Need a new printer, don't know anything about printers.

[Joduko]

I need a printer. It doesn't need colors since I only need to make shipping labels and important documents from time to time.

Does a good printer even still exist? All the reviews I see on e-retail products would indicate no...

 

It doesn't need any fancy networking as long as I can plug in a flash drive or SD card

[emosun]

3 minutes ago, Joduko said:

Does a good printer even still exist?

not really outside of the more industrial office style laser printers.

you can basically get either an overly expensive office laser printer , or an inkjet printer thats so incredibly cheap that you throw the printer away and buy a new one every few months until you finished shipping everything you want to ship.

[Joduko]

3 minutes ago, emosun said:

not really outside of the more industrial office style laser printers.

you can basically get either an overly expensive office laser printer , or an inkjet printer thats so incredibly cheap that you throw the printer away and buy a new one every few months until you finished shipping everything you want to ship.

How overly expensive are we talking?

[emosun]

2 minutes ago, Joduko said:

How overly expensive are we talking?

well basically i don't think i've ever seen a laser printer under 800$ that lasted any significant amount of time.

[Joduko]

6 minutes ago, emosun said:

well basically i don't think i've ever seen a laser printer under 800$ that lasted any significant amount of time.

I would consider it an investment. Do you know of any particular models that are worth looking at?

 

I watched my youngest brother spend over an hour taking apart and cleaning our old HP printer, putting it back together with a new cartridge and everything only for it to make a bunch of noises before it spit out errors. He understandably took a crowbar to it and smashed it to pieces in a fit of rage.

[Needfuldoer]

If you don't need to print color, just get a small monochrome laser printer from Brother, Canon, or HP.

 

Don't waste your time with inkjets. They all suck, even the ones that take bulk ink refills.

[mariushm]

Go laser... I would suggest going  Brother, don't buy the cheapest because those will tend to have non refillable toner or toners that come with chips that count the number of sheets printed. Though most of the newest models will have reset chips. My printer still was the design that has plastic gears and a spring and to refill the toner, I just have to move the gears into the original position.

 

The cheaper ones will also have a weaker drum unit, that are only warrantied up to 10-20k pages (when they go bad, you start having thin lines on your paper, gray crap on the edges of the paper stuff like that and you have to replace the drum)

 

For example, a bit higher end you have Brother HL-L5210DWT at $380 : https://www.amazon.com/Brother-HL-L5210DWT-Business-Monochrome-Networking/dp/B0CKWNT1CC/

 

The drum unit (DR920) is good for 45k pages, genuine replacement is around $225 , third party replacement is less than 50$

 

Comes with toner good for 3k pages, TN920, or bigger versions (6k  pages, 11k pages) ... they have chips so not as easy as just pouring toner into them, but you can buy third party toner with the chips and up to 11k pages worth of toner for around $55 :  https://ybtoner.com/brother-tn920-toner-cartridge/

 

Genuine stuff is $80 for the 3k, ~$100 for the XL (6k pages), $170 for the xxl (11k)