some say an inkjet will do a much better job at this, but then I wonder how much better this can get? It sure lives up to my demands.

I don't really like anything HP. I can't remember why.

I hadn't thought of Xerox. I wonder if their non-multifunction printers are as good ??? That model looks massive !!! But I'll see if I can find any offers here in the UK.

Anything else I should be looking at?

Cheers

Cris

I just measured it. It's 44 x 50 x 55 cm. Not small, but not huge either. I even keep it in the living room and my wife has never complained about it (yet? )

To be honest, before I saw that online offer, I never considered Xerox either. Then I started thinking they were the ones who actually invented the laser printing technology, so they must know something about it. This proved to be the case, very much so. As said, haven't regretted my purchase for a moment and I would buy it again in a heartbeat.

I like the look of that Xeros (I know you mentioned it in my printer thread too), but I just can't bring myself to order from a non-Amazon merchant for such a big ticket item. The main seller on there has the old 15% restocking fee for all returns. I just can't do that anymore, after so many great experiences returning things to Amazon. It doesn't have to be Prime, but these days if it's something over $100 I only order it online if it's fulfilled through Amazon.

Sorry didn't spot the other thread, sorry for the spam post

Interesting thought on Amazon. There seems to lots of reputable stockist here in the UK for Xerox. It's just do I want to spend that much and have something so big in the office !!!

Cheers

Cris

For what it's worth, we considered the Xerox-of-the-day when purchasing a colour laser multi-function machine here last year. I really liked the looks and the specs, but not the size nor the standy energy consumption of the unit we looked at.

Ended up getting the equivalent Samung unit instead for about $50 less. Smaller, and nearly perfect for our needs. So that's another brand to compare with, especially if size is a consideration.

Cheers

No worries! You're asking for yourself, I was asking for a different specific use case.

But I agree that Samsung might be worth looking at. I've been using their laser printers for over a decade and always found them to be well made (surprisingly), especially for the price.

This model, for instance, seems good. After all, an official feature is that "The Samsung CLX-4195FW is a valuable player in a multitude of ways."

I dunno... any product that has the same number of 1-star reviews as it has 5-star reviews makes it suspect in my eyes.

Read the 1-star reviews and note the similarity of many of the complaints.

tanstaafl.

The one we have here is the clx-3305fw. Much better review ratio, especially after filtering out the "hated the software" reviews.

Still, at the sub-$200 price point, quality likely suffers.

You're probably right about those reviews. Even worse, the price for the toner is pretty bad. Something like $45 for 1K sheets (some say they don't get anywhere near 1K). I've been looking at this Brother color AIO with ~$75 toner replacements rated for ~6K sheets.

I think Brother got mostly ruled out in post #1 above.
And that price would buy a lot of toner for an occasional use situation!

Yea Brother is out. I hate the current printer.

How is the Samsung on the paper curl issue ???

I think I have had a cheap Samsung desktop laser in the past, it got binned when the toner ran out and i could buy something cheaper and better than the toner was going to cost.

Imagine how many printers get dumped because of that !!!

Cheers

Cris

Related thread here from last October. I'm still happy with my Samsung "workgroup class" CLP-620ND. Total overkill for our needs, but we got it cheap.

Hardly any Zero curl from our Samsung here. And yes, I actually purchased a barebones Samsung printer with the same engine as the multi-function machine, just for the extra consumables.

There are also sellers on eBay who can provide third-party refill kits and chip resets, as well as hardware hacks to disable the page-count toner kill feature. Best of all are the hacked firmware images to accomplish the same thing in a more reversible fashion.

I plan to go that route eventually, but not until some of the original toners start registering "empty".

Cheers

Depending on the design of the printer, that might not be a good idea.

HP laser printers (and for all I know, many others) provide more than toner in their toner cartridges. You get a new drum, new seals, new doctor blade, new developer, and new high-quality toner.

