I've used a D-Link box without issues. Crappy web interface for setup, but at least it *has* a web interface!

Worked fine other than that with our Lexmark laser printer. A buddy of mine also has one, and uses it (printing only) with an HP multifunction box, in a win xp/vista setup.

Cheers

I've honestly not used one since USB printers became commonplace, but the ones I used with parallel printers worked without a hitch, from $1000 enterprise ones to $50 plug-directly-onto-the-centronics-connector ones.

You can pick up a small print server from about $30 and up (here's an example of a DLink device at Amazon)

YMMV, so read the reviews. The benefit is that it doesn't require any one machine to be on to host the printer.

I used to have a 2x parallel + 1x USB D-Link print server. It worked okay until one day it just mysteriously died. It worked fine though until then.

Those are the devices that Tony was talking about. It's also the kind of device I was talking about that might not work with your printer, so it's good to check the compatibility on DLink's site first.

And like I said, multifunction printers rarely work with these types of devices, and if they do, most of the time it's printing only, so you should watch out for that.

I would agree with Tony's train of thought, though. If you want to spend zero money, share the printer. If you want to spend ANY money, just get a new printer with wireless built in.

thanks for the advice...i should have posted this earlier...i got the HP c4480 printer as a Christmas gift and thought I was going to exchange it (and pay the $50 difference)for the HP c4580 because the 4580 had wireless networking capabilities. However, after reading the many negative reviews on the 4580 and saw the print serve option, i decided against it. now after reading what you wrote, i regret it....maybe I can get Best Buy to still exchange my printer.....

Well, you could always sell your current HP and get another one with an Ethernet jack. The money you lose on the trade-up (minus the savings on not getting a USB/Ethernet printer adapter) is made-up by the fact that network sharing works much better.

(My take: I got a cheap color laser printer from Costco -- a Xerox Phaser 6110. Two years ago, it cost $180, and it has a nice Ethernet jack on the back. Now, two years later, the only thing I've had to do is replace the black toner cartridge, $60 for an official Xerox-branded version or half of that for a knock-off. Color laser, at home, is pretty sweet. I don't often find myself wanting or needing the other functions of a multifunction. I can always go to the office where we've got a fax machine, a scanner, and so forth.)

Arrrrgh, printers are such a racket. Many times it costs as much to replace the required toner or ink as it does to buy a new printer.

The replacement for the Xerox Phaser 6110 is the 6130 and it's $500 at Costco in Canada right now. Toner costs $95 for each of the 3 required colors, plus $92 for black. You'll get up to 1900 pages for the colours at 5% coverage and 2500 with the black. So that means if you're printing mainly colour text you can expect up to around 2000 pages for $377 in consumables. Every printer model they make uses a completely different toner cartridge assembly.

The printer claims it can handle a cycle of 40000 pages per month. I'm sure Xerox would love you at those volumes. That would cost over $7000 per month in consumables. More like $100k if you were printing full-page pictures though.

My parents need a new printer to replace the POS Epson I bought for them a few years ago. It must not be an Epson and it must not be an Ink Jet. Those are all designed to fail within 2 years. They're the equivalent of a Bic pen in purpose, though not as well built nor as long-lived.

They really want the ability to copy as well, but that's about the extent of the multi-functional requirements. I really want to set them up with Black and White only. There's absolutely no way to financially justify the expense of a colour printer of any make/model for the home. It's much cheaper and less hassle to have images professionally printed.

I'd like to find something with an easy to get toner cartridge that won't cost an arm and a leg and that has decent (high-ish) yield. The printer should hold at least 200 sheets of paper in an enclosed (but easy to reload) paper tray.

Any recommendations?

Perfect example of consumables costing more than the printer:

http://www.costco.ca/Browse/Product.aspx...g=en-CA&s=1

Brother MFC-7440N multi-function. Even at its non-rebate price of $289, it's cheaper to buy a new unit than it is to buy a new drum ($294) and toner ($200).

If anyone is considering this thing, might as well just buy multiples with the rebate for $179. Then you can resell the toner (low yield at $140 for 1000 pages) and drums for profit. Or keep them. Though $179 is still going to be the most expensive 1000 pages you've ever printed in black and white.

I suppose you could always resell the printers at $50 and drums at $130 on their own to break even on toner use. You know, to another sucker.

So you want a laser printer. Any other technology is going to cost you a fortune, no to mention that no one makes a B&W printer other than inkjet or laser. (Well, unless you want to buy a phototypesetter, assuming anyone still makes those.) If you want to look, though, Xerox makes some relatively inexpensive solid-ink printers.

Xerox's solid ink seems to cost quite a lot. I could understand if it were made with precious metals of course.

I don't have high hopes for finding anything that will take care of the copying aspect, so I might as well get to looking at older laser printers like the 4L from HP. And perhaps get them one of these more disposable POS or a lower priced copier for copy duty (won't even hook it up to the computer).

I'm using a Lexmark Optra Lxn+ myself. A workhorse, but sadly no longer the fastest kid on the block with only 64MB of memory and 16ppm top speed. It needs some cleaning that I've been putting off though, because I seem to have to pop out and then pop back in its paper tray a few times when printing more than a handful of pages at a time. Kind of defeats the purpose of a 500 sheet tray.

