router/printserver/printer recommendations

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, Feb 06, 2007 at 02:54:21PM -0500, Matt Price wrote:
> um, not exactly sure on price. $500 seems like the very high end, I
> suppose, and I'm hoping for somewhat less.  We print all our written
> work on it, as well as a fair number of downloaded scientific articles;
> I don't know what that comes to, a few thousand pages/month I suppose,
> not much more than that I hope.

Well I know my farther decided the inkjet was costing too much in ink
and the head got clogged to often and was hassle.  He now runs a nice
ethernet connected Xerox Phaser 6300N.  Given after mail in rebate they
are $1149 for a full colour laser with adobe postscript level 3 (not
some knock off that doesn't work), they are hard to beat for
compatiblity.  After all if it has real postscript, and a network
connection, native IPP, a web interface, etc, how can it not work with
everything?  It is also amazingly fast (the 800MHz PPC processor seems
good at rendering postscript.)  If you want duplex (which can be nice I
admit) that will cost $250 more.

If you consider cost per page of many "cheap" laser priters, you realize
it won't take that many thousands of pages before the "cheap" printer
becomes a rather expensice printer (and a much slower one too).

Do not ever consider the Phaser 8xxx series unless your print volume is
more like 1000+ pages per day.  It has some very expensive habits if the
head cools off.  So it might look cheap at $650, and it sure prints nice
and fast and has very nice features, but if it isn't used and the head
gets cold due to a power blip or something, it will eat between 5 and 10
dollars in ink to flush out the head.  If your print volume is high
though, and it never really gets a chance to be idle, then it is a very
economical printer in terms of cost per page.

I have looked at some of the $100 BW laser printers you can get, and
they typically rival an inkjet (if not worse) in cost per page, and have
very bad linux support in general (they are often win printers since
that way they save the cost of a rendering engine in the printer).
Until you hit about $1000 or so, it seems you get ripped off on the
supplies (since the idea is to hook you on the cheap printer, and then
if you actually use it much, they make the real profits on the supplies
you have to buy).

--
Len Sorensen
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