One wonders about...
What protocols they support? What interfaces they have?
The mono laser all-in-one has taken the place of the friendly photocopier in many an offices, at home or at work. In some cases, it has incorporated the fax machine, too. Although in essence it’s a laser printer with a scanner stuck on top, it’s more than the sum of its parts. Most folk use laser all-in-ones as much, if not …
Yep, genuine PS and ideally a HTTP-based scanning facility built in to the device - great for occasional users if nothing else.
My other complaint would be the papers trays - 250 sheets for what are clearly aimed as workgroup devices? Unless they take a ream at a time you're going to get half a ream lying around getting messed up until it finally gets loaded in less than pristine condition. Cue lots of support calls to resolve paper jams.
I purchased a MFC-7860DW about two months ago - for $250CDN.
It's the MFC-7860DN plus Wifi interface - you can D/L a free app to print and scan from iOS devices. Very happy.
Actually, I've had a few Brother printers over the years, they're great value. And work as advertised.
It needs to be mentioned that Kyocera often seem like a good printer for the price but you will be massively ripped off by their chipped toner cartridges.
They are chipped so your printer will only accept genuine Kyocera products and although they say that your cartridge will do X pages, it doesn't matter if you print a single letter on that page or even nothing at all, it will still count it as a page on the page counter.
I once opened a Kyocera cartridge that our Kyocera Mita FS-1020MFP had decided was empty and refused to print from.
I'm not joking....seriously....it was nearly full, but the chip made it a piece of junk.
And the cartridges are not cheap let me tell you.....
Bit of a rip off, I've decided to steer clear of Kyocera from now on.
Really?
We've got two at work, a FS-1118MFP and a smaller, duplex one the 1020D and they both run on 3rd party toners. The only issue is that despite being allegedly compatible, we do have to take a chunk of plastic out of the toner cartridge to make it fit but once it's in, it just goes and goes.
I had to empty the waste toner out of the 1020 the other week, but there was a handy flap to allow access (at least, I assume that's what the handy flap was for! It fixed the problem) and other than that's it's just toner.
The biggest issue I've had is getting drivers for the 1020D for Windows 7 64bit.
If the printer part dies, runs out of toner, etc. does the fax/scan still work? I've seen plenty of all-in-ones where if one part has a problem, the rest refuses to work even though it's got nothing to do with the broken part. Messages like "you're out of cyan, I can't scan!!" get a visit from Mr. Hammer. HP & Epson are big offenders here, in my experience.
Also, I think lasers are de facto a lot cheaper than inkjet. My Brother wakes up instantly after a month powered off without a clogged ink cartridge or the need to spend 10 minutes cleaning by wasting a lot of ink. It just prints and goes back to sleep. It also doesn't refuse to print w/o an expensive service after 15 cartridges like an Epson. The normal cost calculations don't take this into account.
Do the HP printers manage to install 23 different bloated apps that all scream at you constantly, add 3 minutes to your boot time and use up half your bandwidth phoning home?
If you manage to catch the sneakily hidden custom install option, you find that you only ever need two of the apps (driver and scan driver). The rest I have never worked out what they do. Especially the 300Mb Customer Experience package that screams if you uninstall it.