Uggg, i friggin hate printers!
theres no middle ground, its either overpriced biz stuff, or crappy bloated consumer grade junk, with planned obsolescence that only take same name brand ink.

what is a decent networked color printer that wont cost me an arm and a leg to refill?

dont really care about the speed, features, bells or whistles. and honestly i dont even care about the print quality.

all I want is build quality, network printing and reasonable ink prices. preferably refills, as its a bit more green.

TIA.

( oh and p.s., IT CAN NOT BE HP!!!!!)

I have a Brother B&W laser printer connected to the wireless network. One new high yield toner for $40 (the real Brother brand, not a cheaper refill) prints about 2,500 pages. I'm very happy with it.
They have a color version : HL3170CDW ($260 at the egg)

What's your budget ?
$260 might look like a lot of money, but considering the price of refills for inkjets, a single toner refill might be enough to get your money back

I tossed my ink jet printer a long time ago and moved to a B&W Brother laser as well. For the handful of times I've needed a color print, I drive to the local print shop.

Usually Borther lasers are chepaer on the long run with their implementation of separate toner and drum. I have no experience with laser color, my printer is only black/white. As much as i dont like HP, and the more expensive toners (with the drum change every time), they simply work, i had a small issue, i still have it, on my Brother that displays an error thinking i didnt changed the toner.... even an orignal brother toner and still i have to repull the old one, insert it and do the swap procedure, and it works until i turn it off, then again the error, the savings on toner are not turning to be such a big deal, as much as this issue is driving me insane, luckily i still have my HP laserjet that have worked fine for more than 6 years.

As a rule of the thumb, color laser complete refills cost between 1/3rd to half of the printers price. Most printers are equipped with "starter kits", sporting substantially lower filling compared to the regular toner kit.

Personally i've made good experience with the older Canon ink series, pick one with a more common cartridge type and you should get a reasonable capable printer with cheap ink refills possible. If using manufacturer cartridges every 3rd refill or so, you should stay clear of problems.

Since you do not want a HP, i cannot recommend the Office Jet Pro 8XXX series, they seem to need not much ink and have a nice feature set.

Colour lasers cost a lot more to run than their mono brethren, so consider whether you actually need to print colour.

A couple of things that I have discovered over the years:

Brother printers are (generally) reliable and cost effective.

EOL (models that are about to be replaced) printers are often discounted and brand new, and as they have been around for a while 3rd party toners/drums are available so the full price over time can be calculated, with brand new products they often use new toner/drums and you wont know the 3rd party cost of those for a while.

The drums on a lot of models of printers cost as much (or more than) a new identical printer, although I am not certain that the printer manufacturers supply "cut down" drums with new printers like they do with toners.

As a general rule, the more expensive the printer the cheaper the toners and drums are so if its going to get a lot of use you will be best off spending more on a printer to start with.

---

FYI I have an Epson EPL-6200, which is a pretty heavy duty non-networked printer, I bought this just before the last of the stock ran out, its a great printer that cost 40% less than the new model that replaced it and I bought a spare toner at the same time. Never been used a lot, excellent print quality, never replaced the toner, should last for another 5-6 years at this rate.


Andy

Everybody is suggesting the laser printer, but how much do you need to print, Xan_user?
A lot? then the laser is surely the solution.
Not a lot, then the question remains...


I had the same question, when I wanted to replace my old multitask HP (sorry, it's HP... but I never had a problem. Apart the cost of cartridges)

I would take the laser first models, but when printing max. 15 pages a week, I am a bit afraid of how the toner (2500 pages) will age after 3 years still not empty.
Although the toner will be way cheaper than my current 22€ refills, way too often.

I am not decided yet, because I also realized that new ink printers are also having (a bit) cheaper refills. (compared to my old F4180)
(and I would really need a double side scaner. Even more the scaner than the printer. )

But I am 100% decided on the fact that it was its last refill before being tossed.
My little HP knows it's running its last pages before replacement.

After I replaced my ink printer with a networked mono laser printer six years ago I never had problem with printing. Since I do not print every day, or even every week, the ink cartridge header(s) had a nasty tendency to dry out, making it unreliable and expensive to use.

Since the laser printer is networked and supports Postscript I can print from any operating system I like.

+1

I guess that's why I'm paying expensive HP cartridge. The heads are on it, if I remember. So it's never drying before the next set.
But more (too) expensive.

How long you can run on the same laser toner with your low printing frequency?
2-3 years on the same toner? More?

^ Depends on what your are printing.

