Peripherals forum: Please Help Us Choose an Affordable Color Laser Printer

Back when I worked in retail I used to read reviews and reliability survey religiously. One thing that was fairly consistent regardless of the source(PC Mag, PC World, Consumer Reports, etc.) was that Brother usually followed by Lexmark were consistently near the bottom of the list.

Don't assume that any retail salesperson knows the return rates on an item. He or she doesn't necessarily work in returns so may not necessarily see most of the returns. Since a lot of stores' salespeople don't work on commission anymore(see Best Buy, Circuit City, etc.) the salespeople don't have a clue if xyz product came back unless they see it come back or the customer told them. Even if you are in a commission environment some stores don't tell the salesperson if the customer wasn't happy with the unit or if it were DOA.

Furthermore, I can tell you that return rates don't necessarily tell you what the median lifetime of something that wasn't DOA. Since most stores won't take it back after 30 days that is a pretty small sample of the lifetime failure rate. The manufacturer knows how many are sent in for warranty repair, but not every unit that breaks in the warranty is sent in for warranty repair. Furthermore, it tells you nothing about failure rate after the warranty period. For the more expensive units you should expect something to last longer than a year so two units with low first year failure rate may have distinctly different failure rates in years 2-3.
Some large corporations that have 100s if not 1000s of units really know the long term failure rates, but individual consumers opinions are usually based on too small of a sample to be meaningful. Opinion surveys with 1000s of responses are about the only way most general consumers can get an idea of the reliability.

You are right that one bad unit shouldn't automatically cause you to not buy from that brand again because it may be a statistical outlier for an otherwise reliable brand, but from all the data I ever saw Brother isn't the best choice if reliability is your primary criterion. Brother printers tend to be a good price for the features so they might still be worth considering.

But the usual comsumer fair at 200 bucks are turning out to be 2 year affairs with rare exceptions. A rather nice exception for the printer are those hp k550 models.

Shop the HP models but don't pan the Brother because one you had died after a few years.
Bob

Unless space is an issue, they would be better off getting a dedicated black and white fax/copier/printer for doing black and white printouts (remember, faxes don't use color - and really, 90% of text pages are just black and white) and a dedicated color printer for those special color pages and printouts.

I do have a HP 2600N color laser printer - it is very fast and produces good color. However, it's manual feed is a bit problematic, and it cannot print out on specialty paper, such as labels or business card sheets. Since I have an old HP 6MP laser printer, it isn't used that much - only when color is absolutely needed.

At work I deal with a Xerox 8500 color printer that uses a wax-like ink blocks rather than cartridges. Again, the color is very good, and it has a duplexing unit to print on both sides of the paper (something to consider to save on paper). It can also handle labels and specialty papers very easily. It is a bit more finicky than a laser printer though - in addition to the ink, it has a 'cleaning kit' that collects excess wax and needs to be replaced every so often. It also needs to be left on all the time, since during start up, it wastes ink cleaning itself. The 'waste' pages can't be recycled through the laser printer either, as the wax will melt off in the fuser unit rollers.

Again, the Xerox isn't a primary printer (There's a black and white laser and a laser-fax in the office) except when I need double-sided printouts for reports, or color - or both.

For small office work with high output needs, I would definitely look at the Xerox for color purposes. Get a good black and white laser fax/copy/printer machine for everything else.

Office Depot have HP Color Laserjet 1600N (networkable) on sale for ~$200
While I was shopping at Office Depot, I bought a non-networkable one on sale for $179 with $150 rebate ($29/-) net.. cant go wrong with that!


HP have a new Multifunctional model (MCF..) that is currently out of stock but was on sale for a mere $350 after a $150 rebate
..keep checking