It's a girl (laser printer)!

[iftiq]

Hi,

I've just bought a laser printer off of eBay as I recently worked out that I've paid about 2.5x more for inkjet cartridges in the last 4 months than I did for my inkjet printer (typical monopoly-pricing inkjet manufacturing $%£&%?!- also how is it that the colour, especially cyan, ink runs out when all we print is greyscale?).

Anyways, as I'm on a bit of penny-pinching drive I thought I would save some money on the toner as well. Since the printer is second hand, coming from eBay, I'm not sure how much toner will be in it. The printer is an HP Laserjet 1010 and an HP original toner cartridge costs ~£50-60, whereas a "Refurbished", "Reconditioned", "Remanufactured" or "Compatible" toner cartridge costs about £20-30. I'm wondering if anyone has experience using non-original toner in laser printers and if there is anything I should worry about or be aware of.

Also, my inkjet is Wifi enabled, so there's no issue in sharing it across the computers/laptops in my home. However, the LaserJet, being a budget version, doesn't have any networking options just a USB port. I know I can hook it up to my computer and then share it over my Windows network that way, but I was wondering if there is some way of sharing it across my home without it requiring the computer it is directly connected to being turned on.

I have heard of things like print servers, etc, but have no idea how this works or costs. Ideally, I'd like some way of hooking the printer to the wireless network. I could stand to spend a bit of money depending on how elegant a solution is possible. We have a BT HomeHub (old school white one) if that helps at all. The main aim is to make it easy (as in hitting "Print" in IE or Word and then having the stuff come out of the printer) for everyone to print to the laser printer, if only to prevent them wasting more-precious-than-ambrosia inkjet ink (an entirely spurious comparison, but apparently on a litre for litre basis- inkjet print is more expensive than champagne).

Is this something that would work?
http://www.google.co.uk/products/cat...483&sa=title#p

Would appreciate any advice. Many thanks in advance.

[Pob255]

Yep that wireless print server is the sort of thing you want, personally I've found such things not so good in a mobile form (at work we have laptop trollies that get moved from room to room and always have issues as the print server is unpluged and pluged back in)
However if the printer and wireless print server is just staying in one place and pluged in, it's fine.

If you had a network printer (hp printers have the letter n at the end of the model number for network versions ie 1010n) then I'd say just plug it stright into the hub.

As to "Refurbished", "Reconditioned", "Remanufactured" or "Compatible", they can vary in quality.
I'm no sure if there are offical terms, however there are differing types
Basically "non-hp" toners use ether repleced "hp" parts or other manufactor parts

ps the hp 1010 is around £90 so two hp toners and you've paid more than the printer costs, this is not standard for all printers, as is the quarter normal capasity "free" toner you get when you buy a new printer.

[this_is_gav]

ps the hp 1010 is around £90 so two hp toners and you've paid more than the printer costs

My view too.

It's always a small risk buying 'compatible' toner, as they're generally more likely to gunk up your printer with crap (more likely for an inkjet of course, but it happens with lasers too), and the quality of print is sometimes questionable.

That said, you've bought a 2nd-hand printer, so you don't know that it's not already been subjected to compatible toner, or what the quality would be like when you received it. Given that it's a laser printer, I presume quality wasn't important anyway. As Pob said, there's barely any loss even if your compatibles spontaneously combust in the printer, as would be quite a cheap replacement anyway, especially with the low-capacity toner normally included.

I wouldn't spend any money on compatible cartridges normally, but on one of our old printers I do buy them - it's an OKI C7200 from 2001, so that it's still working at all is a bit of a surprise, so I'm not about to shell out on £1,500+ of toner and other consumables if I can avoid it. The toner we do buy works fine itself, but doesn't register how much is remaining, so it sometimes needs to be taken out and reinserted.

Compatibles - what it boils down to is how much you value the printer (unless it's an inkjet printing photos or something).

[iftiq]

Thanks to both of you for the helpful advice. Quality isn't terribly important to me as I'm going to be printing mostly long articles/documents for my own consumption and I have an inkjet for more important stuff. I had noticed that the toner cartridges are quite expensive but from my point of view it's still much much cheaper than the inkjet.

The black ink for my inkjet is quoted to yield 250 pages per cartridge, with each cartridge costing 10 pounds. The HP toner is quoted to yield 2,000 pages per cartridge and each cartridge is 50 pounds. So I'm still thinking that for the short term, it's quite a bit cheaper. I don't mind spending more than the printer on toner/ink- I'd just like it to take longer before I end up having to do that.

I think I'll probably risk some of the cheaper "compatible" toner- will have to inspect what is in the printer when I get it, I infer from the listing that it's the original toner that came with the printer when it was first bought, but can't be sure.

I think where I've gone wrong is the print server part of things. From my reading online, the HP 1010 is a "host based printer" which means that it's incompatible with almost all print servers. The "raster" is produced on the computer and not at the printer, and most print servers don't support such host based printing. So I think I'll have to stick to sharing it through a computer- which is quite annoying. I guess this is why it was so cheap. I'd appreciate if anyone can confirm/deny this, or suggest a workaround?

Thanks all.