are HP laserjet printers still tanks?

[rrothberg]

Back in the early 90s, the printers I saw most used in locations
printing 1000+ pages/month were HP LJ III and IVs. They were pretty
bullet proof. I've been using an HP all in one inkjet printer and it's
pretty flimsy, but I need to add something comparable to the old
'tanks' in one of my offices and the current line of HP LJs comes to
mind. The office has broken 3 Dell printers in the past 2 years and I
want to replace it with something more reliable. I'm considering the
1320tn or the 1320n.

Any thoughts about HP or other recommendations? Thanks!

 

[Woody]

Back in the early 90s, the printers I saw most used in locations
printing 1000+ pages/month were HP LJ III and IVs. They were pretty
bullet proof. I've been using an HP all in one inkjet printer and it's
pretty flimsy, but I need to add something comparable to the old
'tanks' in one of my offices and the current line of HP LJs comes to
mind. The office has broken 3 Dell printers in the past 2 years and I
want to replace it with something more reliable. I'm considering the
1320tn or the 1320n.

Any thoughts about HP or other recommendations? Thanks!

A better solution would be to train your staff in the office to take care of
the hardware. Any printer can be broken by mishandling..

 

[William R. Walsh]

Hi!

Any thoughts about HP or other recommendations? Thanks!

The HP printers of today aren't as "tanklike" as they once were. However, I
would still call them reasonably well built.

I'm surprised you've had a lot of your Dell printers break. Many of the
laser models branded by Dell are made by Samsung, and I consider their laser
printers to be quite well made. Perhaps the duty cycle is too high for them?
Or, as another poster suggested, maybe there's someone doing something they
shouldn't that is damaging the printers?

If you do go with HP, it still pays to look at your duty cycle and monthly
output. If the printer failures you've had so far were caused by a printer
that's not up to the task, you won't solve that problem by simply going to
HP.

William

 

[me]

Back in the early 90s, the printers I saw most used in locations
printing 1000+ pages/month were HP LJ III and IVs. They were pretty
bullet proof. I've been using an HP all in one inkjet printer and it's
pretty flimsy, but I need to add something comparable to the old
'tanks' in one of my offices and the current line of HP LJs comes to
mind. The office has broken 3 Dell printers in the past 2 years and I
want to replace it with something more reliable. I'm considering the
1320tn or the 1320n.

I think kyocera are the most tank-like now.

 

[rrothberg]

I think kyocera are the most tank-like now.

Thanks, I think I'll just grab a 5si or an 8000 via ebay. The rebuild
kits are cheap as well and these units are generally good for millions
of pages.

 

[Arthur Entlich]

Very little in high tech is built to the standards of 15-25 years ago,
and in some ways it's probably a good thing.

The amount of materials that went into the original HP Laserjet were
incredible. Not only were they very heavy and truly built like tanks
and designed for functionality in adverse circumstances, but they still
became obsolete, and ultimately ran out of use before running out of steam.

As an example, I still have two HP Laserjets, and they work, and they
have huge cartridges, but they only have 128 K of onboard memory and
updating it is next to impossible, so they need font cartridges. They
won't work for graphics due to the limited memory.

With the level of upgrading that goes on, better the printer be less
tanklike and more easy to recycle with more limited use of metals and
even plastic.

 

[Splork]

Thanks, I think I'll just grab a 5si or an 8000 via ebay. The rebuild
kits are cheap as well and these units are generally good for millions
of pages.

The 4000 series is tanklike. 4050 is really good, 4100 if you dont print small
media or envelopes.

 

[rrothberg]

Very true especially for the much older stuff. I ended up picking up a
LJ 5SI MX that was on eBay for $120 and picked it up locally for free.
One really can't go wrong there. Granted it only had 4 meg of memory
but it's upgradable to 132 meg. It came with a network card, a
duplexer is under $50 and it's a tank. If they break this one, I give
up. It has a duty cycle of 100,000 pages per month, they don't hit
even 5% of that.

(To address the question about how are people managing to break several
Dells, I have no idea. Different office, different management, not my
budget, they just called me because I usually know my tech stuff. In
this case I was out of date, but knew where to go for advice .
Thanks for all the recommendations).

 

[Ben]

Back in the early 90s, the printers I saw most used in locations
printing 1000+ pages/month were HP LJ III and IVs. They were pretty
bullet proof. I've been using an HP all in one inkjet printer and it's
pretty flimsy, but I need to add something comparable to the old
'tanks' in one of my offices and the current line of HP LJs comes to
mind. The office has broken 3 Dell printers in the past 2 years and I
want to replace it with something more reliable. I'm considering the
1320tn or the 1320n.

Any thoughts about HP or other recommendations? Thanks!

I've been generally pleased with Xerox's mid-range printers. In their
current lineup, that would be the Phaser 4500 and Phaser 5500. I used
their predecessors but I believe the current models are similar in
build.