Favorite B/W printer & ideal B/W printer

rocinante

Hello! I’m wondering what ppl are thinking about when it comes to printers. Do you have a favorite printer manufacturing company? How are repairs and buying new ink? Do you go with brand or off-brand supplies and how does that work? You buying in person or off the Internet?

Let's say, you're looking at buying a new laser printer (for black and white only printing) and was wondering about recommendations for the bare bones and if possible, the ideal printer if money & stuff doesn’t matter.

How about manufacture location? Some printers are made in different spots of the world, but I see that some are also “mostly” manufactured in certain places. For example, Xerox is a USA company that manufactures their printers in the in USA and other spots of the world. It’s challenging to figure this stuff out, it’s not all transparent, but somewhat possible in small ways. How much stock do you put in to this being important vs. a final product that will work great for cheap in long run?

You can find B/W Xerox laser printers for much cheaper than this $849 beast, but it's an example: https://www.xerox.com/en-us/office/printers/xerox-b410-printer

What would you recommend in your experience from the questions above?

Circle Eh!

rocinante I've run used brother, KM, xerox, canon and when it comes to a black and white work horse I feel like functioning when you buy it and a copy count in the low millions matter the most. Contacting a distributor of these companies in your area, telling them your budget and say you're looking to buy something off lease can result in good deals for an office copier. Also buying from a gov auction or copy shop closing down.

I don't really get caught up on the bells and whistles for a bw copier, but probably size and footprint will matter second to it functioning and not having an absurd copy count.

toast

I'd definitely second Circle Eh!'s input on the topic. I've always gone for copy counts in the low 100,000s, and have had printers crap out at about 1 million, but YMMV.

Also to these questions:

rocinante How are repairs and buying new ink? Do you go with brand or off-brand supplies and how does that work? You buying in person or off the Internet?

We've had a couple different models of HP workhorses and the repairs have been pretty chill. Mostly just maintenance kits and occasionally other replaceable parts that we buy off of eBay.

We go with a mix of OEM and off-brand for supplies. Almost all bought on eBay and Amazon. Quality has been a real mixed bag for both OEM and off-brand. Like, buying 3 or 4 toners at a time because odds were only 1 of those would actually be any good. That was when our printer was starting to get pretty old, though, so a lot of the toners we were buying had been sitting in warehouses for years and years.

For a while I thought the OEM were better quality on average, then I changed my mind and thought the off-brand were better. So now I might say it's just a toss-up.

The real trick is making sure to try the supplies out before the return/refund window closes.

bigsalami

toast The real trick is making sure to try the supplies out before the return/refund window closes.

This