Brother HL-1250 telling me it's retiring

Recommendations please for a replacement laser printer.

It's now behaving like a cranky old you know what, something I'm familiar with, but it's earned its keep.

Anyone have experience of colour models, as I'm thinking of one as the cartridges for my Epson R360 are in the same league as perfume, cost wise.

Geoff - Feeling the same as the printer today.

I've had a couple of colour laser printers. The first was an HP 2600n which was a single-pass, single-sided networked A4 printer. Never went wrong, fast and cartridges were easy to change. Not the cheapest cartridges at about £70 each (x4) but fairly large capacity and lasted for ages. I still have it after about 10 years but bought a replacement printer recently.

Now using a Lexmark CS510de (currently about £200) which does duplex A4 (double-sided). It's also networked (plus USB) and has a wifi add-on so you can print directly eg from your phone. Pretty happy with it, although a couple of times it has reverted to single-sided and required the settings to be reset. Duplex saves on paper and doesn't slow the output down much. I use the extra high capacity cartridges (which cost more than the printer but claim to do 4k pages in colour / 8k pages in black and white. A typical pack of paper is 250 sheets).

Dunno if the Lexmark remains the best choice but not a bad one all the same. Alternatives might include possibly a Brother or Kyocera?

Can't imagine going back to inkjet. Unless you are printing photos (why?), they seem washed out on normal paper and the paper distorts and is damp.

My recent experience of a Canon printer, the Canon MG2500 does not print A4 Colour, only 5" x 7" It does A4 B/W OK. This is noty stated in the printers blurb and I only found out when I tried to print A4 colour.

I have now bought an Epson, the one with ink tanks, not cartridges. Cost a bit but far better that buying two lots of cartridges that then equal the cost of the printer ! This Epson model is the ET-2500 @ £199.00. Staples were doing a lower price.

As to the canon printer, it's value to me is now nil so I will dump an almost brand new printer.

So, format that it prints is important to check, which I did not and just assumed it would print A4.

Clive

Until recently I had a new printer that came free with any purchase over something pitiful like $50 / £30. Of course, it was shipped with almost empty cartridges so it would run out just when you'd got it up and running. Talk about a cynical marketing ploy. And without needing to be a tree hugger, you have to wonder about the environmental impact of throwing away a brand new printer which is what I eventually did. I was buggered if I was about to pay through the nose to make the crappy thing work, so it never even made it out of the box.

From memory the ink for my wife's printer is roughly 1/10 the price of gold...

Seriously considering an ink-tank epson for colour to complement the workhorse HP laserjet.

Neil

Edited By Neil Wyatt on 26/10/2016 16:29:15

I've been happy with refurb HP Laserjets off Ebay - they are remarkably cheap. Built for heavy office use and spares/compatible cartridges are cheap. I have one mono (4100) and one colour (3600) - for which each of the four toner carts is £25ish and lasts ages.

Several years since I bought those so might be worth going a generation or two newer now. But I'd do the same again.

Will never buy an inkjet printer - just a total rip-off - anything requiring photo quality or better than the colour laser can do, I get printed either online or at a local print shop.

I have 2 kids in Secondary School and one in the local college so our printer works hard, I have just switched to a HP printer and for a very reasonable monthly sum compared to my current monthly Epson ink costs the HP printer orders up its own ink when it gets low, working well at the moment.

**LINK**

Most problematic printer we ever had was an early Lexmark multi-function.

The print heads kept dying and were very expensive to replace. We got two free replacements as it turned out eh problem was think corroding the print heads. It turned out it was only own-brand ink that caused the problem - they doubled the warranty period to two years because of this. After the second print head we changed to cheap aftermarket ink and it ran for years!

Also avoid big old HP colour laserjets. We had so much reliability from B&W HP laserjets we invested in something like four of these rather than have a upgraded printer copier. Within a year every single one had gone out of 'collimation' and despite endless helpline and other support, we ended up downgrading all but one to black and white use.

Neil

My Epson R300 only got junked because I could not find software drivers when upgrading to WIN 7 ! It was a very good Colour printer and produced some very fine photos. It worked fine with XP.

Re printing paper for colour prints, I found that OLMEC made by ICI was a superb colour paper.

Clive

A while back I got a free HP printer of a type which never worked from new. Most people who bought them when they were first switched on they drove something against a stop which promptly broke and rendered the machine useless. They just sent out a newer model to replace them and never recovered the duff ones. I got one from a friend as an alternative to it going into the skip at work, I'm still using the nice ground steel bars I got out of it!

Thanks for all the suggestions..