An often sited metric is number of pages with 5% coverage intended to match text and more details can be had from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_19752

My usage is generally to print articles with blocks of graphics having large areas of gray shading, which increase how often I have to change the toner, seldom in any case. I change the toner (rated 6 000 pages) every few years.

Edit: Let med add that an unreliable printer is, for me, a non-starter.

I have owned a Samsung CLP-310N for 5 years. I've gone through 3 black toners and am still using the starter colour toner. Colour pages still look good. I think for occasional printing, lasers work well since the shelf life of ink is almost certainly lower.

Printing speed is also more predictable, as long as the warm up time isn't too long.

As reliable as refills may be, cost per page difference is still pennies so I personally stick to OEM and try to time it with promotions in my inbox.

I replaced the toner in my laser printer maybe 6 years ago.

The toner in my HP 1018 lasted 6 years. Not sure if came with a "starter" cartridge or not, but it was the one in the box. Now it has a knockoff "High Yield" cartridge which I don't expect to last for over 6 years at least.

Reading this thread I realized I still had a Nec Superscript 870 that I got new in 98 in the basement. I haven't used it since at least 03, if not earlier, so it has been sitting for at least 10 years. Fired it up and while it made a rather worrying smell, it printed just fine. I'm pretty sure it's the original cartridge too, so a 15 year old cartridge printed fine. I really need to take another load to the recycler

I have experienced that smell when I had to get the "spare" old laser printer out of storage.

Its basically dust being burnt, you get exactly the same thing with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_heating if they haven't been used for a while as the way the toner powder is fixed onto the paper is by passing a wire that's 300-400C.

http://computer.howstuffworks.com/laser-printer.htm


Andy

thanks everyone. going to check out a laser brother, but probably keep the ink jet for the few times i need color.

I'm not sure whether they are still producing them, but Kodak used to go down the cheap-refill route for their ink-jets.

Annoying thing about laser printers is their possibly high standby-consumption and potentially (under research) nasty emissions from printing (ozone, fine-dust, etc.).

Good point.

Since we are keen in low consumption around here, maybe some could recommend lower idle commotion, on laser printer models?

Some brand are better than other for this?

Power switch works for me.

My now 7 year old HP 1018 only uses 4 watts at idle. I can't see newer printers being significantly worse unless they have networking functions done badly.

My Canon multi-function inkjet uses 7 watts at idle, but it has a WiFi connection running.

My Brother uses 3.5 Watts at idle I believe... I can measure that again.
(It's connected to the wireless network)

Mine has a physical on/off switch easily accessible on the side. Spends 99%+ of its time turned off, not just for power reasons but because it has a very fast spinning 80mm fan in the side of it which comes on when you switch the printer on.

Under W7 (less successful on previous OS's in my experience) you can easily print several documents over several days and turn the PC on and off repeatedly and then once you have several jobs in the queue you can turn the printer on and they all come out at once, just make sure that all of the files to be printed are located locally (not on a USB stick).


Andy

My MFC is run as a fax, so it's on standby anyway. So i never bothered to measure.

Chose a b/w one with wireless support. But i have an old LExmark Color Laser (IBM actually) that will only be connected and powered on if i really need a color print.

Generally, best way to cope with 15pages/week is the power switch method. Leave it off until needed.

One advantage of a Laser over inkjet is longevity of toner. Keep that in mind if you don't print much as all inkjets use a small amount of ink every time they turn on to clean the heads and depending on the model, they'll go through a cartridge a month even when not being used. Another issue is that some of them if not used will have the ink dry in the print head (seperate tanks/heads are the worst) meaning replacing the entire printer.

Last, if you do a lot of printing each month, you definately have to pay attention to the duty cycle of the printer. Those cheap HP 1100's are only good for about 200 pages a month and when they die, they're paper weights.

As to HP color lasers, they're designed to fail - that's right. They're actually designed to fail after the warranty expires so you're screwed anyhow. I bought an HP 1600 Color (great prints) that had the Red quit working. It wasn't a matter of not working well, it completely quit working and there are no repair parts available. As others have mentioned, when I need color, I simply go to my local business center/office supply shop and have them do it. For photos, I go to a local show and print on true photo paper with quality inks for less then the printer would cost me as little as I need color.

It's actually gotten to the point that I haven't printed anything for the last year as anything I need to share with folks goes out as a PDF that they can print as needed. The other advantage of using PDF is the fact that I don't have to worry what version of Word, Open Office, Star Office, Bob's Office and what not they have on their system plus I'm able to embed a time-stamp while setting the file to Read-Only mode (can't be edited). Solved many of the issues I had with docs that needed to be sent to someone else.