Back in Houston, I had my trusty, ancient HP 970xi inkjet that worked tirelessly, if slowly, and had a nice duplex feature. That printer is currently in storage and probably needs to be replaced when we get home. Here in California, I've got two left-behind printers from my landlord: an old Lexmark integrated flatbed scanner/inkjet and an ancient HP sheet feed scanner/fax/inkjet. The Lexmark printer sheet feeder never really worked, crunching every sheet of paper, so that was out immediately. The HP v40xi is too old/weird to be properly supported by official Apple drivers, so I had to install this "foomatic" free software which on a regular basis emits random crap in the middle of the page. Oh, and the paper feed is also not working so well. No more!

I want to spend a modest amount of money ($100-$200). My desired feature list:

- absolutely supported by OS X
- relatively fast (20ppm)
- direct Ethernet support (versus currently using my Mac as a print server to my wife's PC laptop, which isn't as reliable as I'd like)
- modest preference for laser over inkjet

This printer is not for printing photos. Instead, we need to print a variety of one-offs (boarding passes, maps, recipes) plus the occasional 20-page technical paper. Color would be a modest bonus, but we can live without it. "Multifunction" features... we don't care about fax, although we might get occasional mileage out of a decent sheet-fed scanner that can yield multi-page PDFs, particularly if it can OCR.

At this point, the interesting printers that Costco happens to have in stock are:

Brother HL-2070N ($139) - black&white laser with network
Xerox Phaser 6110N ($179 - a bargain!) - color laser with network (no doubt soon to be discontinued, thus the great price)
Lexmark X9350 ($199) - color inkjet, duplex, wireless, scanner/fax
Brother MFC-5860n ($169) - color inkjet, network, scanner/fax

Of course, there are many other printers out there in the world, but these represent a reasonable sampling of cost and features.

Alternate thought: I could buy the cheapest, lamest inkjet printer I can find ($50-70 seems to cover most of the low-end action, $100 gets a Canon Pixma ip4300 that supports duplex), on the assumption that it only needs to last me until the end of the year, then I get something better once we move back to Texas. Even the cheapest, lamest inkjet would outperform the junk I've got at home now.

Thoughts?

I highly recommend Brother. We have a HL-5140 USB printer here at work and it has never let us down, never paperjammed, toner lasts for ages, good build quality and solid (Windows) drivers. All that and its not particularly expensive.

My cousins actually have a pair of low end Brother printers on their electrical trade counter and they put some serious mileage on them printing Invoices and Delivery Notes. Again they prove to be reliable and low cost.

They are all USB printers though, no real experience with the network ones.

I'll second this choice, and add that the supplies for this printer are the least expensive on a per page basis. Also you'll be changing the toner and drum less frequently as their capacity is larger.

It doesn't have an Ethernet jack, but that is easily remedied with one of the many available print server gadgets. Some AP's even provide services for usb printers.

I have no experience with Brother. I find that Lexmark usually makes good printers, but their business practices bother me, so I don't buy them anymore. I have had very good experiences with Xerox (nee Tektronix) printers. The 6110 is actually new as of January, so don't worry about consumables being hard to find. That said, it's their low-end printer. The only language it supports is GDI, which is a Windows-internal language. This used to mean that it was a Windows-only printer, but Xerox explicitly supports Mac OS X and even Linux. The manual for it even has a reasonably comprehensive troubleshooting section for Linux, talking about things like CUPS, Ghostscript, Samba, etc., so I'd bet that the support is pretty good. And the Mac section is also pretty good, but they have fewer variables with a Mac, so it's shorter than the Linux section.

Personally, I'd go with this one, unless duplex was a requirement. Then again, that is in part due to my lack of experience with Brother and my refusal to buy more Lexmark products.

Oh, I also prefer laser printers, as toner doesn't magically disappear just sitting there like inkjet ink seems to.

I can also recommend Brother. I have had a couple over the years, the most recent an HL-1650 I got a few years ago. I have run about 30K pages through it and had ONE paper jam in all that time, which is better than any other printer I've every used. The toner is very cheap as well, and the ethernet connectivity simply worked, first time, on both linux and windows.

pca

I'm currently using a Brother HL-5250DN and I'm happy with it. It's ethernet, so it stays on all the time and can accept print jobs from any computer on my wired or wireless networks. It'll spool up, print, then go back into silent powersave mode. This is useful to me because it sits in my basement recording studio. I wanted a printer that I could leave on all the time instead of having to come downstairs and turn it on each time I wanted to print.

One thing about the networked printer feature of the Brother printer I've got, and I'm guessing might be the similar for some other networked printers...

In Windows, if you set the printer to be your default printer, and the printer happenst to be in powersave mode, any operations you do that try to query the printer (such as going to the print dialog box, the page setup dialog box, the print preview screen, etc.), will sit there frozen for a long time because of the network timeout, because of the printer not responding. The printer doesn't seem to want to respond to just idle queries on the network. Only an honest to got print job makes this thing wake up quickly.

