My four-year-old color laser printer (Xerox 6110, rebranded from a Samsung CLP-310, I believe) is starting to flake out. I got it from Costco, at the time, for the miserly price of $169 and it's now printed just over 2000 pages over its lifetime. These days, it will print a few pages and then jam. I'll open the front door, pull out the mechanism, wiggle it around, then put it back in, and it will work again for a few more pages. This is getting old.

Poking around Amazon, it seems there are very few color laser (or LED) printers under $400 these days. Brother makes several $200-ish options, but they get mixed reviews (slow, loud, etc.). HP offers a similar range of prices ($220 for the cheapest, $400 for a model with duplex). Again, reviews are mixed. Dell offers a variety of different printers, but then you're dealing with Dell, dude, which could be a problem for my Mac.

Thoughts?

I have a Samsung CLP-300, probably very similar to the 310. This a common complaint for this model.

When it happens, I clean the rubber pickup roller with alcohol and then I'm good for another couple hundred pages.

If you get a jam in the fuser, that is a very bad thing requiring serious disassembly. Take pictures as you do it, reassembly is... complex.

tanstaafl.

I'm very pleased with my Samsung CLP-610ND duplexing color laser printer. It's *gigantic*, but the quality is great, the toner cartridges last a long time, and I managed to find it new for $200 late last year. I wouldn't expect to see it at that price again, but if I was shopping now and saw it for $350 or less, I'd jump on it.

Adding: Okay, it looks like the successor to the CLP-610ND is the CLP-620ND, which is available for $299 from TigerDirect here. Even better, you can get 12% cash back if you sign up for Bing cashback and search for the printer through Bing's cash back page.

I love my B&W HP LaserJet 4350dtn that I got on ebay for ~200. It had about 10k pages on the clock, which is probably half a month's duty cycle. On a big month I print 10 pages. I expect this printer to last at least the 8 years I got out of the used HP LaserJet 4 that it replaced. The drivers are built in to every computer and the thing spits out pages whenever I want to print, and I'll never have to clean the print heads. You can get a lot when you give up color.

I have to agree with Doug and Tony. Did you miss the Samsung printers, Dan? They sell color laserjets for WELL below $400. Heck, WELL below $200. I'm seeing $139 for the CLP-315W.

I've been using monochrome Samsung laserjets for the past 7 years. Just two printers in that time, and we're not talking about their top of the line, we're talking about their $110 printers, which was cheap for a laserjet in 2003/4.

tanstaafl: tell me more about your fix. Your printer is exactly the same as mine. Where exactly is the roller you're cleaning?

dignan: What's interesting is how many other printer vendors seem to use Samsung guts. This appears to include Dell and Xerox. The CLP-315W, the successor to my printer, gets pretty shaky reviews. The CLP-620ND seems more likely to be a good choice if I end up giving up on my current printer.

I've come to hate all things HP over the years. Even the classics, like the Laserjet 3 and 4, while they live forever, never really just work either.

I bought a couple of Samsung printers, 'cos I like their other products, and found them to be junk too.

So, I remembered from back in the day, that Okidata was the best you could get, so I bought a new one a few years ago. It's the C5500 color laser. I'm really happy with it. Oki's quality seems to be as good as ever.

Dan, see if http://www.fixyourownprinter.com/ has any info on how to fix your particular problems.

I once got new life out of an old failing laserjet thanks to that site.

Don’t get an Epson. It works great, very cheap to buy, however eats an expensive ink cartridge about every other day.

That appears to be the way their making money with new printers – About give the printer away but rake in the cash on the cartridges.

I despise HP printers. Actually, I think the printers are alright, but HP wins the prize for WORST SOFTWARE CDs EVER! I don't know what they're installing that requires about 20 minutes to complete, but it's just too much.

Of course, this is mostly aimed at their all-in-ones. If I bought an HP single-purpose printer I'd just use Windows drivers and it wouldn't be a problem

I'll give HP credit for doing things right on the Mac side. They were one of the first to support Bonjour, and starting a little while back, killed off all their own weird software in favor of just using the built in OS X services. Need to scan a document? Just hit scan on the printer, and up pops the OS X Image Capture app.

Are there any all in ones that actually have good drivers? And by good I mean PC and Mac, all functions working the same over the network, and using native OS widgets and dialogs for all interactions?

Yeah, and they could easily do something similar in Windows, or make very simple apps to accomplish the tasks that users need. So what's with the bloatware? I guess, in their twisted minds, they think they're helping users, when actually the software is even harder for them to use. Ick.

It's like the Apple side of HP doesn't have the bigwigs breathing down their necks. Maybe they don't...

Oh, and ATI is also a huge fail on Windows but (I've heard) is good on Mac. I just dealt with their awful Catalyst drivers this afternoon, and I want to slam my head against a wall.

I hate HP for their mechanical problems, mostly. When my last HP died (or rather, could only reliably feed one sheet at a time), I actually bought another HP brand new, as they were on sale. It jammed on the second sheet... I returned it about an hour after I bought it and got the Oki.

