Colour Laser Printer

[raro]

We use in the office a Lexmark C500. The sales guy at Tukcom talked me into it, showing the huge cartridges (they were actually twice as big as the HP cartridges....).

Nevertheless, I just made a rough calculation as I sensed that the price per page is quite high....5 Baht I came up with! Since replacing the cartridges is almost 5,000 baht each (!) I consider buying rather a new printer next time two of them are empty.

Big question is: which model? I am getting somewhat tired of paying for toner through my nose!

[webfact]

if you need superior text quality and medium/good graphic output than I recommend Xerox Phaser 6180N

It's also an affordable printer. Be aware of expensive toner prices. This applies to all laser printers. 5K for a cartridge is not unusual...

Edited March 10, 2009 by webfact

[Crushdepth]

We just got a HP CP 2025 at work, 39,000 baht (but its the double sided / networked model). Quite nice, but it seems to process jobs a lot slower than our old black and white model. Toner is about 4,000 baht per set.

[Guest Reimar]

As I wrote in an other thread before, IT-City sells an OKI Color Laser Printer for THB 9.xxx while the Toner cost per color for that Model is below THB 1,000.00

Cheers.

[Cuban]

Indeed - I decided to avoid buying a color laser and just use ink-jet for proofing then contract out 'production runs'.

If you want to keep it in-house I suggest looking at a model that allows self refills of the toner packs - there are suppliers, I found some when I was looking two years ago but didn't need to follow them up.

Trawl the forums for experiances on how different makers treat non-original toner packs.

HTH

[jingjingna]

I looked into the OKI printer recommended by Reimer. While the toners are under 1,000 Baht per colour, the downside is after 500 pages they'll need changing.

[monty]

I use the epson c1100, which I guess is out of production now.

Cartridges were about 3200 Baht for color and 2,500 for the black one, but they last quite long.

It's hard to put a price per page though, printing full A4 color photo's eats the cartridges, you can count on 20 Baht/page for that.

I'm getting about 3000 pages of mixed color use (I have a brother laser for B/W pages).

[Guest Reimar]

I looked into the OKI printer recommended by Reimer. While the toners are under 1,000 Baht per colour, the downside is after 500 pages they'll need changing.

To be clear: I didn't recommend the Oki while I wrote that those printer is to sell at IT-City for a quite cheap price regarding the supply's!

As long as I haven't tested that printer by my self, I will not recommend anything, just gave the info.

[Crushdepth]

One thing about the colour laserjets - the cartridge life tends to be quite short compared to 'black and white' printers. They have to fit 4 cartridges in the printer, so they tend to be a lot smaller.

Although I haven't used our colour laserjet much yet, my impression is that colour inkjets actually have much better image resolution (although, I hate cleaning the heads). Curious if other people found the same.

[webfact]

In my office I would use a

Color Laser for mixed color sheets, flyers, charts, letterheads and for superior type/text quality.

The latter can not be achieved with an Inkjet printer.

Inkjet for occasional printing of color photos. Used on certain types of paper Inkjets produce

a better output.

[rogerdee123]

I've always used HP Color Lasers. Now using an HP 3500 and HP 3600 networked.

Regarding toner cartridges, for many HP color laser printers there are two capacity sizes for each color cartridge. If you're looking for less cost per page the go for the larger capacity cartridges. Many buyers prefer the smaller capacity cartridges because it's a smaller upfront cash outlay but the cost per page goes up.

There have usually been 4 cartridges in HP color lasers I have owned and the printers are huge and this is one of the reasons why.

Usually for me the toner cartridges don't run out at the same time however once they did and I also considered buying a new printer rather than replace the four cartridges because the new printer comes with four new cartridges. However the cartridges with the new printers often are the smaller capacity ones. So beware of false savings or (like me) you will find your new laser printer running out of toner soon after you buy it and you're back to square one needing toner again.

A couple of years ago in order to save money, I took cartridges into a shop to have it refilled with toner. A few months later one of the refilled cartridges started leaking toner into the machine and I didn't realize it until it was to late and the machine was ruined for business use. After painstaking cleaning it still worked but the color toner would show up on the odd page printed out from time to time. I think once the toner gets into a machine like this you can never get it all out. So I don't refill cartridges anymore. But maybe there are reliable refill shops out there that guarantee their work.

I used ink-jets also for some years like everyone else. But I've done the calculations many times (although not lately) and I believe there is no way an inkjet can be cheaper on a per-page basis if you use the real OEM replacement cartridges.