Recommend me a printer

[otc]

Bumping an old thread. What do you all recommend in 2020?

We'd prefer a laser printer. The wirecutter recommends the HP M255dw, but the HP M454dw is on sale now for about the same price.

Both are a little pricey for our needs, but I'd like this to last for at least 10 years or so. I also would consider the lower priced Brother they recommend, or something similar, if people think they'd be durable.

Thanks!

My beloved office-grade Lexmark finally died a little while ago...

I bought the b&w Brother recommended by wirecutter and thought the print quality looked awful. I'm sure I simply have higher standards than them, but laser printers should be 100% crisp and clear, and it just didn't look that way. Returned immediately. Anytime people say they like that thing, I assume their eyes are no good.

Ended up with an HP Laserjet Pro M118dw. (although I notice most printers are either out of stock or have gone up in price now that everyone is at home...I paid $99 but it is now full MSRP of $129, same seems to be true of the Brother).

As long as you don't need color, this seems good. It prints doublesided and has networking built in. Quality seems good, and speed/capacity/etc. is fine for home use. Wireless seems a little flakey (from the reviews, it seems like every single wireless printer is only OK) so I have an Ethernet cable plugged in, but it was working when I tested it on wireless.

I didn't want to spend the extra money on color--which also means your printer now has 4 separate toner cartridges to deal with and more moving parts. Figured I have color laser printers at the office and lasers aren't good for photos or anything else I would really want to print in color at home. Pretty much just papers to read, shipping labels, PDF tickets, etc.

 

[otc]

Oh, and I remember that HP seemed to sell a bunch of very similar models--slightly different feature sets or physical appearance, but it seemed like the actual printing internals were the same. I think I picked this one because it was the cheapest at the time that offered the right feature set.

I note that this review knocks the Brother for text quality:

Brother HL-L2350DW Review

The black and white laser Brother HL-L2350DW offers reasonable text quality and printing speed, and good ink economy, all in a package with a low initial...

www.techgearlab.com

The HPs they reviewed seemed to produce the best text quality.

 

[PAKNOWLES63]

Hi fellas -- I know this thread is just over a year old but in case someone is looking for a good printer, and searches this archive, I'll let you know what I found. Can't really contribute to too much else from what I can see! we've bought about (20) HP LaserJet 3010 (aka 3015) for our office. They've been work horses. Been buying them from 2012 to 2020, They've all been great. They're network printers. Some of the models you can do duplex (dn designation I think?) but haven't; had a need. We originally did it because we wanted all cartridges to stay the same. And even in our digital age, we still find we're printing stuff all the time. I have 2 at home as well. They've been great. I think discontinued now, but I was seeing them all the time on Amazon or Ebay for about 300-500 and I've never had a problem with any of them. Cartridges seem to last forever too.