OEM toner cartridges have a designed service life equal to a little bit more than the quantity of toner inside. You can refill them, but you are using a worn-out drum, risking damage (sometimes irreparable) to the printer itself if a seal fails and dumps all the toner into the guts of the printer. It is not uncommon for an aftermarket "rebuilt" toner kit (rebuilt=refilled) to fail in that fashion at its first use because it was not assembled correctly.

In my experience, refilled toner cartridges rarely give print quality as good as a new OEM cartridge, due to worn-out drum and generally inferior quality toner. This is especially true with color laser printers, but even black and white printers show quality degradation.

I just grit my teeth and pay the exorbitant prices for new HP cartridges. I don't print so much that this is too terribly painful, probably only six to ten thousand pages per year. No, wait, a lot less than that. I've printed 10,705 pages in 42 months. In that time, I've gone through all the starter cartridges, then replaced each of the "full" cartridges once, and I think the black one twice. My ratio of color pages to B&W is 2.5 to 1. Assuming about $100 per replacement cartridge, that makes my overall cost about 4.6 cents per page. Not the cheapest printer to run, but not exorbitant either, especially compared to a color inkjet printer. I have been very satisfied with the quality of the output. I've never had an issue with paper curling, and since replacing the pickup/separation rollers, the document feeder has been bullet-proof, even while duplexing.

I was a bit disappointed that I had to spend $40 to replace the pickup and separation rollers after only 10,000 pages, and most of the innards of the printer seem to be made out of plastic, so I suspect that HPs 40,000 page per month duty cycle is a bit, uhhh, optimistic. Of course their recommended monthly page volume is only 2,000 pages.

tanstaafl.

edit: Oh, one more thing... If you dig deeply enough into the printer's menu structure, you can disable the "toner empty" flag and continue printing well past HP's conservative estimate of when the toner cartridge needs replacement. In my experience, I get about 30% more use from the "empty" cartridge.

I have a Samsung CLP-325W colour laser on my home network.

These are typically very cheap on the used market since the WiFi networking is unreliable. However, connect it to a real Ethernet cable and it works just fine.

No paper curling or paper jam issues. Middling print speed, not too noisy. Middling colour print quality.

We do not print very much so it goes through toner slowly here. Cartridges are rated for only 700 pages colour and 1000 pages B&W.

It is reasonably compact in footprint overall.

Doh! I totally forgot that the Brother was the source of the issue in this thread. Oops.

Sounds like a big load of FUD to me.
I plan on refilling my Samsung cartridges, not buying third party ones. And at only $100 for an entire new printer, with toner, I'm really not seeing any "risk" here.

Cheers

I really like the look of the Xerox range, but I can't find any good deals on them at the moment. Why is it always the way! I don't want to drop £400 on a new printer right now, toner for the brother is going to be around £100 for a decent aftermarket solution, so I was thinking of around the £200 mark really.

Hmmmmm I've always hated printers !!!

Cheers

Cris

Yeah, I'm convinced that's FUD. Wikipedia says:


As far as I know, the worst thing that will happen when your imaging drum gets old and worn out is that your printed pages will start to get a faded look to them, with the black parts not being quite as black as they should be. So if you do hack it to refill the toner without replacing the drum, even if you don't replace the drum when you should be, you're not really risking much. That's been my understanding for a long time.

And the risk? If things go bad and you ruin the printer, now you just have to buy another cheap laser printer that didn't cost much to begin with.

For me, the only reason not to hack the system to get around the toner/drum disparity, is that it's just simpler and easier to use them as-intended.

Another negative vote against Brother, we have a Brother mono laser MFC and an old Brother fax; both have recurring paper feed problems even after warranty repairs.

Looking at a Xerox colour laser long term, but currently also looking at a CISS for our Canon inkjet MFC.

Have had a Samsung CLP-680ND for a couple of months now. It's pretty big, and quite noisy in operation. But the duplexer is neat, and the quality is very good, no curling that I've noticed.

Although Samsung still haven't coughed up on the cash back yet, must give them a ring.

This thread just became much more interesting! I have a client who's a realtor, and she prints full-color fliers regularly.

