Which Laser B/W on a *really* tight budget?

[Jambers]

My girfriend's Dad is planning on doing a lot of printing quite soon.
It will all be in B&W and will be 99% text. He has an inkjet if he
needs higher quality or colour prints.

Can you recommend a decent quality, cheap to buy, cheap to run laser
printer? New or 2nd user. I am in the UK, if that makes a
difference.

TIA for all replies,

 

[Fred Mau]

My girfriend's Dad is planning on doing a lot of printing quite soon.
It will all be in B&W and will be 99% text. He has an inkjet if he
needs higher quality or colour prints.

Can you recommend a decent quality, cheap to buy, cheap to run laser
printer? New or 2nd user. I am in the UK, if that makes a
difference.

For cheap used lasers, I like the IBM 4039 and the IBM/Lexmark 4049 a/k/a
Lexmark Optra R. I bought a used 4039 several years ago for about US$50.
Ran it as-is for several months until the existing toner ran out, spent
about $125 for a new toner cartridge, and have been using it daily since at
about a dozen pages per day. The 4049/Optra R is substantially the same
machine, slightly newer styling. In my opinion, better and more rugged than
the newer models.

On the HP side, the Laserjet III are good used bargains, more reliable in my
opinion than some of the Laserjet 4's. Stay away from the older Laserjet I
and II, too limited in memory to do decent graphics or fonts.

- FM -

 

[Dorothy Bradbury]

Old, HP line with remanufactured cartridges

New, cheap lasers like Samsung ML1210 are good re cost, but
have pricey cartridges (35ukp) and quite low page count. However
the upside is they are a remove-bung-to-refill - 8-15ukp/refill.

The larger Samsungs have far more pages per ukp re cartridge,
but charge more for the laser - and none are built like the older
HPs (HP3, HP4) kind of printers re reliability & build quality.

Price out the various options /with page-count & refill & cartridge/.
The older inkjets (Epson) had very cheap compatible ink cartridges,
such as Epson Stylus Colour 800 (like 1520) with carts at 1.99ukp
for black which will do a realistic 400 pages in B&W text.

I picked up an A3 ?1660? recently which used the cheaper cartridges,
for exactly that reason - lots of B&W A3 printing possible very cheaply.

 

[Jambers]

Cheers for the replies, reckon I'll look out for a well priced HP LJ
,4 or 5.

Thanks again.