Our old HP Color Laser-Jet behemoth that we inherited from Sue's old employer has gone terminal and it's too expensive to fix it. Time to buy a new one. Must be able to to modest amount of color printing in a timely fashion, reliably and don't want to have to replace it in 12-18 months. Not quite a large office environment, but we often have to do multiple copies of 20+/- page printings and occasionally multiple 100+ page reports or proposals.

Prefer not to spend too large a fortune as we haven't got it to spend. <~>

Any suggestions or good/bad experiences?

I recommend HP printers all the way.

If you can blow 1k usd, this printer is worth going for:
http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF25a/18972-18972-3328060-15077-3328071-2512208.html

Its ment to be a small office printer, that can do quite a bit of printing, and connect up to your network for multiple people to use.


If you need to go cheaper, then:
http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF05a/18972-18972-3328060-15077-3328070-446153.html

It can't handle the volume of the other guy, but if your only doing about 1000 printed pages a month, it'll serve your purposes. I'm not sure of the quality of color it does, but black/white is pretty good.


You can also look into local photocopier dealers for leases of printers if you want to go that route. I'd stay away from getting a second hand printer below 2k usd (brand new), its just not worth the hassle.

Did you check into your local staples/photocopier/printing stores?

Or check online, like: http://www.colorprintingwholesale.com/?

Just ideas.
Kris

Thanks.

I've had mixed results with HP printers of late, admittedly not high end. While older models performed flawlessly for years, newer models seem to have bugs they never fix and QC issues. I am open to another manufacturer.

We are using Xerox Phaser 8550 at UC Berkeley. It is Solid Ink printer, not exactly a laser printer. The print quality is the same or better. The prints durability is the same. I believe the colors reproduction quality is much better than that of Laser printers. Very reliable. The previous model 840 was working perfectly for 7 years in severe abuse environment (by students and post-doc's). Bought the new model 8550 a year ago, because they had a free new printer trade of promotion (just buy the ink from them often enough), and because the old one had many of its exterior plastic parts missing :-)

You can check the current promotions here (but the one I've mentioned was for education institutions only): http://www.office.xerox.com/perl-bin/product.pl?mode=rebate#rebate_color
They are offering a $500 trade of for the 8860 model (check your old printer model).

Doug,

Then I suggest going to a site like http://www.newegg.com/ and going to the printer section and reviewing the reviews of customers.

Newegg is a an online geek heaven and they take the time to do up all the specs to every product, even take their own pics of all products from the box to out-of-the-box.

Good luck in your hunt!

Kris

I concur with Alex. The Xerox Phaser 8550 is a realiable workhorse.

I agree about HP printers. We just had one go bad on us after less then 9 month of use.

We just purchased a new color laser printer from Costco.
Its a Xeros Phaser 6120N. It was shipped in 2 days!
So far prints are of good quality and its VERY fast, even when printing color prints.
Cnet review of it was pretty positive too.

As an IT person i would NOT get a HP for several reason, and if you want them i can list them.

I also have the Xerox 8550 printers in my office and while they are very good they are not toner printers, they use solid ink that look/feel like cayrons. A better model in that class is the Xerox 6300/6350 or a used 6250 which are color toner based, and they have a lower cost per page.

A lower cost alternative is the 6180 which cost about half the price and is intended for lower volume of printing than the 6200/6300 series of printers.

I agree HP quality seems to has deteriorated over the past few years.

I was at an account on Friday where we determined that a 6 month old HP color laser needed to be replaced. The previous week, a fairly new B&W HP Laser printer needed to be replaced at a different client. I am loosing faith in HP.

I would be interested in your reasons. Sue is still a "believer."

Old habits die hard.

When i was researching which printers to get for our office of 25 people i was looking at several things and this is what i found:

On comparable priced models:
The cost per page was lower for the Xerox. Xerox was ~3.1 and HP was ~5.5 cents.
Xerox page per minute rate was almost twice as much.
Xerox had more RAM, which makes a difference with large document sizes.
Consumables are cleaner and easier to use.
Xerox tends to jam less and jams are easier to fix.
Xerox tended to be upfront about the cost of consumables while HP you have to hunt this down.
Xerox drivers have fewer issues than HP, in my experience.
Xerox tends to be quieter.
Faster first page print, usally in less than 10 seconds.

I have a 3 year old 6250 with over 300,000 prints on it and it is still going strong. The last thing i had to call a repair person out for was a paper jam, and that was because the sales person tore a sheet of paper to shreds trying to get it out instead of calling me to do it. The only real issue i have had with them is when the office orders really cheap paper that has alot of dust on it, the dust coats the rollers and causes printer jams, but this is fixed by cleaning the rollers, which is not that hard.

Here is the comparison (Xerox 8550 vs HP 3000 - almost the same price): http://www.office.xerox.com/latest/855CC-11.PDF
IMHO, XEROX is the clear winner.

I can also vouch for the Xerox. Nice, fast prints and reasonably priced. I have 6 of them on my network at work.