I really dislike ATI as well. Probably 99.99999999999% of my windows problems over the years I've finally come to realize are the fault of the ATI drivers. I use nothing but Matrox now, and have no issues.

The only printers I have ever been actively pleased with were QMS, and they got bought by Konica/Minolta fifteen years ago, and since then they are just as mediocre as everything else.

Macs simply don't have the same sort of invasive video drivers like you see under Windows. Somewhere under the covers, I'm sure, the guts are equivalent, but you just don't see the useless cruft under MacOS that you do under Windows.

I bought a Lexmark printer a while ago, and its Linux software install was a 20Mbyte binary RPM (i386 only, of course). Yet the whole reason I chose it was because it's networked and has a built-in LPD emulation that takes Postscript -- so installing it required adding one line to /etc/printcap, about 20 bytes. However much you feel your HP software was bloaty, I suggest that Lexmark beats it by being bloated six orders of magnitude beyond what it needed to be...

Peter

That applies to virtually any inkjet printer, but we are talking about laser printers here.

As I have said on several occasions here on the bbs, the initial cost of the printer is almost irrelevant. If you are looking at bottom line costs, by far the most important consideration is the cost of the toner (or ink cartridges). Do your research and find out what the cost per page is. That's what is going to eat your money over the years. An extra two or three hundred dollars on the initial purchase will be trivial compared to what you'll spend on consumables over the life of the printer.

That said, Kyocera/Mita has, in my experience, been unquestionably the best way to go. Before I retired, our big Kyocera B/W printer saved us more in consumables every year than we paid for the printer, when compared to the big HP that Corporate forced on us and which for obvious reasons we seldom used.

tanstaafl.

Unplug the wires from the back of the printer so you can stand it on its back. Remove the paper tray. There is a large, oddly-shaped semi-circular rubber pad on an axle that lets it rotate, right above where the leading edge of the paper would be if the tray were still in place. Clean this roller with alcohol and your problems may go away.

tanstaafl.

Many times (although not, apparently, in this case) bad reviews are a product of unrealistic expectations.

Samsung is in good part responsible for some of those expectations, for example claiming a preposterous duty cycle of 20,000 pages per month for the CLP-315. Nearly all of the working parts (gears, rollers, etc.) are made out of plastic, and it would be miraculous if that printer ever made it to 20,000 pages before becoming worn out. It is a disposable printer, on sale for $139 at Amazon.com, and anyone expecting heavy usage will be disappointed. My CLP-300 is fine for my use -- a 100 page month would be a big deal. When it finally gives up the ghost, probably after eight or ten thousand pages, I won't complain, I'll just replace it with something similar and know that I paid one penny per page amortizing the original cost of the printer, on top of the 2.6 cents per page for toner. Shopping hint: When looking for a new laser printer, make sure that toner is available from aftermarket suppliers. My CLP-300 costs me $26.00 for a complete set (4 colors) of aftermarket toner, compared to $269 MSRP buying the toner from Samsung.

tanstaafl.

I'll see about cleaning that roller. Looks painless, worth a shot.

Don't let plastic parts prejudice you. Printers that can do 200K prints a month have plastic gears. I think plastic is used many times because they are quieter. Metal gears also get metal particles inside of the machines because they do wear down quicker than you would think.

We also have a Lexmark laser here for general (B&W) printing. But we did install the PPD file for it (about 40KB), to gain full control over the printer's features and to get it to print at max speed. The generic PS interface didn't give full capability on either front.

Cheers

Cleaned all the rubber bits with rubbing alcohol. I also went out and bought a Samsung-branded replacement toner cartridge for my nearly-empty cyan toner. Guess what? It physically fits my Xerox printer without any problem but is nonetheless rejected by the printer. Samsung-branded toner costs $50. Xerox-branded toner? $70. Grrr....

EDIT: and I can buy compatible toner for a fraction of that. Any reason for me to buy "original" vs. "compatible" toner?

I would say buy the cheap stuff since it is out of warranty. I don't know about that brand but for HP there are a ton of 3rd party toner cartridges and they generally work fine.

There must be an EEPROM or counter chip somewhere in the toner module that has an ID and running total of number of pages printed. You can get dongles that reset it for you but unless you're going to be buying a lot of different brand toner it won't be worth while to buy it.

In theory the original toner is designed and tested to work with the printer whilst the compatible toner may just be whatever the refiller people just put in there. You're looking for a new printer anyway so if it does go bad you've not lost anything by using the cheap toner.

This is the toner I have been using on my Samsung. No problems so far, and it is less than 1/10 the MSRP of the genuine Samsung toner.

The tricky bit is that the Samsung toner cartridges have little electronic counters built into them, and if the toner you buy doesn't have compatible electronics to match your printer, you are SOL.

Have you tried your printer since cleaning the pickup roller?

tanstaafol

For my HP 4V, I always used the HP toner, but the last time I changed the cart, it died like 2 weeks later. The printer service dude says he never uses HP, 'cos they die early, and carry no warranty. The off brand cart has a 1 year warranty...

