World of Laser Printers: Part 2

I left off the last post with a discussion of our "workhorse", the HP LaserJet 4100 equipped with a JetDirect networking card, extra paper tray, and duplexer. Today, I'm going to get into the other half of the equation that makes our printing system here on StaNet complete. 

On occasion everyone needs to make a copy of something. Here in the United States, it's often our drivers licenses, or birth certificates for the kids' sports teams, but it could be any number of things. And of course, no one wants to have a full-blown copier in their house. About 10-15 years ago, the first of the reasonable all-in-ones came out and alleviated that problem. They just make so much sense; printer (usually color inkjet), scanner, copier, all in one rather small unit which not only gives all the functions, but clears precious space. However, with all the goodness comes compromise. Although, most people don't care about the slow and poor quality scans, the one thing that is an issue is the same for virtually all inkjets based devices. The fact is that it's an inkjet! Although there are some things about the technology that reigns supreme, the use of them on a day-to-day sense is not very cost or resource conscious. The fact is, they all dry up over time. I've never used one that didn't. Some are worse than others, but they all do it. Some use ink more heavily and some less so. We have friends that have a Kodak who say that although it doesn't come up to their claims, it is their experience that it does save some money in ink. In my own experience, I've come across nothing that uses up ink quite as fast as an Epson, although the output was always top-notch.

Some years ago, we picked up our first in a long line of HP all-in-ones, and used them first attached to a PC then moved on to networked versions that we could share. The whole time, it was a frustration to pay the $30-45 per cartridge on a regular basis. This was somewhat lessened for us since we didn't print out in color a lot (we had the laser by then) and we bought our cartridges in two-packs at Sam's Club. Still it was incredibly annoying to have put in a cartridge and print little or none, go back several weeks later to find that I needed to put in another to copy something! The cost per page was astronomical!

So, several years ago I tried the first experiment. I bought a used color laser printer: it was an HP Color LaserJet 5, I got it for a great price ($75 plus toner AND an unused set), AND it was HUGE. It wasn't a floor-standing model, but it should have been. I can't even begin to describe to you how big and heavy it was! I could barely lift it and could barely get my arms around it! It printed out beautifully, but DID I SAY THAT IT WAS HUGE, plus it didn't solve the copy need, so I sold it for about what I paid for it. But I was hooked! I knew that I wanted a laser for my color needs as well. I began looking at all-in-ones that were color laser based. Unfortunately, at that time, they we still quite large both in terms of size and $$$, so we kept soldiering along with the inkjet.

About 3-4 years ago, I notice several things were going on; lasers (that worked unlike the LJ1100 series) were getting smaller, Samsung was not only in the market, but they were supplying some of them to HP for the bottom end of the product line and they were doing some color laser all-in-ones! So I started watching them carefully and reading reviews. 

I don't think anyone who's the least bit interested in technology has missed the meteoric rise of the Koreans. They've gone from basically being a 3rd world country and outpost for the American military to dominant status in several key industries in less than 25 years! They've become as threatening to the Japanese industries as the Japanese had been to the American's in the the 70's. Basically, they've out-Japanesed, the Japanese! This has happened in everything from automobile and ship building to high-tech electronics such as cellphones, televisions and computer chips. 

What this led to for me was the Samsung CLX-3175FN, networked, all-in-one color laser printer. Not only does this thing do everything that I had needed from it's inkjet predecessors, it was small, unobtrusive and rather inexpensive. I bought it used for about $200 along with a complete set of unused toner cartridges which by itself was a $100 value! This pretty much completes my networked printer systems and covers the vast majority of my needs. 

The "vast majority"? Well yes: lasers are great, but they don't do photographs very well, so along the way, I've picked up some old Kodak photo printers so I can do quick prints to give people like my daughter's birthday party participants. People still LOVE to have a physical picture to hold in their hands. Eventually, I'd like to have a wide-format photo quality inkjet, so I can do my own printing of framed photos around the house, but that's a creative office reorganization to go and down the road. At this point, all I can say is that I'm extremely satisfied with our network printing system that's available to all computers at all times and doesn't dry up for less than $300 total invested! It was very satisfying the other day to watch my wife who was in her chair in the living room using her laptop on Wi-Fi to send various print jobs to whichever printer suited the purpose while printing out things for her classroom....all without a glitch and my intervention.