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I’ve endured poor quality black and white printing from my laser printer for quite a while. The pages would always come out lightly dusted with toner making them appear as though it was black text on gray paper. When it first started happening I discussed it with a friend and he said it was simply the toner running out. Since I’d never owned a laser printer before I wasn’t sure if that was actually the case, perhaps we weren’t on the same wavelength in terms of diagnosing the problem.

The other day I went to Staples to buy a new office chair, about time really. I found this nice high backed microsuede ‘manager’ chair a month or so prior, but didn’t really feel like spending all that money on something that I didn’t actually need. My patience, if you want to call it that, was rewarded because it was put on sale for a hefty $40 off. I really like the chair, it has great lumbar support, padded arms, and a headrest that actually works.

The point of mentioning the chair was because during that process my receipt was printed on one of their fancy colour laser printers, oooh… I realize that I’m ashtonishingly weird because I get excited over things like print quality. Anyway, seeing crisp printing on that receipt really annoyed me, in the sense that my laser printer was putting out total shit.

I’d held off on buying a new toner cartridge because they were retailing for around $70. That’s really not too bad, I suppose, except that the price of mono laser printers has come down so much that, well, we’re getting into the “free printer with purchase of toner” situation, just like inkjet printers are in… except of course it’s “free printer with purchase of insanely expensive ink.”

I decided to actually look online for the toner and found that newegg.com had it for almost half the price of the local b&m type office shops. I opted for the 3,000 page toner versus the 6,000 page one, mostly because of cost, but the price difference ended up really just being that 6K was twice the 3K… made sense to just get the smaller one instead (two 3K = one 6K costwise, etc, even playing field).

The new toner cartridge fixed the print quality problem, huzzah for that. I have nicely crisp text again. I really like laser printers simply because of the cost per page being so low… even if the initial investment is higher. The chances of running out of toner when you need it are so much lower than that of running out of ink with the inkjet printers… You won’t find a 3,000 or even 6,000 page inkjet cartridge. In this case the toner was actually cheaper than buying ink for my (unused for two years) inkjet printer which managed practically nothing before running out of ink.

I’m still very interested in a colour laser printer, but the main thing holding me back, again, is the high initial investment. Okay, so perhaps $500 for a ‘personal’ colour laser isn’t so bad… and I’ll get thousands of pages before I need to add more toner, but when you have four cartridges to replace that each cost $100… ouch! We’re pretty much back to the ‘free printer with toner’ situation, and it’d be better to just buy a new printer, heh. This is certainly true when it comes time to replace the fuser, opc belt, etc, which comes around 60,000 pages. I found some idiotic person bitching about having to pay $400 to replace the OPC belt on her $500 printer after six months. Well, uhm, if you’ve printed 60,000 pages in six months… just buy a new printer and quit bitching. You’d never get 60,000 pages out of even four inkjet printers before they’d disintegrate. All types of printers have consumables, toners, inks, belts, etc… It’s just on ‘throw-away’ printers, well, the companies realize that it’s pointless to sell those parts. The plastic case the parts are in costs practically nothing, but the guts of the machine wear out… and the OPC belt, and fuser are some pretty damned important parts to a colour laser printer.

I think I found one that meets my needs, while it isn’t the best, the price is almost right. I think, whenever I get around to wanting it bad enough to actually pay that much for printing, I’ll be getting a Brother HL-2700cn. It’s compatible with *nix, Mac, & Windows (very, very important), it’s network-ready (important, and helpful… no need to buy an extra printer server)… relatively fast, and all around not too bad. I dislike the lack of bypass/manual feeding of paper, but honestly I rarely ever use it on my current (also Brother) laser, and the reviews indicate the graphics are ‘fair’ …but hmmm, it isn’t like you actually print photos with this sort of printer anyway. To get into the higher quality graphics pretty much doubles the cost, and well… I can buy disposable inkjet printers if necessary. When it comes to photo printing it is much better and more economical to just have a minilab at a pharmacy, walmart, etc, print them, at least in my learned opinion. ;)