Recommendations for office printers please

Dopey_Dora_42

Hi,

Can anyone recommend an office printer please that the ink cartridges are not too expensive and the machine can cope with quite a lot of printing per day. At the moment we have been using an epson c86 which isnt really suitable for an office.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you

Dora x

Debt_Free_Chick

B&W or colour?

For any reasonable volume, where you also want speed & quality, I would go for a laser printer every time. Especially as they are around £100 or less. Replacement toners tend to be expensive though.

Dopey_Dora_42

Thank you , we need colour and black .most of our documents are just in black but our head office logo is coloured.

Dora

Mobeer

I would definitly recommend a laser printer. Though their consumables cost more than for an inkjet they also last a lot longer, which should give a lower cost per page, plus they are generally faster.

Have you considered having two printers, one for colour and one for black and white only?

ManAtHome

I use a colour laser (Samsung CLP-500) for officey stuff - definitely lower cost per page than inkjet, faster, and no problems with drying out. Also works well with my Maxtor NAS drive, although I'm sure you can now get the printers at a reasonable price with networking built-in.

Little_John

How the hell do you have a printer working with a NAS drive? they are totally unconnected devices. some printers can use a hard drive in them but they are not a NAS box and seperate printer.

Anyway back on topic, you have a few problems with your request, you will not get cheap consumables for a printer of the type you want. Laser is the only way to go for printing of large volumes but laser consumables are not cheap. the more you spend o the printer in the first place the cheaper to run they work out at, the cheap colour laser printers cost alot in toner cartridges and imageing drums, my hp 2550 costs £60+ per toner and £120 for an imageing drum, their lives are actually about 3000 pages for the toners and 6000-7000 pages on the drum the HP stated figures are 5000 pages on the toners and 20000 pages on the drum but for a colour page the drum uses the equivilant of 4 pages. so if you printed every page in colour you would get 5000 pages my figures are based on actual use I have used 2 drums and 10 toner carts so far. page costs work out at about 8p per page.

the bigger the printer the more expensive it is to buy but they have larger capacity toners and drums they also use single pass technology making printing quicker and cheaper compared to the 4 pass printers. the cost of the consumables are pretty similar but thye last longer therefore printing costs are cheaper.

How many pages are you looking at printing? colour and mono? as stated it may be better to buy a decent mono laser and a high output inkjet like one of the hp business inkjets, the seperate print heads and large ink tanks make the running costs lower and performance is pretty good. they can be bought for about £100 for the 1100. each head is about £22 and the ink tanks are the same.

I would buy one of of the 1100's and a 4000 series mono laser.

ManAtHome

Little_John wrote: »

How the hell do you have a printer working with a NAS drive? they are totally unconnected devices. some printers can use a hard drive in them but they are not a NAS box and seperate printer.

Maxtor NAS drive (and a few others I believe) have USB ports which support printers and/or USB drives/sticks - mine does.. Gericom (Aldi) USB drive, at least 3 different types of memory sticks, Samsung 1410 mono and clp-500 colour laser (obviously not all at the same time - only 2 ports, but any 2 seem to work).

Little_John

ok sounds like they have print server qualities in them, maybe you will be able to set up queue names on the 2 ports or different port numbers 9100 and 515 for example and be able to use both at the same time using the port config option in printer properties under ports.

Debt_Free_Chick

Dopey_Dora_42 wrote: »

Thank you , we need colour and black .most of our documents are just in black but our head office logo is coloured.

Dora

I would simply get a printer to print a supply of paper with the logo on it. Then use that paper to print from a B&W printer.

You need to be clear about your primary needs and address those first - to me, it sounds like a B&W laser printer. I might then consider a budget colour inkjet for occasional use.

HTH