Canon i-Sensys LBP6000
Nicely rounded, ice-white lines – and there’s a textured-black version, too – distinguish this mini laser printer from many others. The front cover folds down to become the feed tray and the top cover folds forward to become the output tray. You can stack up to 150 sheets of plain paper, though there’s no separate multi-purpose feed. The printer managed 16ppm against its spec of 18ppm, which is excellent for the price and the print quality is very good for text and fair for graphics and photos, though the range of grey tones is a bit limited. Running costs sit at a fair 3.1p for an ISO page and, overall, this printer is good value.
Reg Rating 80%
Price £99
More info Canon
Dell 1130n
This machine is actually made for Dell by Samsung and could be mistaken visually for either of the Brothers. It has the same boxy appearance, with heavily rounded vertical edges and the same flip-open, single-sheet feed above a 250-sheet main tray. It only connects using USB, but Dell provides drivers for Windows, Mac OS X and various Linux builds. Although Dell rates it at 20ppm, I saw a maximum speed of 13ppm, putting it at the lower end of the group. Print quality is good, with sharp, clean text and graphic fills showing less banding than some. Running costs, at 3.6p per ISO page, are high.
Reg Rating 70%
Price £99
More info Dell
Next page: Epson Aculaser M1200
COMMENTS
sub-£250 shirley?
Seems to me that half these printers cost more than £100 - judging by the price noted in the review and presented by Amazon on clicking the Amazon button.
Re: Electricity Consumption - a Real Cost
I'm a bit dubious about those quoted costs. As an example, the Brother HL-2130 is estimated at 215kWh per year. Averaged out, that's over 24watts 365 days per year, 24 hours per day. It's equivalent to the printer being in full ready mode (i.e. hot and ready to go) for 7 hours every day and printing for 1 hour. That's well over 1,000 pages per day, vastly more than the usage this sort of printer is designed for, an wholly atypical of a home office or domestic situation. Also, the printer defaults to entering deep sleep mode (0.8W) after 5 minutes. In a domestic situation this is how it can be expected to remain for the vast majority of the time (or switched off).
In fact Brother's estimate is 0.913kWh per week or 47kWh per year which is about £5 and an average of about 5W. I think that's much more realistic for typical home use - indeed it would be at the high end in my view.
I suspect that's typical of most modern printers. Until somebody puts an energy usage monitor on one of these for a few months in a typical environment, we won't know for sure, but for now I think the estimates are simply wrong for any environment where this class of printer will be used.
Re: sub-£250 shirley?
You can get a colour laser printer for less than some of these, without shopping around. Given the amount I was spending on ink* £150 was a pretty good investment for a Samsung
*Every single time I wanted to print something, the ink cartridge had dried up, clogged and needed to be replaced. For this reason I find a laser printer much better for my low printing volumes, despite them normally being associated with high volume.
Postscript?
For me, the ability to toss the shitty CUPS crap and just run lprng is important, so I want a printer that does Postscript. This also gets around "does my driver/setup know how to handle duplex" too, as PS deals with this natively.
My old Brother HL-5240 does PS just fine and cost <US$120, so it's not a high-end feature.
Re: Re: sub-£250 shirley?
It's out of stock at the supplier where it's selling for £107 and also at the supplier selling it at £118. It seems to be retailing around £170 at Ebuyer, Dabs etc.
It's very common in a Google shopping search to get the odd supplier offering the product at a price much lower than everybody else. Usually, they are out of stock or don't even have a page for the item.
