Laser Printer

I want to buy a reliable and not too expensive laser printer. It has to be Mac (G4) compatible (usb). It could be in town or online. Any suggestions?

What will you primarily be using it for? Printing lots of black text? Or colourful photos? Or both? And Is speed an issue?

Hi there, what will be the main job of this printer? According to consumer reports Laser printers excel at printing black-and-white text, but that is really their only main use.

the brother HL-1440 $230 US is rated highly, as is the HP Laser Jet 1000 $200 US.

Mainly black text. I don’t care about colors and I don’t want to print pictures- Shutter shack can do that for me!
Speed is always nice but reliabilty and cheap price per page is more important.
Anything in the $150-$300 (Canadian) price range?

Lexmark 220 is being discounted. Should be able to pick it up under $300. Just set one up, nice black case, quiet fast. Beat the HP model in net reviews. you can also add a paper tray underneath.

Maybe I need to explain a little more why I want a new printer. The one I have now sucks! It’s an Epson stylus photo 820. It is unreliable. It won’t print black text if the very expensive and useless color cartridge is empty. It won’t take any of those cheaper brand cartridge. It never printed anything in color that was of any decent quality (photo or plain). And I doubt that I ever printed more than 10-15 copies of text without having it jamming or printing lines or being empty or something else.
It’s a piece of junk that basically came bundled with the computer.

I do a lot of printing for work but I do it by emailing to my workplace and then using the good system that we have there (right to the photocopier!) But my wife isn’t set up the same way and sometimes, you just want to print something at home anyway.
I prefer to keep my pics in a nice web gallery (thanks to someone I can’t name!) and send the ones that I want printed to shutter shack. As for colour printing ( cards, etc…) I don’t really have a use for it except that my kids would probably empty a color cartridge per week.
Maybe I just need to buy a very cheap, black ink only, reliable ink jet.
I miss those old apple stylewriter!

Hi there, not sure if you came across this website yet, but it has some interesting info about cost of printing per page (be sure to scroll all the way down to get more info)

http://www.experts-exchange.com/Hardware/Printers/Q_20733448.html

However, from consumer reports again:
most ink jets print 2.5 to 9.5 pages per minute (black-and-white)
cost of printing varies from 3 to 9 cents a page (blank-and-white)

Laser printers print 9 to 15 pages per minute (b/w)
cost of printing is between 2 to 4 cents a page (b/w)

Consumer reports also states that “black-and-white laser printers generally cost about as much as high-end inkjet models, but they’re cheaper to operate.”

Almost makes me want one. But I don’t know any specific info regarding models.

I have one sitting outside in the rain! It’s some british model that Apple rebranded here with Postscript, but the drum cost more than a new machine! I loved it on my old Amiga! Saw it new for $2100 and a year later it was in Costco when they opened in PG for $399…
now I must settle for my Xerox 2240…

BTW Dave: they lie thru their teeth. All of them use a 5% coverage format in economy mode. Type a single spaced page and it more than doubles. When my girl drew pics with our Lexmark 7000 (cream of the crop in it’s day) she’d do 1/2 page of solid blue sky, half page of solid green lawn and a little black kitty in the middle. Cute but the paper was soaked like a dishrag with about $5 worth of ink!
TIP: color inkjets- check out the Canon i560 or i860. Seperate ink colors and you can get generics <$15. They’re good size tanks too.
but inkjets are for kids…
EDIT AGAIN: sorry, that was an apple laser. the original stylewriter inkjets were Canon 600s (4 ink tanks) and 4000s (1 blk, 1 color tank) rebranded. They were good at the time but there was like 20 drops of ink in the tanks…