Toolkit

Story: Affordable colour laser printers

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For volume printing, and smaller users are well served by inkjets so have no need of lasers, the cost of the colour printing machine is at risk of being rapidly dwarfed by the cost of the cartridges, drum kits, fuser kits etc.

Going through your four makes:

Brother: we had several brother black and white printers many years ago. They all gave up the ghost on us. Would take a lot to shake our belief that Brother printer workmanship is unreliable. Even though their purchase prices may be very low.

HP: Do they love the razor blade trick (give away the razor, it is selling blades - or ink cartridges - that counts). Our 4500DN on a 3500 double sided A4 run this month has gone through 3 cartridges and a drum kit. We ignored successfully message replace fuser kit and that message has now vanished. The machine would not allow us to ignore the cartridge and drun kit exhausted messages. This is typical: we migrated much of the work this time round to black and white on a Kyocera FS1800TN with a double sided add-on, even that only gave 12000 A4 sides (densely typed black and white text) out of a 20,000 nominal cartridge, and, for all their song and dance about low cost of ownership, they force you to deal through their approved dealers gifting said dealers high percentage margins. However give HP their due: their printers in our experience work pretty well. Though we had great problems with expensive repairs - and eventually an unrepariable / inaccessible fixing unit - on a quite modestly used 3150 fax machine.

Xerox: They will never be forgiven for 38 inkjet cartridges at GBP 45 each on a very modestly used GBP 1195 fax model 3006 9 years ago. Also two expensive repairs. Once a firm takes you for a ride like that, never again to be trusted. 3006 machine was junked.

Samsung: have absolutely no experience, not qualified to comment.

Can we have people like ZDnet investigating and emphasising the true cost of ownership of "Affordable" colour laser printers? Not patting said manufacturers on the back as they get more people hooked onto the expensive cartridge / drum kit / fuser kit / repairs bandwagon?

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