im looking for a decent straightforward black and white printer for printing out stickers and posters....
I think i'm looking for a laser printer.... the ink doesn't run when they get wet. On dabs.co.uk they start at about £70-80 (how much do they differ in quality?? I'm not after speed at all) I think basically all im after is a photocopier-quality printer. im not altogether sure how they work but i think they use toner right??

how cheap would it be to replace the cartridges in a laser printer?
do they last for a long time?


i hope someone can help me out cos i'm not sure what i need...
thanks!

:cool:

There are several things you should be looking at:

How much do you print per month in sheets?

What size do you print?

How old or new is the model you are looking at?

Is it PostScript?


I have used laser printers by HP (laserjet 4 and 6 series) and have a Xerox Phaser 5400 at work currently. All of these models are workhorses rated at 30,000 sheets plus per month and in the case of the Xerox 200,000 (we only run about 10,000 per year). We mainly use it as a B&W postscript proofer, it does 11x17 and prints to the edge.

The Xerox in particular has very good toner life of about 20,000 copies and cost about $60-75 US I think to refill.

Don't be affraid of buying used ones especially if you can get a good model for cheap, try office auctions. The high end model from even 5 years ago are still good printers and are built like tanks. Many of these printers cost in the 2,000 to 5,000 dollar range when new. Our xerox cost $3,000 3.5 years ago.

Check menufacturers websites to see if the drum is part of the toner cartidge or not. If it isn't it's another thing to be replaced every year or two (depending on use)

Postscript printer will probably work better for what you want and could produce better prints in some cases.

Check what weight paper the printer will take. For example many or the HP printers only take 32lb so cannot run card stock.

There have been lots of very cheap laser printers on the market these days and though I haven't tried them I really doubt there quality in both print and build.

We recently got a laser/fax combo and the toner only lasts for 2500 prints which isn't very long at all and the toner cost $30.

Toner usage is almost always based on 5% coverage per page which is basically light text, no graphics. If you are doing stickers then you will be using way more so you really have to watch the toner specs on the model you're looking at. If the printer is rated at 5000 sheets at 5% and you are printing 25% coverage then you will only get 1000 sheets per toner cartrige.

Another thing you should be looking at is processing speed (which is usually not related to print speed). Our Xerox for example has a pretty fast PowerPC RISC processor (what Apple used on pre-"G" macs) for processing files. Cheaper printers have slower processors which means for complex or large files you could be waiting a long time for a print. On our old Apple LaserWriter I wouldn't print some things as I would be waiting 3-4 hours for a print. Now you won't be printing anything near as complex as I do but on a slow printer you could be waiting 30 minutes for a file that has lots of detail.


Hope that helps a bit

:)

right ok, a lot of information to digest!

basically i want a cheap but sturdy printer to print out the odd poster or sheet of stickers (but probably mostly text because i dont have a working printer at the moment)

I'm really not going to be using it much AT all (just a printer for my room) so i'll probably only use it once or twice every WEEK. which is why i'm not too bothered about speed.
I would like to be able to print stickers and posters decent enough to display in public (or to take to the photocopiers to get loads done) I don't need anything in colour (I use our school's A3 photo printer for that) but i would like reasonable quality. I've heard lasers print generally a higher resolution anyway for things like text (not sure if these rumours are true). I don't need to print any bigger than A4.

I wouldn't want to spend more than about £100 on one if i can help it (not sure how much that is in US $). Do you know of any problems that can occur with cheaper printers apart from slow processing?

What do you do with yours anyway?


cheers :D