hi folks. our laser printer has just been confirmed BER (beyond econimical repair) so we need a new one quickly. we have always used HP2600n and found them very reliable and pretty damm good basically. just wondering what others use and recommend anything different?? by the way they are about £150-£180.

we use kyocera here very reliable![]()
Although we bought a surge of 2600n printers last year, we are edging away from them now as the running costs make it the most expensive printer in the school. Like many, we were taken in by the brand name, cheap buying price and quality, yet failed to calculate that the costs of the consumables and their capacity cannot compete with a model maybe that costs £100 extra.
If it's heavy usage, go for maybe one in the 3000 series, but always check running costs first. If it's for light usage, I guess it might not be too bad, but that all depends on overall printer usage.

The other option (which is often overlooked) is networking a photocopier. This can save a lot of money too. Most modern photocopiers just need a 10/100 Ethernet board installing.
Can I add a little underline to the points above and recommend that instead of asking for "good printers" without a guideline on its usage that you approach this from the other direction... ie:
How much use did the old printer get, over what period and roughly how much were you paying in consumables?
Once you have that info' I'd then ask for ideas based on that usage and bearing in the mind the likely use it'll get, figure out which is long term most cost effective.
Course I'm biased because I spend inordinate amounts of time on printer related stuff but as a rule, cheap printer means highway robbery on consumables.
We standardised all our printers with HP Laserjet 1320n's but HP decided to stop the model and bring out a new one with a different toner cartridge. Yippee!!
I use HP Laserjet P1006.
we've got a load of HP2600n's and they are great for small workgroups.
If you were happy with it before just buy another!
(IJT are giving them away for free if you buy some of their carts)
We use 2600's for colour and P2015's for mono
Im not a massive fan of the 2600 but for some reason we never seem to buy another brand...id like to give Kyocera a try
We also use 2015 and 2600 for mono and colour. Easy to setup and maintane.

We have tried kyocera printers here and are about to get rid of them through natural wastage as they have come to the end of their life. I personally find that if you need high output, quality and longevity then you cannot beat HP.
We have 4100s 4200s and 4250s which are all very fast mono printers and have proved their worth time and time again.
As for colour you cannot go past the 4600, we have had one for over 5 years and is still going strong. The 4600 we have in our main office is just coming up to 200,000 pages and is still as good as it was when bought new.
We have just started buying in some HP 2015n printers and for the money they are brilliant got ours from a company called XMA in Nottingham found they are the cheapest in the country at £180.00
As i have said we have 2 A3 kyoceras and 2 5016ns they have cost us more in downtime than all the HP printers put together.
I would say if you have been happy with the 2600s then stick with them I am sure someone will have refurbished units if not brand new ones somewhere.
Last edited by bossman; 12th March 2008 at 12:00 PM.
We had all kyocera's when I arrived here, nothing but problems, always jamming, the paper trays are cheap and nasty, (we are on novell) driver issues.... I am in the process of changing them all to Xerox Phaser's, There are 2-3x the cost of the Kyocera's but so far not many issues, no more phone calls saying the printers aren't working.
From my experience stay away from kyocera... although we do have kyocera photocopiers and they have been running great, much better than the canon ones they replaced.
Yeah I will vouch for the 4600 too, we've got one in Art that has been there at least 3 or 4 years, and apart from having to add more memory to handle the huge photoshop files they print, its always worked like a dream.
Likewise we've got about 3 4650's in Tech and they're still going strong
Touch wood, ive never had to dump a HP colour laser yet, whereas a few of the mono's have broken beyond repair, although tbf they were things like 2200's and 1300's
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