Ricoh seems to do the best with supply costs, but you don't get a discount on the printer itself.

Also, keep in mind that many of these printers arrive with their toner / ink cartridges half full. Replacing the old printer with a new one, just to get an ink refill, doesn't necessarily make good sense.

Amusement: despite claiming it was out of black toner, the pages were coming out of my printer as black as ever. I was waiting for it to truly run out of toner, but the printer eventually refused to go on, without giving any explicit status message to that effect, beyond the red lights that I had been happily ignoring for weeks.

Anyway, for low-volume printing, such as my own use, I don't think cost-per-page is the right metric. What really matters is dollars per year to keep the thing going. I spent $180, up front, on the laser printer and now, two years later, I spent $60 for a new black toner cartridge (which is actually full, unlike the old one which is shipped half-empty from the factory). I figure I'll get another two years out of it before a lightning strike or some other calamity takes it down for good.

At that point, I won't feel so bad about the costs.

Boy, this this thread brings back memories.

I still highly recommend Kyocera B&W laser printers. They are more expensive up front, but the cost per copy savings will pay for the printer.

As for your statement "There's absolutely no way to financially justify the expense of a colour printer of any make/model for the home" I beg to differ. I have been absolutely delighted with my Samsung CLP-300 color laser printer. You can buy one from Amazon for less than $175 including shipping, and a 2000 page four-color toner kit goes for less than $40 again including shipping. That's less than two cents per page. No, the print quality is not as good as a dedicated photo printer on special 15 cents a sheet paper, but it is more than adequate for home use as shown by this scanned in image from the printer.

Reviews I have read on the printer suggest that it is not robust, and that anybody thinking they will get the claimed 24,000+ page monthly duty cycle is living in a dream world. But for folks like me who print maybe 20 pages on a busy day, it's hard to beat.

And, BTW, if you shop around, it is easy to find the printer for less than $100 but you'll usually pay $25 or so in shipping. Toner is readily available, but $40 delivered seems to be the sweet spot in the price spectrum right now.

tanstaafl.

It's good to point out that it's easy to print with exclusively black toner with a color laser printer. And, unlike inkjets, the color pigment won't evaporate.

Also, worth noting that the Samsung CLP-300 and the Xerox 6110 are identical to one another. Some variations have Ethernet and others don't, but otherwise looks like we're both quite happy.

I work for Ricoh so....

Don't forget other consumables when figuring out your cost per page. The Ricoh C400DN for instance has toner cartridges that only have toner so there are separate photo conductor units you have to replace at some point there is also a image transfer belt and fuser that are consumables. I don't know what the actual cost per page is if you include all these items but I deal with many people that are surprised when they find out about this stuff later.

Fortunatly for me most of our customers have supply inclusive service contracts so all the consumable items are covered under that and they just pay per page.

Also even with laser printers the supplies do go bad just sitting unused not as fast as ink jets but it still happens.

I'm a huge Samsung printer fan. I have one of their lowest-end laser printers, and I've been using it for at least two years, and it replaced another one of their lowest-end printers that lasted me plenty of time too. They perform solidly, and the printer driver is lightweight.

I will never again recommend an HP printer. I think their hardware is pretty darn good, but their software is an utter failure. I haven't seen a model yet - multifuntion or otherwise - that didn't require a 15 minute-long software installation. That's absurd. Even if they do feel the need to install a bunch of photo software or something on your machine, it shouldn't take as long as it does.

In the past week alone, I've seen three instances where someone's HP printer install got screwed up, resulting in second copies of their printers. The problem is some programs will still print to the first copy, which the computer thinks is offline. The only solution when this happens is to go through a painful uninstall of their horrid software, and reinstall it all over again. Ugh.

Much simpler on Linux with the HP MFCs. They just work, like they're supposed to.

Cheers

Same on OS X too. Plug it in, or find it on the network automatically. I think maybe once I looked at the setup webpage for my printer, just for fun. And the MFC HP printer a family member has was also just a simple plug and play operation. Clicking the scan button brings up Image Capture and everything.

I guess all the good software engineers at HP are on the Unix side, leaving the Windows dev to people who like making bloated software or something.

I've always just plugged in HP printers and used whatever the default driver was in Windows. Always worked fine for me...

You can't do that if you want to use the scanner, fax, etc. on a multifunction printer.

My HPs are all set up as Deskjet500. Can't wait 'till the last of the HPs dies off and I can go all Oki. Even the best of the Laserjets (3, 4), required constant fiddling.

Dignan included printer only devices. I expect to install drivers or software for a MFD.

i have a Samsung CLP-510N... it came with stock cartridges... they are only half full with toner... yesterday i just refilled them to full.. This will give me around 7000 pages at 5% coverage.. the refill kit even included new chips, a pair of gloves for each colour.. and the toner came in bottles that fitted right on the cartridge.. price 180$ (1495 danish kroner/DKK) so that gives me 0.02$ a print

but yeah, i will have to replace the transferbelt and drum... what is the fuser? the thing that's hot?

Yes

True, I should have limited that statement to MFP's. I guess the feeling comes from supporting HP printers in the average user's home, where almost nobody has an HP printer-only anymore.