MegaSack DRAW - This year's winner is user - rgwb
We will be in touch
oh mighty mind of stw - can you recommend me a colour, networked, laser printer/scanner with duplex at the 400-600 quid mark? I've got something in mind but I know that a bunch of folks on here are more than likely to know more about it than me and I'm a bit fed up trawling through manufacturers websites working out what their machines are meant to do.
I like Brother stuff, hate HP with a passion and am happy to look at anyone else (Samsung any good?). No need for photo quality. Probably 1500 b/w pages per month.
tx for any pointers
Hi
I run the service department for an independent office equipment retailer. We are the warranty service agents for Brother and I'd say avoid them. The way their laser printers calculate how much toner is left in the cartridge is crude and can mean you needing to replace them with 20% left.
We are also the main service agents for the Executive Series by OKI Printing Solutions. Although the ES range is out of your price bracket their MC560dn ticks all your boxes. They give outstanding prints due to the polymer in the toners, are extremely reliable(I have clients doing over 5,000 colour and 3,000 mono prints per month on this machine)and they come with a 3 year warranty and £50 cash back. They are also quite cheap to run.
I would also avoid Samsung. We were service agents for a number of years and they were expensive to run with consumables never achieving their yields.
If you have any specific questions, feel free to email me.
Keith.
brilliant Keith, thanks. I'll take a look at OKI as well then although the 560 is too pricey.
Ah, sorry. Forgot about the + vat thing taking it beyond your budget. But if you can stretch you might find that the cost of ownership over 3-5 years will be much lower than a Brother or Samsung due to the cost per page. Some of our clients have got the extra capital outlay back in as little as 6 months.
Interesting thread ... well, not really. But relevant! I'm in a similar boat to Leffeboy, tho probably with a slightly smaller budget. But I've got to be able to do high quality colour.
So, putting aside purchase price for the mo ... of the billion different makes out there, which is the cheapest to run?
Hi menothim
Keith was right about looking at the total cost of the machine. What I found looking at a bunch of models was that their marketing folks really know their job and the printing costs are all very very similar. The single biggest factor is getting your printing costs down is knowing how many pages you are going to print on average. The cheaper machines appear to deliberately force you to use smaller cartridges which are more expensive to run. The more expensive machines let you use the big cartridges. You also need to know how much of that is colour. Sorry but there is no easy way out of checking the numbers but the good news is that it isn't worth agonising over as it won't make much difference as long as you get the number of pages roughly right. If you are printing around 1000 b/w a month then you need to spend about 300 on a printer. At 3000 a month then it can go up to 700.
In your case you probably care more about the quality as that appears to be more variable between machines