Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsBetter than inkjets - is that saying much?
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 17, 2019
After years of frustration with inkjets, I finally went back to laser. Inkjets trick you with initially good printouts, but then the jets clog, or you get banding, etc. I probably went through at least a half dozen printers this way. I’ve waited to review this to make sure I’m not getting burned. So far, pretty good. Only a couple problems that I can live with.
The good:
- Prints pretty consistently, every time. We don’t use our printer very often any more. Inkjets will invariably force you into a cleaning cycle that burns ink - IF they don’t become clogged and unusable (which they invariably do.) Lasers don’t care (it uses toner/fusion technology, not micro-droplet).
- All the functions work pretty reliably for me (with a Mac). Scan and print - I don’t have a copper phone line any more, faxing is a pain to get set up and doesn’t really work well over VOIP.
- Toner cartridges last a reasonably long time (but see cost item in “bad and ugly”!)
Bad or Ugly:
- Most of the time when I’m manually feeding pages into the “extra paper type slot” it mis-feeds from the main paper tray and claims it’s jammed. I have to remove that tray, pull out the sheet that started feeding and put the tray back in. Then it works OK.
- For a printer this size, the main tray is comically small. It should be like a 200 to 500 sheet tray. It’s about 50 sheets, if that. Also, the way the paper loads in is not very “secure” - it doesn’t give you that warm fuzzy feeling that it’s aligned right and won’t jam, but it never has. Just seems like a poor design.
- Once, the black toner cartridge got some shmutz on the fuser that’s built into the cart (or similar roller part). It caused blotching on the printouts, so I had to replace the cartridge before it was done, but that fixed the problem, which is much better than throwing the printer away like with an inkjet.
- The toner cartridges are insanely expensive. Like $100 each or $400 for a set (all three colors and black). Holy Moley! I’ve replaced the black twice (high capacity) and the colors I honestly can’t remember but I think I’ve just bought one round of color high-cap. That’s about 25 cents a page at their claimed life of about 2500 pages. I prefer the convenience of laser and not throwing my printer away once a year like with inkjets, but really, this is pretty rich. I can afford it but think very hard if you’re on a tight budget. You may have to live in inkjet hell. Do your math.
- I have not printed family photos. It’s good enough for newspaper quality photos, but don’t buy and expect to print 4x6 glossies.
