Printers / Color printers for small business

[VeraArev]

Hello everyone,
I have a question concerning buying a color printer for a small business.
It's not a publishing business or any of that. It is needed for normal functions of a regular small business. (Real estate).
What kind of printer would you recommend that would be reliable, fast enough, efficient and wouldn't break the bank.
I'd appreciate if you named models and also gave some reason to why that particular model should be bought!!!
Thank you a million!!
Vera

 

[BudTheGrey]

My first piece of advice is to bite the initial bullet and buy a color laser. They are more money upfront, although pretty good ones can be had for $500, but more than pay for themselves in speed and the economy of the consumables (toner). I've had good like with the OkiData 5100 series. I've not used an HP color laser in several years, but I would expect them to work well. My favorite, though is our Lexmark C510.

 

[TCouch]

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Lexmark.

Ok, let me clarify that statement. I'm an Authorized Service Technician for HP, Lexmark, Xerox, and Okidata printers. And I've worked on all of them. And from a technician stand point, the Lexmarks are by far the worst of the 4 I am certified to repair.

As for prints, the HP's give good color, at a reasonable cost per page, and are well built, as long as you don't buy the Color LJ 2500 series. Spend the extra money, and get the 4600 series Color LaserJet if you're going to buy HP.

Okidata makes a good, respectable product, but the consumables in an Okidata are more than that of HP. For example, in an HP, the Toner/imaging drum is one unit. Where as with the Oki's they are seperate. So, there is a few more things to buy if you went with Okidata.

As for Xerox, they also make good laser based printers, but they also offer a "wax" based printer. It uses solid ink, which gets melted, sprayed onto an imaging drum (which you'll never replace unless you dig at it and actually scratch the surface) and then gets transfered onto the page.

The Xerox wax based printers will give you by far the best quality. The new one is the Xerox Phaser 8550 and is fast at 30 ppm. The wax produces a glossy image on even regular paper, and text has a raised feel, for those times when presentation is important.

The down side to the Xerox is it's extreme warm up time from the Off state, which is why it should be left turned on. The other down side is that you will increase your cost per page, as the wax is a bit more expencive.

Timothy N. Couch
A1 Printech
Anchorage, AK

 

[nicksims]

I've had HP laserjets and now am a serious fan of the Xerox. We've used the 8400dp and will most likely get an 8550.

Why the Xerox? While the consumables (ink "sticks) are a bit more expensive, it is just about the only consumable part you have to buy. With laser, you've got the expected toner cartridges, but you've also got drum kits, transfer kits, fuser kits... Not replaced all the time, but when you do, get out the heavy checkbook. With the Xerox, you only have the ink and an occassional maintenance kit to buy (about $130 per 30,000 prints).

It cleans itself, prints very quickly, efficiently, and mine have RARELY jammed. And that was generally because I did something I shouldn't have. We print stationery, cards, glossy items, and use all sorts of papers, sizes, card stocks, textures...

The colors are incredible (a plus for us) and the b/w prints are simply fast.

If you have the option, spend the little bit more for the double sided printing ability.

The only downside to the ink for the xerox (other than price- but if you don't print high volume color you should be just fine) is that you can't buy it locally. More specifically, you can't run out to your local office supply store and buy them. You either go to Xerox and have them shipped or a local printer repair guy (I guess like TCouch?) can sell them. Here, the local printer repair guy also ends up shipping them. Not sure what the advantage is (sorry TCouch- that is just how it is here- they order it and ship it to us- takes more time). For our laser, we can just run out and buy the toner (but not the specialty parts).

To add to Tcouch's comment about the warmup time on the Xerox- it has a power saver mode which is designed so you should NOT turn it off unless you need to unplug and move the unit. When you boot up from an OFF position, it goes through various cleaning cycles and does use more ink than I care for. So- never turn it off. It powers down into a sleep mode and is ready pretty quickly when I wake it up from its nap. I'm not always patient- yet this hasn't bothered me. It is pretty quick I feel- especially compared to the warm-up time for my laser.

So to sum up- fast, high quality printing, low jam rate, average cost for ink if you don't push the color a lot, no large part costs, and it works on a variety of papers (I know not your priority, but when you print on some envelopes, you'll be happy).

Oh- this is odd, but do you live in a dry, low humidity climate? I'm in Denver. Pretty much no humidity (huge market for hand lotions!) HP won't acknowledge this (at least to me), other than in the basic spec section for the printers. If you go laser, make sure your office has the appropriate humidity- if it us too dry, jam-city! Get a small room humidifier.

Just our experience.

Good luck.
Nick

 

[danswindow]

I've had an 8550 since August and it has performed great. I initially was going through ink like crazy until I found that if I used the Enhanced setting it used less ink. The printing speed is greatly reduced but I've been using a lot less ink. I was told that in the fast color setting it was using all the colors even for black printing. Right now my cost per page for color is about the same as I used to pay per page for B&W hp2100 laser.

 

[nicksims]

danswindow-

I have the 8400. If you don't need to use the color at all and want to stick with the fast setting, try this- hoping it is similar to the new 8550. When you open your Printer Properties menu, go to Tek Color. There you'll find a Black&White option. With that, you shouldn't use any color- just black.

Nick