Looking for the ideal printer

Hi, I'm going to answer your questions with some of my own; can you quantify "heavy loads" as in an estimate of pages/month? Is the load very heavy for a few days and then not much? What do you want to print? The better that a printer handles high-density images, the more it will cost. Do you need multiple or large-size paper trays, duplexing, or a built-in print server? You need to define inexpensive, too. I'd really like a printer that could do 100K pages a month without breaking down, but I'll never find one for us$299. In defining the price, you must look at cost/page over the expected life. Most color printers are much more expensive per page than monochrome. Some save money when only printing in black, some don't. Let us know, there may be an answer waiting for you!

Ideal to you may be a cumbersome pain in the butt to someone else. Here's Austrailia's PC MAG's laser printer buying guide.
http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/index.php/id;178247912

I have always had HP laser printers... as a matter of fact, I still have a 6P on my desk here at work and an 1100 on my desk at home. Both printers are way beyond their warranty periods (seemingly a good indicator that your "inkjet" will die soon), but have not had any issues since the day they were purchased.

A relative purchased an Okidata (Laserjet 4 emulation) that has also been running for almost 10 years. Since my first inkjet printer purchase (HP1200A - 1995), I have gone through more than a dozen inkjet printers... Canon, Brother, HP, Epson, and Lexmark. In all that time... the 6p keeps chugging along.

You didn't mention if you needed network capabilities... that often adds a nice markup on printers as well.
Good Luck finding what you need.

It really depends on what you mean by cheap & heavy work load.

Is this for industrial use or home use? The requirements vary depending on what it's being used for and just how many pages per month are going to be printed.

You can look at the Samsung CL range for Home work and they are cheap per page with a built in Duplexer and with the added paper tray are cheap to use but really a Low Volume Printer as anymore than several K per month will prove expensive.

On the other hand if you are looking at a High Volume Printer one of the Canon Image Runner Series of Photocopiers with a LAN interface do an excellent job for High Volume Printing and are cheap per page when it comes to printing. They also give you the advantage of being a fully fledged Photocopier and have the ability to scan several thousand pages to your computer in a very short time.

The Samsung that I use gets heavy Use for a Home Printer and spits out about 12K per month without a second thought but I wouldn't want to push it much harder than that. The IR series of Canon Photocopiers can run all day without any attention other than replacing Toner Cartridges and can handle from A3 down.

It really depends on what you mean by [b]Cheap and High Volume.[/b]

Col

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