Printer suggestion 125ish, laserjet

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xenotype

Gawd
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Sep 27, 2004
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I was familiar with the HP laserjet 4m, and was wondering if there is now a better model to buy. I have a fairly in flexible (+/-10 bux) 125 USD for a laserjet printer. What would be a great option for a college student, who can do a lot printing.
 
I just got an HP Office Jet 4500 for college from Costco for $70. I've only done a few prints to make sure it works, but it seems nice for the price.
 
Just a black/white.

Hows that HP working for you? Clear text (going to be printing lots of that) and is it fast? Ahhh, I just looked at it, its a multifunction, which I like, but its takes cartridges like an ink jet. I would like the multi/function but not an ink jet. Those cartridges are expensive.
 
i just bought a brother mfc-8220 off ebay for 120$. Fax, Copy, Scan, Printer. Also included the ethernet module (this is a separate module, it is not included by default!). Have only been using for 3 days honestly. Looks good so far. Has drivers for every OS on earth unlike my lexmark x83, bleh.
 
If you don't need color.. or even if you do need color, moake sure to get a printer that doesn't have the crap page count chiop built into the cartridges.

The company I work at bought some of the smaller HP Color LaserJet printers for certain people to have in their offices.

We are now spending ot least $1000 each month on Tonor for those crappy printers.

I personally have a Dell LeserJet 1720 (monochrome) that I picked up at a thrift store for a whopping $7. In the two years I have had it I still have not had to refill the tonor.

It also does a sweet 30 pages per minute and the page counter is built into the printer. When it starts blinking, you can reset it and keep going.
 
Thanks for all the suggestions.

Cyclone: let me know if you have any updates on your printer, that is the one I think i will get (though, might be hard to find, especially if you found it at a thrift store).

There is no newer model of the HP LaserJet4m? or what would be the upgraded/newest model of that design?
 
xenotype said:
Thanks for all the suggestions.

Cyclone: let me know if you have any updates on your printer, that is the one I think i will get (though, might be hard to find, especially if you found it at a thrift store).

There is no newer model of the HP LaserJet4m? or what would be the upgraded/newest model of that design?
Click to expand...

The closest would be the HP 1100 series.
 
Look for deals on Brother printers. The toners last a very long time.
 
I don't know about the cheaper hp laserjets. I have a p1006 I got for $60 or $70 about a year ago (maybe longer than that I don't really remember). It prints text nice and sharp but I swear they artificially make everything else crappy. Like if you try to print out a bar code it will make all the lines wavy and blurry because it thinks its a picture and I bet they do that on purpose since you can print text just fine.
 
I recently picked up a refurb Brother 5370DW (monochrome) for ~$110 and I do not regret my purchase at all. Having auto duplex is very convenient for students trying to save paper. Spool up is very fast, noise level is good, and quite compact in size. Toner is cheap and generic is available.

I replaced my 6 year old Dell 3000cn (color laser) after everything finally giving out. Don't bother with color lasers if you are not going to use them at all, those stupid chips/sensors flags it after a while and you'd be forced to replace them all eventually.
 
Brother 2270dw is $79.99 on Newegg. Its a pretty awesome printer for the money. Wireless N and a duplexer. You can have Staples.com price match it and then use a $25 off $75 coupon to get it down to $54.99. Ejunkie has coupons. Its gotten great reviews. I own one, my father in law owns 2. Its the only wires printer I've had that has never dropped off the network.
 
I use a Brother 2170W and it's amazing. Cheap generic issues, and it just works. Would definitely recommend Brother, and I have heard good things about the newer 2270dw.
 
I picked this one up recently:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00450DVDY

because I was looking for a laser with duplex capabilites and that offered built in networking. I wasn't planning on using the wireless connection, but I ended up having to, and it's been pretty fast as far as response time goes. The print quality is on par with normal laser, and it's dropped about $35 since I bought it to boot.

I'd have a hard time not recommending it at the $100 price point Amazon's got it at now.
 
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I have a kindle, and I have used OmniPage X to perform optical character recognition (OCR) on scanned documents. The reason you find so many misspellings in Kindle edition books is most likely varied. But my guess is that a lot of publishers can't publish eBooks fast enough, so they don't bother to perform the needed proof reading. Performing OCR is not fail proof. In fact, the computer tends to generate a lot of mistakes, depending on the quality and visibility of the original scan. As far as piecing together a PDF, I have converted my older eBooks, which are simply PDFs I've read on my computer, into .mobi files compatible with my Kindle using Mobipocket Creator - freeware available for Windows only. It works great converting docs, PDFs and other documents into eBook ready files.
 
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Be careful with lower priced laser printers. Some studies suggest that they release a significant amount of toner into the air and might be toxic.
 
Brother 2270DW. had one for about 3 weeks now and it's been perfect. So easy to setup, too! The option to buy a high capacity toner is a huge plus, imo.
 
Get a used DELL 1720.

I actually picked mine up for a whopping $7 at a thrift store. Only thing that was wrong was that the toner page counter needed to be reset.

It does a very nice 30ppm. I have had it for around 2 years and have not had to refill the toner yet.

The HP, Brother, etc. printers have page counters that cannot be reset. The toners come with a stupid little chip on them.

So if you printed 5000 blank pages, it would still count down even if it wasn't using any toner.

So basically, no matter how much toner a printed page actually uses, it counts down as it were a full page.

We have some newer HP Laserjunk printers where I work and we end up going through $300-$500 a month in toner alone all because of the freaking page counters on the toner cartridges. The toners probably actually still have at least 50-75% of the toner still in them. Such a waste.

Oh yeah.. and when you change a toner cartridge in one of the newer HP printers.. be ready to wait for 10-15 minutes for it to reset itself before you can print. Sometimes you even have to end up power cycling them or even unplug the power for a bit and then plug them back in before they will start working again.

If you really must get an HP, get and OLD one.. before they started putting the page counters on them. The only way you knew the toner was low is when the pages started getting light spots on them. There is absolutely no reason for those page counters other than the printer companies knowing most consumers are idiots and think that just because the printer says it is out of toner it must be so.
 
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