As title… needs to be laser and cheap to buy/run.
Must have a sheet feed and be able to print onto press n peel.
Highly preferable if it supports Apple AirPrint .. either way needs top print from kids school iPad.

Why does it need to be laser? My (limited) experience is colour laser is large, slow and expensive.

Just for the classic stw counterpoint, my experience is that lasers are smallish, cheap, don’t run dry, and fast!

OP Define ‘decent’ graphics. My samsung c430w is quick and cheap, and it’s graphics are ‘ok’ but they’re not like art quality prints you’d hang on your wall. Fine for school work tho.

Well I’ve got nothing bad to say about my HP Envy 5640. Cheap with Instant Ink, works well, never clogs, seems to do everything without issue.

EDIT didn’t notice you said laser. But I still think inkjets can be good.

I’ve hated every inkjet printer I’ve ever owned. Expensive to run and if you try to save money by not using it very often the inks dry up anyway.

I was given an HP Colour Laserjet Pro 400 just before the start of lockdown (replaced an ancient Laserjet 4000 B&W that I’d had for over a decade). It’s great. Quick, colour print quality is way better than the big old corporate colour lasers I’ve used. Support AirPrint (though I think AirPrint can be a bit flaky – sometimes size/orientation seems odd with AirPrint and you’re better off printing from a Mac). You seem to be able to pick the printers up for under £300 refurbished.

Toner cartridges are expensive at retail – £300? at full price – but they do a few thousand pages so cost per page is fine. But you can halve that if you shop around on Ebay and well under £100 if you use refillled/remanufactured toner.

No idea what presss and peel is but lasers get hot so you cant’ use shiny photo paper and I’d guess not anything that has glue in it.

Toner cartridges are expensive at retail – £300? at full price – but they do a few thousand pages so cost per page is fine.

If a ‘few thousand pages’ means 3,000 that’s 10p a page. I pay 3.5p a page on Instant Ink and it’s always 3.5p regardless of how much ink goes onto it. I could print out 100 completely black pages at no extra cost.

Why does it need to be laser?

Because press n peel only works with laser toner.

OP Define ‘decent’ graphics.

Well as a starting point I want to be able to print something like this. This is just a mockup onto vinyl film but I want to etch onto metal.

View this post on Instagram

Second mock-up of headtube design on aluminium for the raw frame. Now Dad needs to cut out so he can acid etch and then anodise onto plate metal. If you like the FilthyRides products see the link in my profile for 10% off! #filthyride#mtb #ferrets #ferretsofinstagram #downhillmtb #downhillmountainbiking #grom #kidsmtb #kidsdh #littlerippers

A post shared by OlsterMTB (@olstermtb) on Oct 14, 2020 at 4:27am PDT

My samsung c430w is quick and cheap, and it’s graphics are ‘ok’ but they’re not like art quality prints you’d hang on your wall. Fine for school work tho.

I had a Samsung one (quite possibly that one or its predecessor) but it seemed very expensive to run toner wise. Certainly quality was good for my requirements but at the point something (can’t remember) broke it seemed too much effort/cost to repair it. [it was linked to the toners and the cost of replacing them as well and may have been linked to me using 3rd party toner]

OH currently prints a load of Jnr’s school stuff and her own school stuff and this tends by default to have a black background (timetables and homework). She’s unwilling to do anything but print directly to a default printer (it’s my problem to fix) but its rivalling or exceeding my spend on bike stuff on the Epson 420W MFD.

If a ‘few thousand pages’ means 3,000 that’s 10p a page.

It used to be tens of thousands … Many moons ago I had a Laserjet 4L that reached EOL (75k) in 2 carts (to be fair 99% text). My brother had one of the early CNC machines and I have it to him and he made a alloy gear to replace the plastic one designed to fail and it was still working a decade later.

Any more suggestions?
Just needs to be cheap to own/run and print out “reasonable” mono graphics.

No idea what presss and peel is but lasers get hot so you cant’ use shiny photo paper and I’d guess not anything that has glue in it.