Her old HP - which had good color accuracy and saturation - failed recently after years of use; she's in the market for something new. She just tried a Brother 9340, but the color was a little off and rather washed out, nowhere close to the HP.

Anyone have ideas on a solid multifunction box that has rock-solid color? Duplexing isn't as important as vivid color (it's sales!). She works in letter/legal paper sizes. Document handling for scanning to pdf is important to deal with the massive realtor paperwork load.

thanks,

-jk

I just installed two Xerox color printers in a small office today. The Phaser 6500N and the WorkCentre 6605DN.

I was quite impressed.

The print quality from these printers was phenomenal. The download site for the printers was pretty much limited to PCL and PS drivers and not much more.

The only annoyance was that the 6605DN has a built in scanner, but as far as I could tell Xerox doesn't provide anything in the way of scanning software. It seems like all they give you is TWAIN interface to act as a middleman between scanning software you might have on your computer and the network hardware. In the end, I had to tell the client that they either needed to purchase scanning software (like Vuescan) or only scan from the unit its self. In the end, I'd rather scan from the scanner anyway because it limits your back and forth.

Even setting up network scanning from the printer was a little annoying. As I said, there's no scanning software so there's nothing to signal to printer what the available destinations are. Epson AIO printers, for example, install utilities that signal to a network scanner that they're ready to accept scans. The downside is that they don't always work.

The 6605DN requires scanning to samba shares on Windows machines (not sure about Mac but there were instructions). The computers on this network didn't have static IPs, but fortunately I could identify them by hostname.

In the end I came away very impressed with the Xerox brand. The quality was fantastic. However, I did see some page curl on the printouts that I made. Nothing that bothered me, though.

Our Xerox printers have a utility called Scan2Desktop. I thought it would have been included in the printer, but maybe you have to get access to it online.

http://www.office.xerox.com/software-solutions/xerox-scan-to-pc-desktop/enus.html

I was recommended a Canon printer yesterday, that specific model was Mono. Anyone had experience with Canon Colour Laser printers?

The specs seem fantastic!

Cheers

Cris

You're welcome.

Mine came with ScanSoft Paperport. But I have to be honest, it was tucked away rather good one one of the added CD's. It took me a while before I found it, too. I agree they could've made that more obvious.

I'll definitely be recommending them in the future Thanks!

One issue might be that they're pretty expensive. I think my client said that the 6605DN was around $900. While I think it was well worth that money, most of my clients aren't looking to spend that much on their printer. It's ~$400 more than the Brother I just set up for another client, which wasn't as nice but it also wasn't $400 worse.


Now that I think about it, I'd forgotten that the AIO printer had already been removed from its box and put in place before I got there. Once I couldn't obtain scanner software I should have asked for it, but I've just gotten into the habit of treating pack-in printer CDs as garbage. I never use the included discs, and grab the software from the company's website instead. Sadly, Xerox doesn't seem to include that scanning software on printer's download page.

I almost bit the bullet with the Xerox yesterday, but I can't figure out if scanning with OSX actually works or not.

Does it? Anyone know?

Cheers

Cris

Well, I have the 6505DN, and -while I don't know what the 6605DN adds to its feature list- I must say I'm very happy for what it offers me. I really couldn't wish for anything more. And I paid less than 400 € for it (can't really remember the exact amount, but it surely wasn't more than that) Again, I'm no professional user so my printing needs are probably not that high, but even so I'm pretty sure this AIO would fare very well in small businesses too. (at a very affordable price I think).


Well, I made the same mistake you did. For years now, I've never bothered to look at included CD's, since I always download the most recent drivers and software from the internet. It had me puzzled as well when I couldn't find any scan software online. I had already given up (and even already started a complaint email to Xerox) but then it hit me - I don't know why : what if it was included with the provided CD's? And behold: there it was. Just in time to discard that email.
I fully agree Xerox should make it downloadable also. If they want to protect the software, they can always make it downloadable only when you register your device with them.

