Comparing New vs Refubished Printers? 40
GraWil asks: "Does anyone have advice on purchasing a color laser printer? I'm trying to decide between getting a new small 'personal' color laser or a used/refurbished workhorse. For the roughly the same money, I can either buy a Xerox 6100 or a refurbished Tektronix 740/750 or even a tabloid sized 790. I've had mixed luck with color HP and Lexmark printers but I'm open to any suggestions at this point. There are a fair number of reviews but none of them ever compare new with the old."
Re:Toner cost (Score:3, Informative)
New cartridges cost $220 or something like that.
I bought a LaserJet 1300xi at Sam's Club for about $320. It's not quite as fast, and you have to load it twice to print 500 pages, but cost per page is miniscule.
I use two printers (Score:2, Informative)
I print about 40-100 pages per day. I'm an avid reader and print out things to read on the bus as I don't want to show off my laptop to early morning bums.
Refurbished isn't that great (Score:5, Informative)
Printers have a fixed lifespan. Gears grind down, aerosol builds up, capacitors burn out, internal memory has limited write cycles. Generally, a printer is rated for x number of pages. A cheap 50 buck one is maybe 10-15K, a 120 would give you 30K+. There's a large difference between a refurbished printer that someone used once a day for 3 years, and one someone printed 5-10 pages a day on (and as much as it surprised me, some people do print more than that). The second will have a high chance of breaking in the next 3 years, the first probably won't. Of course, this data is for inkjets so multiple by a factor of 3 to get better numbers.
I'm not saying that refurbished can't work. But with the price of lasers still fairly high, I think you get a better deal buying a new one rather than risking it breaking early.
Also, make sure to look into cost per page. Thats the cost of toner, divided by the number of pages printed per cartridge. This differs vastly between printers, and for heavy users can dwarf unit cost.
The Used Looks Nice, It Has PostScript (Score:4, Informative)
I wrote a comment [slashdot.org] on PS a little while ago in the "printing on Linux" article.
Also, given the choice, get a printer with a built in network server (you know, ethernet). If you have a desktop, it might not seem important. But since I've gotten more computers and started to use my laptop as my main computer, having the printer seperate from any computer is great. I don't have to keep one computer on. Even if I only had a laptop, I could plug the printer into my network and print from anywhere in the house thanks to WiFi. I can keep my printer next to my computer, in the basement where my cable modem is, in a bedroom that has an ethernet jack, or in a bathroom (if I added a ethernet jack). And with a little ethernet->wireless adaptor, I could put the printer in the attic if I wanted. It's actually very handy.
Also, as a /. special, if you have both ethernet and PS on your printer, it's AMAZINGLY easy to configure with Linux, Windows, or OS X. Windows is a little weird (a network printer that's not attached to a computer is considered "local" when adding a printer. Huh?). But no messing with GhostScript or anything under Linux. The printer already speaks PS, and if it's like mine ACTUALLY RUNS LPD, so you just forward jobs.
I hope others can help you better with the which is best, as I said I've no experiance with color lasers, but PS and ethernet are fantastic features that you should be looking for.
Re:Don't do it (Score:3, Informative)
Real World Experience: Color LaserJet 3500 (Score:3, Informative)
I work for a company that remanufacturers toner cartridges. One major disadvantage of buying a new model printer is that if your company doesn't make cartridges for your printer, it won't be able to give you free ones
That being said, since remanufacturered toner cartridges are a big help to anyone on a budget, you should bear this in mind when considering what to buy. I'd give the nod to HP because with the highest market share they also have a bigger remanufacturing industry. Lexmark has a lawsuit going that is trying to prevent remanufacturing entirely for copyright issues. As a result, I would strongly recommend going with HP if you want a shot at cheaper cartridges.
