Color Laser Printers

[Aristotle]

I've had a wonderful HP Laserjet 4L printer for over 12 years. I got it used from my dad who had used it for a few years before that.

It has served me well, but I have really wanted to replace it for a few years with one that is faster, has more options for printing things like envelopes and such, and most importantly, could print color.

We have an inket that we use for color from time to time but I really hate inkjets. I hate the frequency with which you have to replace the ink, I hate the cost of ink (toner is no dream, but it tends to be better than ink), I hate the way the ink has to dry, and most of all, I hate having to keep 2 printers going.

We know color laser printers are expensive, which is why we've shopped around for 3 or 4 years now. We can never seem to find one that does what we want for a reasonable price.

Some things we're looking for:

* There must be a cartridge for storing paper (preferably in the 200+ sheet range). We saw a nice, new HP color laser that was about $500 but the paper hangs out on a tray like a fax machine. Bzzt. The baby will annihilate that.

* An option to manually feed a stack of alternate paper would be nice. When we print out things like checks we do that on special paper. It would be nice to be able to load that separately by hand rather than having to pull out the cartridge, put that paper in, put the cartridge back in, etc.

* Decent resolution.

* Good ppm speed (most importantly for printing black).

* Reasonable cost.

* Network capable. Ideally, I'd like to be able to put the printer on the network as a network device and not have to install it on one of our computers. That way everyone can use it without the computer it is installed on being turned on.

* It should only do printing. I'm not interested in those All-in-One type devices.

Does anyone know of any printers that fit these specs?

Does anyone know of any good sites that review printers or discuss/analyze the features of various printers?

Thanks!

[Kyla]

Check out this site... http://www.pcmag.com/category2/0,1738,10,00.asp

[Bramond]

Or Try this one.....
http://www.vnunet.com/products/hardware/printer

Good luck !!

[Gadiantor]

I've been using color laser printers at work for awhile. I've used HPs and Lexmarks, so I can only comment on those brands.

This turned into a longish rant so I'll give an executive summary: HP sucks, Lexmark rules.

I've found that HP, no matter what model, has annoyingly long warm up times, and everything about them seemed above average at best. There was nothing that I really liked about any of the thee models we used. I'd include numbers, but I don't really remember them, and my comments are about their entire line, as they all had the same issues. The higher priced models didn't live up to expectations in quality of printing, speed, or maintainability (they had to be cleaned far too often) and almost all the components were plastic which gave them all a rather cheap feel. The low priced one we had continually had problems with the USB connection dropping off, and it would cycle itself seemingly randomly making loads of noise. If you go with a network card in the thing the usb problem wouldn't be an issue, but it speaks to me of the shoddy workmanship that went into the printer in general (we had the same problem on two different printers of the same model).

The Lexmarks on the other hand were all very fast, super high quality for the price paid, the maintainence was infrequent, and they were tremendously reliable. I was impressed with every aspect of the printers, but it came at a cost. I'm not sure what they have in the way of lower end printers, but I'd consider them over an HP any day at any price just based on my experience with the two brands.

[Aristotle]

Wow. That is officially the first time I have ever heard anyone say anything good about Lexmark.

[Isaviel]

Yeah no doubt I have always considered Lexmark to be cheap and worth what you pay for. I use HP color laserjets at workl though they are not cheap they do a good job and are networked for everyone to use. The other color printer we use is a tektronix. I'm not sure what they have available for what you're looking for but it's another good color printer.

I'm not sure what your price range is but here is a link to some of the Tektronix printers

[Gadiantor]

Thanks for jogging my memory! The other printers we used weren't Lexmark, they were Tektronix!! I feel like a huge idiot now, but thanks!

So everything I said about Lexmark apply to Tektronix...or just ignore me. I'll pretend to still be jet lagged...or something...

I don't know why HP color laser printers suck so much though, I've never had any problems with their black and white printers.