I solve this problem by setting my USB inkjet printer as the default printer, and only switch printers to the networked Brother right when I'm ready to print.

I ended up deciding that the price on the color laser printer couldn't be beat, so I just put in my order. For amusement, I went to Fry's last night and had a look at the selection. They had a Samsung CLP-300 (review) for about $20 more than I paid for the Xerox that, on inspection, has unmistakably identical guts. Should hopefully do the job. And, if not, Costco has a generous return policy.

Amusing thought: I wonder if this printer generates the yellow-dot watermark?

Yeah, cost-per-page isn't really my concern. We only seem to get a new ream of paper (500 pages, right?) once every year or so.

Based on ink/toner prices at NewEgg and page estimates at the manufacturers' sites, the Xerox costs $0.05 a page ($0.03 if you assume just black), the Brother laser $0.02, the Brother inkjet $0.04 (about the same for just black), and Lexmark doesn't seem to want to give a page estimate for its cartridges, but the color cartridges are not separate, so if you run out of blue way before you run out of other colors, too bad; you get to replace all of them.

You know what? I'm thinking of the fuser. I stand corrected.

Agreed. I have also never seen a fuser replaced with the toner/drum assembly.

Still, it's a good point being made here. There are some (rare) SOHO laser printers out there where the imaging drum is a separate part, and so the per-page costs go down because you're not paying for a new imaging drum every time you fill the toner. Our main workhorse printer at one of my old jobs was like that. Very cheap to run.

Those are pretty rare to find, though.

Actually, the Xerox color laser referenced here is that way. All color lasers, I'm pretty sure, since you can't tie the drum to a single toner cartridge.

Or, you can do what I did. Take home the office's old HP 4+ laserjet, and then offer to take "all that old toner no one needs any more". I've have the 4 for at least three years, and I'm still on the first toner cartridge (which wasn't full in the first place). When that goes, I've got at least two more. The thing has a network card, and it's just plain solid. I was worried that it was burning a lot of electricity, but I put my kill-a-watt on it, and it might cost a dollar or two to have it on all year when it's sleeping, which is well worth it for nearly free, reliable, high quality, pretty fast printing.

We bought a brother multi function inkjet for faxing and scanning, and we've never bothered to buy more ink for it after the ink ran out. We love it for one feature, and that's scanning to a compact flash card, which is brilliant. You take your cf card over, tell it to scan to a PDF, TIFF or JPG, and it puts it directly on the card. So much less hassle than dealing with crummy scanner drivers when you only want to scan one thing every few months.

I'd love to upgrade to a color laserjet and a high quality document scanner, but I'm just too cheap.

Matthew

I just print everything at work

The Xerox printer has arrived. Initial thoughts:

- Setup was entirely painless, both for PC and Mac. Not at all like the pain I've been through with HP printers. The printer speaks Bonjour, making discovery and such about as easy as can be.

- The printer is unquestionably a Samsung under the hood. Even the Windows print drivers had Samsung's name all over them, despite all the UI elements saying Xerox.

- The printer has a helpful web interface that can, among other things, let you set passwords for administrative tasks. Unfortunately, none of those passwords apply to the web interface. *sigh* At least the print dialog has a helpful link to launch you into the web interface. There's a firmware upload feature as well, but the printer isn't smart enough to go and get its own damn firmware upload, nor does it tell you were to go look on Xerox's web site (versus a number of other "help" pointers that it does have pointing at Xerox's web site).

- The rasterization happens on your computer, not on the printer. For short documents, you don't notice. For an 80 page document, rasterization takes a while, and (at least with the Mac) you have you wait until the rasterizer is done before the first page comes out. After that, though, you're zooming along at full speed. (Grumble: the rasterizer has two tasks running, one taking 93% of my Core Duo, the other taking 12%, leaving most of the performance of the second core idle. Apple needs to parallelize its rasterizer.)

- This thing is seriously power hungry. The lights dim when it comes on. My UPS (connected to a different wall outlet, but apparently on the same circuit) makes unhappy noises, apparently switching to battery and back. The printed pages, as they come out, are very hot -- hotter than any other laser printer I've ever used.

- The document I'm currently working on has a big "DRAFT" banner splashed across every page at 50% grey. When I first started printing it, the printer was going slow and I realized it was printing it in CMY color. I canceled the job (requiring me to hit the sole button on the printer; it was already gone from the local print queue) and tried again in black&white mode. Much faster, but also much darker. The CMY version of the grey closely resembled the on-screen PDF. The B&W version was much darker.

We'll have to see how it holds up, and whether its power saving mode does a semi-decent job. The only surprise is the power consumption. Otherwise, I'm very happy.