Printable View
He currently has a Canon LBP5050 but it takes forever to print the first page, which is often all he prints. It needs to be fairly compact, quiet and relatively cheap to run. The price isn't so critical, if it meets the other criteria. It doesn't need to be network capability.
You can get the standard version of the HP CP2025 at the moment for less than £100 (after cashback) which have reasonably priced cartridges (and the dual pack black works out very good value).
The 2025's are expensive to run (this printer uses cheap V7 cartridges too) but a decent choice, we have one and it has no issues, it is quite quick waking up from standby but it depends on how pedestrian you mean; you could always turn off the sleep functions. Using the cashback I would go for the N model - better now as you cannot retrofit (with reasonable cost anyway).
We bought 2x 3525dns using the £200 cashback for £215 each. They are pretty quick and although not as cheap as our ancient 3550n to run they arent too bad. They arent compact though and weigh a ton. This might be a consideration if you wanted to move a different printer around to accommodate.