Colour Laser Printer recommendations needed

[Harrison]

I'm looking to buy a new colour laser printer.

I currently use an A4 B/W Samsung for most stuff and it has been brilliant and very economical to run with third party toner cartridges.

I've also got an Epson All-in-One for colour A4 printing and a professional A3 printer for photos. But the Epson is too expensive to run as it eats colour cartridges really badly and third party ones only last about a 1/4 of the time an official one would. So for office printing and my wife's teaching printing I'm thinking a colour laser would be a much better bet.

So what A4 colour laser printers would any of you recommend?

Based on the experience with my A4 B/W Samsung I would definitely consider a colour one, but they don't seem to get as good reviews as the B/W only models. Anyone using a Samsung colour laser and could share their expeience? Running costs? Print quality? etc

I'm not using it for photos, only business like colour text and graphics, illustrations etc.

 

[Zetr0]

Ultimate this will depend on your budget.

I am into colour Laser Printers in a big way, I know them quite intrinsically over the last 15 years of ownership.

History:
back in the day I would use a Brother or Oki laser setup but Samsung and HP had overtaken them by 2002, from there I used the Samsung CPL500 quite exclusively for nearly 8 years, interspersed with an Oki B/W unit for large Uni runs of appendices and data output.

Despite being a high volume printer with time the unit essentially wears down, in the end I managed to secure a HP 4700DN, and let me tell you, its the best I have ever used!

To be honest the HP 4700DN, its a massive monster and can be obtained quite cheaply on eBay ( just make sure that the fuser kit and transfer kit is above 40% ) toners are relatively inexpensive - and you will be coughing up at most 0.025 pence per page of black and 0.48 pence per colour page. (yes less than half a penny!)

Output is amazingly crispy as you expect from a laser and it has lots of features like duplex mode and booklet mode!!! (which is awesome for making manuals and guides )

HP obviously have a range of units and one of them that really sticks out and could be had for cheaper is the HP 3000n range - they use the same imaging system as the 4700dn series but the squeeze it into a tiny package.

My friend Atari-Jay just got one of these and is very delighted with it -


HP LJ 3000n with 12 month on site HP warranty £120 + £12 Postage

• Under 5k prints
• Over 50% toner levels

eBay.co.uk BIN


I will be honest, having played and researched a lot of laser colour printers, this is the one I would recommend at the moment.

 

[Harrison]

Thanks Keith. That HP does look good, however even the 3000 model still looks quite large. How big is it?

My current Samsung is the ML-2525 and I love how small it is, but at the same time able to load 250 sheets in its tray and have a long lasting toner cartridge. I don't really want a colour one to be much larger if possible, especially as my A3 printer, an HP B9180 is a bit of a monster size wise.

Do you have any experience off the All-in-one lasers? It's something else I'm considering as the ability to scan and photocopy would be good, and I could then get rid of the Epson all-in-one inkjet currently being used.

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk 4

 

[Laudrup]

We are using DELL 2150cdn printer for a while now. I am really satisfied with this workhorse. We are printing 50 sheets color a day, for b/w prints we are using a DELL 2335dn (~250 a day).

I recommend Dell printers !

 

[Zetr0]

Thanks Keith. That HP does look good, however even the 3000 model still looks quite large. How big is it?

My pleasure, I am out at Jay's tonight, so I will take a picture of the HP LJ 3000n to give you an idea of size =)

My current Samsung is the ML-2525 and I love how small it is, but at the same time able to load 250 sheets in its tray and have a long lasting toner cartridge. I don't really want a colour one to be much larger if possible, especially as my A3 printer, an HP B9180 is a bit of a monster size wise.

Do you have any experience off the All-in-one lasers? It's something else I'm considering as the ability to scan and photocopy would be good, and I could then get rid of the Epson all-in-one inkjet currently being used.

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk 4

I have had some experience of AIO (all in one) printers, Unless your budget is in the £400+ market sadly I cannot recommend them as usually they are integrated so much that when one thing goes wrong it all goes wrong =(


@laurup

Dell would be my second choice, but I haven't as yet been able to find a deal as good as the HP I listed earlier.

 

[johnim]

I have a Dell1250c and has been great im still using the supplied toners with it
here is what ebuyer have to offer

http://www.ebuyer.com/store/Photo/c...ort=price+ascending&96=Colour&page=1&limit=30

 

[Harrison]

An update to this old thread I started some time ago.

I eventually purchased a Samsung Xpress C1860FW Colour Laser All-in-one and I've really pleased with it.

http://www.samsung.com/uk/consumer/...s/colour-multifunction-printer/SL-C1860FW/SEE

For the price of £275 from ebuyer.com this printer has a lot of features, as well as a few that are a bit gimmicky such as NFC.

It has it's own print server so doesn't need to rely on a networked computer for printing and it's fairly easy to setup. You can even do direct WiFi printer so the printer doesn't even need to be on a wireless network as the device can connect directly to the printer using it's own direct wifi server.. handy for printing from phones and tablets. It also has ethernet as well as wifi and although mine is connected to the wired network.

You can also print via NFC, placing your mobile device on the NFC area of the printer (the device needs the Samsung print app installed) and the printer will instantly commicate with the device and print what is currently shown on its screen. Gimmick in my view but some might find this useful.

The 4" colour touchscreen also means you don't need to access the printer from a computer to change settings or update things before performing an operation, and this means in scanning or photocopying roles it works and feels just like a full office photocopier to use. It also has direct scanning features where you don't even need to use a computer. You can plug a USB stick into the printer and it will scan directly to the memory stick, and you can even navigate and manage the files on the memory stick from the printer's screen. Another cool feature is scan to email, so you can scan documents and the printer with directly email the scanned documents to an email address. You can setup multiple users for the printer with their email addresses, then just select a username before scanning to let the printer know whom to email it to. Pretty cool feature.

It also has a built in web server allowing you to log into the printer from a computer, and this brings up the printer's homepage similar to a broadband router... you can then use this homepage to check status of the printer, such as toner levels, waste toner level, printer status, print jobs in queue, as well as entering usernames and emails addresses into it's address book. Nice feature.

The software that comes with the printer is also good. Providing a lot of features. You also have an eco mode on the printer to save on toner and this works well and the printer quality is more than acceptable for documents you are not needing to be high quality for presentations or more important prints.

The only negative about this printer is probably size, but that isn't an issue for me personally.

Highly recommend this printer, or if you don't need the All-in-one scan/photocopy/fix features it also has a cheaper little brother called the C1810W which is the same printer but within the top scanning section and colour touch screen. Still provides the same quality and speed of colour printing.

Oh and I almost forgot, this printer also came with a free Samsung WB35F camera worth £135, which is pretty cool. I didn't need another compact camera, but once arrived it is pretty nice and has quite a few useful features plus a reasonable spec of 12x optical zoom and 16MP. The reason for including it free is due to it including NFC so you can just place the camera on the printer to print a picture from it. It also has built in WiFi so you can connect the camera directly to a mobile or tablet to view images live from the camera, which is a nice feature. Could be a handy backup camera for me to take with me alongside my DSLRs, or for when I don't want to carry them with me.