I've had many conversations with the guy who runs the factory about what to buy. I said "Gee, used color LaserJet 4500s are getting pretty cheap, maybe I should buy one". He talked me out of it saying there are all sorts of problems with those old printers, and the technology is much better refined in newer models. His opinion is that anything older than the 4600 is not worth getting, and he's not doing that to try to sell cartridges since at the time we made cartridges for the 4500 not the 4600.
I think his advice was sound, since I like the quality of the 3500 quite a bit better than what I've seen of the 4500.
Color lasers do not print as beautiful photographs as inkjets do, and you should be aware of this. At the same time, it might cost you $0.50 a page to saturate a laser-printed image with ink, while it costs about $2 a page (including special $0.50 a page ink) to print your photos on a typical colour inkjet. My actual printing cost has been a hair under $ 0.10 a page including a good mix of text and photographs.
Judging by the listings on eBay, you will get a Color LaserJet 4500 for about $450 or so but it may not include the toner cartridges, or it may include used-up ones. You're still going to have to buy about $400 to fill it up. That seems to imply that you're not spending much more to get a brand new 3500 with brand new full-life toner cartridges. I paid $999 for my 3500N (with the networking). Since the new cartridges are $130 each just about everywhere, that means most of the value is in the cartridges, not the printer!
Looks like my six months of printing has cost me around $54 a month for around 500 pages. Not bad considering how much I've used it.
In conclusion, I've been extremely pleased by my Color LaserJet. The photos aren't perfect, but nobody who has looked at them has complained. And the text printing is, as the C|Net review says, darn near perfect. I can say that printing in colour is downright addictive and I would never want to go back to the spattery inkjet or the boring monochrome LaserJet.
Hope this helps.
D
Re:Toner cost (Score:3, Informative)
While toner cost does make a difference, for a refurb you can generally find toner on Ebay or the like for cheap. You can also find recharged toner cartridges from most printing companies for cheaper than the original, though you'll have to be a bit more careful in the care and handling since recharged laser toner cartridges always leak more easily.
In particular, I once found a Phaser 760 being tossed out at a corporate site and brought it home to work on. There was little wrong with it, and I found toner cartridges (all four colors) for around $80 apiece on Ebay. They do print a ton of pages, but that also depends on what you're printing.
I would say that the primary deciding factor (for refurb vs. new) is that reliability of original. If the new printer was a POS then I would steer clear of the refurb. I have a Lexmark Optra S that I picked up particularly because I'd worked with an Optra S for a while and found it such a rock solid printer. I even sprang $$ for the duplexer for it (new, couldn't find a refurb/second-hand one at the time).
The track record of the printer will also advise you as to what spare parts to stock on hand. Laser printers are much more repairable and reliable than inkjets, but you do need to have replacement parts available - fuser, roll bars, paper feed rollers, and imaging drums in particular for color lasers. I remember that the paper feed roller (little rubber wheel that pulls the paper out of the tray into the printer - nubby when new and smooth, dusty rubber when worn) was the thing that wore out the most on HPIVsi's and we stocked those by the truckload. The rest of it was pretty rock solid and like most B/W lasers the imaging drum is part of the toner cartridge, so much less hassle.
After that I would think about the size both in terms of the amount of space these heavier duty printers require and the weight (the Phaser 760 was one @#$% heavy printer and I think lugging it around was a good part of what re-injured my back). If your don't have a lot of desk real-estate to spare or a really sturdy printer stand/table then you might want to think twice.
A lot of the pricier but nice features in printers are more affordable when you buy a refurb. Think about networking built in on the printer and any built in spool disks or memory. The down side is that refurbs seldom come with a manual or warranty and some of these things are what will kill the printer in the end. The primary reason I ended up throwing away an old HP of mine was that the spool disk went bad and I couldn't replace it.
How comfortable you are tinkering with the printer definitely is the last thing I would list as a factor in choosing refurb over new. If you have to get the copier repair guy in to fix a paper jam, stick with new, however, if you're comfortable with getting a little toner on your hands and reasonably handy tinkering in the guts of a PC, then there's no reason to shy away from the refurb printer.