If I go second hand I will need to check that they work with Yosemite and El Capitan.

Epson have definitely shown the way forward at last with their 'tank' models.

Geoff - Will advise what I decide on, but don't hold breaths.

I got so fed up with replacing inkjet cartridges and clogged nozzles that I bought a used Lexmark colour laser printer earlier this year - it cost me £50 delivered with plenty of toner remaining in the cartridges. I'm very happy with it and even happier when I found out that using inkjet photo paper to print a photo gives almost as good a result as using an inkjet.

I have been using a Dell C1760NW colour laser printer for the last two years without any problems. It is wirelessly connected to all our computers so there are no extra wires and it can work as a stand alone printer. Dell colour cartridges are a bit expensive, but I have used the Premium Crystal Wizard cartridges from StinkyInk since I bought the printer with no problem. It is currently on Ebuyer at £99-99. There are a lot of good colour laser printers out there now, it depends which maker you fancy most and how much you want to pay. I don't believe there is very much between any of them now. The only thing to look for is the running cost.

I used to run a large Canon colour Laser printer/copier at work which produced good quality copies on suitable stock. It was still no match though for a half decent inkjet when it came to printing colour photographs.

......another reason not to retire early..............

Geoff

What do you print on your colour printer? I ask as I have an Epson 2400 A3+ printer which I use for photographic work. (It takes 8 inks and it 'aint cheap to run - the quality however is PDG!) I did buy a continuous ink system for this and this does reduce the cost a bit.

For everyday use I have a mono HP LaserJet P1102 - cheap as chips and the cartridge lasts for yonks. ( In addition re-filled cartridges are available making it even cheaper than chips!)

Norman

Edited By NJH on 27/10/2016 13:34:23

Hmm, I'm surprised the pics came out better on inkjet paper. Laser printers work by melting the toner powder on to the paper after it has been photodeposited(?) there. If you heat up inkjet paper, it goes all gammy and the shiny plasticky surface goes black and sticky. Ask me how I know. If you did not suffer from this problem, I would suspect it wasn't actually proper inkjet paper. They don't seem to mind transparencies though, which is handy for plotting out multilayer PCB gerbers to form a sandwich.

I agree though that the rendering of colour photos on colour laser printers is pretty damned good. Certainly on a par with the 4x6 photos we used to get from the high street.

We used to have one of those large A0(?) sized HP inkjet plotters for our mechies to print drawings out on. It didn't get a lot of use so it was always getting blocked up. Had something like 7 different ink cartridges and each colour also had a replaceable head. It soon got to the point that it wasn't used or even usable - a bit of a vicious circle. Of course, a colour laser that size would have been unaffordable. With inkjets I reckon you have to use them regularly to keep them working properly, a problem that didn't seem to affect the laser printers so much.

Set out to buy a colour laser printer at beginning of the week. Ended up buying an Epson ET-2500 EcoTank colour all in one ink jet from Waitrose - £190. (Why? - because the sales lad did a good job!)

The initial cost of the printer is comparatively expensive but after two years (they say) of average use when one or more inks run out you just fill it up with more ink. They reckon a set of inks should yield 10,500 pages which should do us. Its not photo quality but I would say equals/betters laser reproduction. The odd 6"x4" photo we want is done on another small dedicated photo printer

The built in scanner is very adequate for what we want and WIFI connection is a doddle to set up and use with PC/laptop/tablet/phone either locally or from t'other side of world. B/W copies from one button and colour copies from another - all very simple and easy to use.

Our new printer is for home use only, nothing to demanding and I am hoping with its purchase we will have solved the scourge of replacement cartridges at eye watering prices. (I read somewhere that the ink in many branded cartridges, volume for volume, is more expensive than Channel No.5. - something I can quite believe.)

Rik

Muzzer - Ilford Omnijet Pearl - I've used it for many years if I want a 'decent' colour print.

Rik - my biggest gripe with inkjets is clogging nozzles - if not used for a while, many cleaning cycles are usually required in order to get them all unclogged. I used to have an HP inkjet which was touted to automatically clean when required - whilst it usually did this, it also consumed large amounts of ink without doing one print!

Norman,

Just found I haven't responded to your question - sorry.

I use the Epson R360 for photos of family's 5year old, but I seem to using the 'Nozzle Check' mode more than printing.

Cannot decide whether to use the Epson in place of the laser, and incur the price of black cartridges, or go for another laser either b&w or colour, hence my post for advise and feedback.

Trouble is I no longer do as much printing as before, so I will use the Epson for the time being, and see how things go.

Geoff - Thanks to all for suggestions and comments.