I have no personal experience with it, sorry.
But I have read that scanning on Mac used to cause problems.
Then again, the support website shows new Mac scanning drivers since the 3rd April 2014. So I would guess it works fine now?

I think it only works over USB, but it doesn't say what scanning software it supports etc...

Not very good that it will scan over ethernet to a PC but not OSX!

Cheers

Cris

Same issue with the Samsung we have too. I used some active USB extender dongles (over cat5 cabling) to get a scanner connection from it to the machine most often used for scanning.

The Samsung can also scan directly to a USB stick using the onboard UI -- maybe the Xerox also?

Years ago, at work, I decided to have non-original refilled toner cartridges used on our HP5000 high volume printers. For nearly two years, that has been the purchase policy, and overall we did have cases where the toner seals failed and toner did go all over the place in the printer itself. While this is a quite limited statistic, the refilled cartridges did prove significantly less reliable than original ones in our case.

On the other hand, all that it caused is a tech support call to have the printer cleaned internally, and it resumed its daily job without issues. So, the economics did work out nonetheless.

Now, take this for what it is.

For one, this happened on computer labs with 25+ machines each, on high volume printers. Not sure how well this relates to a home printer.

Different companies may work differently and possibly the one we used (for almost two years) was not that good. Others may sell u better quality refilled cartridges (unless you refill yourself).

Also, this implies nothing in terms of the average life of a cartridge drum versus the toner powder in it.

Finally, the economics is quite different. High volume printers are quite more expensive themselves.

So,it all boils down to: in my experience, refilled toner seals did fail occasionally.


At home, I am using a HP OfficeJet Pro 8600. I hated, and stayed away from, inkjets since the 90s, so this was quite a change. So far, so good. Photo printing quality is awful, other types of printing is good enough.

I've bitten the bullet on the Xerox!

I hope it's worth the extra money

Cheers

Cris

It has arrived in the biggest freaking box I have ever seen !!!

IT'S MASSIVE !!!

Also seems to be working over USB just fine, next to tackle network printing.

Cheers

Cris

Yeah, looked large! But the in-store appearance and build quality makes a very good impression. Hope it all works out well for you there!

So, how did it work out for you Cris? Are you happy with your purchase? Also, did you get it working for OSX? I'm asking because I want to switch to Mac as well in the very near future and I'd like to know beforehand if I can expect problems or not.

It did work out thanks. It is a little annoying that the scanner only works over USB, but it does work very very well so that kind of makes up for it.

Another little annoyance is you have to download the print driver pack from the Xerox website before the printer will install. Other manufacturers seem to be able to deliver their drivers along with OSX or at least offer an option to automatically download, but not with the Xerox. A minor issue really.

Print quality is top drawer, certainly the best laser printer I've used. It wakes from sleep amazingly quickly and start printing in seconds. It also doesn't make much noise, basically only while printing.

It is a big printer, so allow for that if you are looking at one. Works fine with OSX, Xerox could do more work in this area to make how it works clearer.

Cheers

Cris

I missed which model you ended up with, but that surprises me. I would have thought it would have network scanning...

I've got a 6505, on the Mac the scan driver only support a USB connection. That is the only real negative I can find with the machine. I think it works over the network with a Windows PC, and I think I can set scan to email if I want (but I haven't yet).

Cheers

Cris

Same (lousy) scan setup with the Samsungs, too. But a $15 active USB extension cable set (over cat5) helps with that here.

Cheers

I can confirm that it does work with Windows, I'm using it that way. It seems rather silly that Xerox decided to deny the Mac customer this. Anyway, happy to read it worked out for you!

Mmm.. just looked around, and found a "scan to pc" project for Linux. Installed the software (mostly python stuff), and.. it works! Got Linux network scanning for the Samsung now. And since it's mainly Python on top of "sane", it ought to be workable on OS/X as well. This by itself isn't useful to Cris, but..

There might be something similar out there for the Xerox, as I think the protocol is similar (?).