Jodie and I have been wanting a new printer for a while.
Our requirements? Inexpensive, durable, fast… and laser. No inkjets allowed in this house.
I hate inkjet printers, and consider them one of the most ingenius and insidious consumer rackets ever created by the tech industry. Inkjets prey on getting people in for cheap on the hardware — then getting screwed royally on the ink cartridges until doomsday. But I digress.
A good laser printer, on the other hand, can now be bought pretty inexpensively. And while, yes, replacement toner costs more than ink, you also get a lot more use out of it (the cartridge that came with our new Brother HL-5250DN, for example, will last about 7,000 pages)
After much research (including reading all 109 customer reviews on Amazon), we ordered our Brother HL-5250DN laser printer from Provantage (due to price, which came to $203 with shipping, and was the best deal at the time of purchase).
We chose this model for its speed, Mac/PC/network compatibility, and for its auto-duplexing (printing on both sides without you having to manually change the paper). I set it up last night (its name is Unagi, after our favorite sushi), and initial results are favorable:
- Setup was fast and easy on both my iBook and my Windows XP laptop
- Adding it to our home wireless network was a snap
- Crikey this thing prints FAST! I printed some test pages, and they were both done before I’d even walked up to the printer
For more info on the Brother HL-5250DN, and where you can buy, see the links below:
- Amazon.com: Brother HL-5250DN Network Ready Laser Printer with Duplex: Electronics
- $236.97
- PROVANTAGE: Brother HL-5250DN Network Ready Laser Printer with Duplex 30PPM 32MB 1200DPI
- $159.79
- Brother International – Printers – HL-5250DN
- Brother HL-5250DN – Review by PC Magazine
- PC World – Brother HL-5250DN Review