The pnp needs 150C-170C to transfer the toner to the metal and is specifically made to work in laser printers so can’t see that being an issue.

Wow…. I was going to recommend the Brother HL-3140CW that I bought last year when I changed jobs…. But as it’s now £320 rather than the slightly better £114 it was back in Feb ’19 I’m not sure I can. Seems like a huge chunk of money. Anyway, you can get pattern cartridges for it and it’s still on the original ones but just works whenever I need it. Just shows how many more people are looking for home printing this year!

To quote an old IT Manager…HP are the drug dealers of the Printer world, lure you in with a good deal, and leave you addicted to expensive toners for the rest of your life! I have a colour HP laser and do use genuine cartridges, I believe HP put a chip in their cartridges, and the reused, and refurbished stop the Digital display working, although they will still print. On a funny note…I got my printer through my wife’s IT contacts – cheaper than standard RRP, but default set in Hungarian…even a hard reset didn’t sort it, so on Google Translate working out each menu, until I could set up English!

Wow…. I was going to recommend the Brother HL-3140CW that I bought last year when I changed jobs…. But as it’s now £320 rather than the slightly better £114 it was back in Feb ’19

I have a HL-3140CW and did exactly the same! Was about to recommend that, or the current equivalent, and then found it looks to be over £300, when I am sure I paid just over £100.

I also have a Brother mono laser printer. Was cheap (I see above that this may no longer be the case), toner cartridges are cheap and last ages (compared to inkjet rip-offs), it prints at 10x the speed of an inkjet, and quality is more than acceptable for printing out schoolwork etc.

EDIT: Mine is a DCP1610. Still available for 130 quid or so.

Wow…. I was going to recommend the Brother HL-3140CW that I bought last year when I changed jobs…. But as it’s now £320 rather than the slightly better £114 it was back in Feb ’19

Further research seems to suggest the Brother ones the toner doesn’t (or may not) transfer as well.
It’s hard to say as most of this is from sources don’t speak my language (as in they speak “art” which my brain can’t process)
I need to find some information in a language I understand which is going to be the use for PCB etching.

To quote an old IT Manager…HP are the drug dealers of the Printer world, lure you in with a good deal, and leave you addicted to expensive toners for the rest of your life!

Yeah funny but 2 decades ago I got a copy of an engineers manual though an official partner.
This described how the engineer can set the “call engineer” copy, print count and totally disable the printer until the client pays.

It used to be tens of thousands … Many moons ago I had a Laserjet 4L that reached EOL (75k) in 2 carts (to be fair 99% text)

It still is for B&W printers – colour lasers have 4 cartridges so if you want them to be a desktop size I guess the cartridges need to be correspondingly smaller.

HP are the drug dealers of the Printer world, lure you in with a good deal, and leave you addicted to expensive toners for the rest of your life!

But they also seem to be the biggest sellers which mean there are a lot of enterprise quality second hand printers around and 3rd party toner is easy and cheap to source. I’ve never worked in an office where they’ve used anything but 3rd party on the old b&w lasers. maybe more complex on the latest printers.

If a ‘few thousand pages’ means 3,000 that’s 10p a page. I pay 3.5p a page on Instant Ink and it’s always 3.5p regardless of how much ink goes onto it. I could print out 100 completely black pages at no extra cost.

That’s impressive – sounds a genuinely good deal. Are there any downsides?

Inkjet is definitely much better for photos on proper shiny photo paper but, unless something has changed, much worse than laser for colour documents.

Not pressed the button yet, but was tempted by one of these Kyocera. There is a slightly cheaper non wifi model if you can run a cable, and compatibles seem to be around £40

My wife prints all of her business (sticky) labels and docs, gift vouchers and tons of other stuff on her OKI 511dn it’s been solid (she had a 3 something dn prior but bust it due to stupidity) great image quality happy with 3rd party toners, only downside is they’ve gone up in price a lot recently.