Home Forums Peripherals & Multimedia Peripherals Recommend a Printer?

I want to buy a simple monochrome printer with Wi-Fi. The only one available in the French city where I live is a Hewlett-Packard model HP Laser-Jet Pro P1102 for 129 Euros (about $170.00). Does anyone have any experience with this model or can recommend something else? Much obliged.

I don't think you are going to find a black and white inkjet anymore, let alone one with wifi. $170 isn't a bad price for a laser printer, especially one with wifi.

Be sure to check how many pages you are going to get per toner cart, and how expensive the carts are. Generic carts are usually a lot cheaper too.

Since you are looking at laser printers the Brother HL-2270DW at an extimated street price of $150 US and has both WiFi connectivity as well as full duplex printing. Even better, Brother has excellent support for the Mac and uses standard OS X drivers rather than proprietary drivers HP is prone to using.

As I indicated, I don't have a lot of choices where I live. Of course I could wait and find something else when I travel to a bigger city. I only need the printer for downloading text so monochrome is the cheapest way to go, and I'm not interested in any other features beyond the wifi. But now you've got me nervous about the H-P proprietary drivers. Need I be concerned about that? I use a late 2006 Macbook with OS 10.6.

Not really, but it helps to understand the difference. Mac OS X includes a slew of drivers, from a standard set to the current crop of drivers from printer manufacturers like HP. The HP drivers may be proprietary, but they are freely available to all users. In addition to including these 3rd party drivers in Mac OS X, Apple regularly provides driver updates whenever the printer manufacturers make them available.

The difference with the standard drivers is that in this case HP, not Apple, makes those drivers, and that the end user (you) may have to wait for HP to include certain functionality or fix bugs in an updater, rather than for Apple to do so. That said, there usually is no problem with using printer-specific non-standard drivers.

Thanks for everyone's help. I think that I'll stick with the H-P model mainly for price considerations. After checking the Brothers French website, it turns out that the price for the HL-2270 is a steep 195 Euros (about $260), a lot more than the Stateside price you estimated at $150. Au revoir.