Home Forums Peripherals & Multimedia Peripherals Another printer recommendation, please

check out PC World's take on it. Then read HP's response too.

Someone's already done the measuring and the math, and concludes that printer ink (in new carts) is currently going for around $5000/gal- wow. I knew it was bad but that still surprises me.

I see a comparison between printers/ink and cars/gas, suggesting printers that will only use their carts is like buying a Ford and then having to buy gas from Ford at some huge price. Bug then I realized, I'd be expecting to pay more at the pump if I could drive for three months between fill-ups.

And if you only had to pay a couple of grand for the car.

Well, it's taken a while, but after looking at the printers offered by Brother, Canon, Epson, HP, and Lexmark I've bought a Canon imageCLASS LBP6000 laser printer (Reviewed here ). Talk about minimal, but so are my needs!

The only other printer I found that fit my parameters is the HP LaserJet Pro P1102w (Reviewed here ), but it would have cost $141 as opposed to the $78 I paid for the Canon, and it isn't reviewed all that much more favorably; further, it doesn't offer any additional functionality that I can foresee needing, its greatest attraction being its color.

Apropos of joemike's concerns about drivers, the Canon's got a well-documented installation issue, an equally well-documented less-than-knowledgeable tech support staff issue, and an also equally well-documented workaround, so I'm assuming that I'll be OK with it.

Edit: Forgot to mention that the Canon and HP have roughly equal per page costs.

Well done.

Well...done, anyhow.

Actually, I'm happy with my decision.

My Canon laser printer prints significantly better and faster (even with its 8-9 second warmup) than my (ancient) Lexmark inkjet printer did, and it's not at all noisy in the bargain.

Its down-side, a big disappointment, is its inability to print via AirPort Express as I assumed (naively, perhaps) it would based on its easily available specs: "Standard Interface - USB Device 2.0 Hi-Speed" Digging deeper into its documentation, though, I found: "Interface: When connecting with USB (The USB port on Macintosh)"

But balancing that out is the fact that even if the HP can print as I'd like it would take me more than 30 years to average its higher price down to (an extra) $0.01/copy…not particularly cost effective, and not a price I'd care to pay to save having to move my MBP about 3 feet and cable it up every once in a rare while when I need to print.

Canon may keep their drivers updated, but judging from the documentation they provide both in the box and on-line, they're not particularly Mac friendly.

The installation problem I mentioned earlier is really an example of their forcing Mac users to dig for instructions that are readily available to PC users in the form of a quick-start guide; Mac users, on the other hand, are merely directed to the users guide buried in the driver download, and without even a heads-up that the installation process is unintuitive and needs to be researched before it's attempted.

Further, the PC users guide (which, for some reason, is more than twice as big as the Mac users guide) has been updated twice since the Mac users guide was last updated.

I hope this helps others with their shopping.