[Shop-talk] Printers

[Wayne]

David Scheidt wrote:
> Brother are making some very nice small B&W lasers these days.  Much
> better made than the low end HP crap.

I don't care for Brother's stuff, because I've found their drivers to be flaky and the consumables expensive.

I'm not sure what you mean by "low end HP crap".  In the 90s, HP intentionally "crippled" their personal-sized printers, and some were real clunkers (eg: the 4P).  Annoying crap like 50 sheet paper drawers, and other things to dissuade them from larger scale use, and from scavenging their expensive printers' market share.  Even worse, some force the PC and driver to do the vector to rasterization of PCL and then dribble it to the printer bit by bit, like most cheap ink jets.

The 1200 I mentioned however, has a full 8MB, 90MHz processor, 250 page tray, decent manual feed tray, real PCL5, PCL5 and PostScript (PostScript was a really expensive option not too many years ago, so it was nice in a $350 2002 unit) And 15ppm.  I've found it to be a real solid little printer, with cheap consumables, and you can find them all over Ebay for cheap [search "hp (1200,1300)"]

I don't know much about HP's current personal sized laserjets.

I also see a bunch of old mid-range HP work horses, like the 5 or 4000 series on CraigsList for cheap;  just beware of excessively high page counts.

  -Wayne