Epson Aculaser M1200
This machine has a tall, black, bread-loaf shape and uses the common paradigm of turning its front cover into a feed tray – 150-sheets in this case – while using its top cover for output. Unusually, it offers USB and parallel connections, useful in legacy environments. Rated speed is 20ppm and I saw 15.8ppm under test, which is very reasonable. Prints range from excellent on black text, to well above average on greyscales. Running costs, which you might think would be high on an inexpensive machine like this, are a very creditable 2.3p per ISO page.
Reg Rating 85%
Price £95
More info Epson
HP LaserJet Pro P1102w
With a similar shape to Epson’s Aculaser M1200, but lower profile, HP’s personal laser printer has a neat, front-to-top paper path, with a 150-sheet tray and a 10-sheet multipurpose feed, too. Its simple controls are on front and top and, unusually in this group, it offers wireless as well as USB connection. HP claims a speed of 18ppm and tests returned 15.8ppm, good for such a small machine. Print quality is also up to standard, with crisp text and greyscales with little banding, though not as many distinguishable greys as some. The ISO page cost comes out at 2.9p, which is below average.
Reg Rating 80%
Price £110
More info HP
Next page: Kyocera Mita FS-1120D
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.
