Back in Houston, I had my trusty, ancient HP 970xi inkjet that worked tirelessly, if slowly, and had a nice duplex feature. That printer is currently in storage and probably needs to be replaced when we get home. Here in California, I've got two left-behind printers from my landlord: an old Lexmark integrated flatbed scanner/inkjet and an ancient HP sheet feed scanner/fax/inkjet. The Lexmark printer sheet feeder never really worked, crunching every sheet of paper, so that was out immediately. The HP v40xi is too old/weird to be properly supported by official Apple drivers, so I had to install this "foomatic" free software which on a regular basis emits random crap in the middle of the page. Oh, and the paper feed is also not working so well. No more!

I want to spend a modest amount of money ($100-$200). My desired feature list:

- absolutely supported by OS X
- relatively fast (20ppm)
- direct Ethernet support (versus currently using my Mac as a print server to my wife's PC laptop, which isn't as reliable as I'd like)
- modest preference for laser over inkjet

This printer is not for printing photos. Instead, we need to print a variety of one-offs (boarding passes, maps, recipes) plus the occasional 20-page technical paper. Color would be a modest bonus, but we can live without it. "Multifunction" features... we don't care about fax, although we might get occasional mileage out of a decent sheet-fed scanner that can yield multi-page PDFs, particularly if it can OCR.

At this point, the interesting printers that Costco happens to have in stock are:

Brother HL-2070N ($139) - black&white laser with network
Xerox Phaser 6110N ($179 - a bargain!) - color laser with network (no doubt soon to be discontinued, thus the great price)
Lexmark X9350 ($199) - color inkjet, duplex, wireless, scanner/fax
Brother MFC-5860n ($169) - color inkjet, network, scanner/fax

Of course, there are many other printers out there in the world, but these represent a reasonable sampling of cost and features.

Alternate thought: I could buy the cheapest, lamest inkjet printer I can find ($50-70 seems to cover most of the low-end action, $100 gets a Canon Pixma ip4300 that supports duplex), on the assumption that it only needs to last me until the end of the year, then I get something better once we move back to Texas. Even the cheapest, lamest inkjet would outperform the junk I've got at home now.

Thoughts?