I ordered the no-name compatible toner. Should be here in a few days. We'll see if it works.

The printer seems to be happy, but I'll know better after it's gotten more use. Interestingly, when cleaning the rubber grabber you highlighted, it appears that the rubber is cracked and distressed. It's not smooth like it should be, which could certainly explain it's occasional inability to grab the paper. We'll see soon whether or not more invasive repairs (e.g., replace the rubber part) are necessary.

It is not supposed to be smooth. It should have a rough, textured surface to better grab the paper.

tanstaafl.

What tanstaafl said. Some of the rollers will be smooth whilst others will have an odd rough texture on it for extra friction to pick up sheets. It shouldn't be cracked though. If its too smooth or damaged then you need to order a maintenance kit and replace the various pads and rollers.

Well, okay then. Good to know. We'll see whether cleaning it has lowered the jam rate or not.

Is there a bypass tray ? Maybe you could just just that and not bother with the paper cassette. It sounds like you print very little.

Not to pre-empt Dan, but no, that model does not have a bypass tray. It is a very simple, basic, inexpensive (Amazon has it on sale now for $139) color laser printer with absolutely no bells and whistles.

tanstaafl.

It is amazing that any kind of color laser printer is that cheap now. (do I sound old )

But a full set of (official) toner cartridges will cost you more than the purchase price on the printer. Thus, even color laser printers have finally come down to the same, awful level as inkjet printers.

Well, if you buy bottom-of-the-line color laser printers. There are plenty of reasonably quality color lasers out there that will last a long time. This one (and I have the same one, too) is not in that class.

There aren't any, as far as I know, high-end inkjet printers.

I'm not sure that's the correct conclusion. Laser printer toner cartridges haven't increased in price on average, it's just that now you have to buy four of them for color laser printing. Just look at those HP Photosmart printers. Those have something like 6 ink cartridges, so you're going to spend way more than you would for a black and white ink printer. Color is more expensive with either technology.

So it's the same it's always been, except now we have affordable ways to print in color with a laser printer.

Lastly, if you only want to print in black and white, you can actually print very cheaply with some ink models. Take this one, for example.

Yeah, I meant to exclude large-format printers. Is it even possible to print onto Letter/A4 sized paper on those? The last one I had access to had its paper on a big roll.

One penny a page for ink. Not bad.

But about two minutes shopping showed me where I can print black and white on the Samsung color laser printer for half that amount. Now that is with aftermarket toner, no guarantees, no promises that it won't gum up the printer, but so far I have been OK with aftermarket suppliers.

tanstaafl.

This one will do cut sheet letter size

Yeah, I'm fine with no-name toner cartridges for my aging laserjet. I HATED it in the offices I worked in, though. They simply couldn't perform like the name brand, and caused all sorts of problems.

I'd expect that the cartridges included with the printer are maybe 3/4 empty.

"You're going to need a bigger boat"

Stop exaggerating, gbeer. Averyone knows that they're only 2/3 empty!

tanstaafl.

Update:

The third-party toner seemed to work fine, but the printer itself is decidedly not fine. It gives the red light, like it's jammed or something. There is clearly no paper anywhere around, so no jam to fix. Power cycling or whatever just causes the same behavior. One of the motors tries to turn for about a second, then *clunk* and it's got the red light back on again.

Is it dead, Jim?

EDIT: So I found the service manual from some dodgy Russian web site. The service manual helpfully mentions there are menus that might tell you service related things, e.g., "Menu-Setup - Maintenance - Check other - (Select a desired part)". Unfortunately, there's no such menu available anywhere from the web interface of the printer. All I know is "Stop Printing, Service Requested". I'll also note, for the record, that I've found at least one other bloke with the same exact problem.

Was it this manual? If it isn't, for $3.24 you're not taking too big a risk. I haven't bought the manual myself, but I keep the bookmark handy just in case.

Try opening up the printer and taking it apart a little bit. The fuser comes out with just four screws. Pay attention to the drive axle for the fuser -- it connects with a spring-loaded coupler that slides to one side to disengage. Put it back together and see if that cleared any jam codes or anything. Alternatively for $139 you can just replace the whole printer and keep the old one for spare parts. Probably make more sense in the long run, although if you are printing more than about 50 pages a week you might (IMHO) be better off to buy a more expensive (i.e., heavy duty) printer and be done with it. Of course now that you've invested $25--$30 in aftermarket toner, and God knows how much of your time trying to get the existing printer to work, it would be a shame to give up on it now.

tanstaafl.

I just wanted to give a little update on my own printer. I dropped $25 on a refurb toner cartridge, and now I'm back to full operation. This printer (and cartridge) has lasted at least 3 years, and now we'll see how this refurb toner works. Fortunately, I don't really care if it starts giving me problems, as I never even expected it to last this long

To sum up, I'd definitely recommend Samsung laser printers without hesitation. If this one ever died, I'd replace it with that color model you linked to, Doug. No question.

In the end, I decided that I don't want to throw any more effort at this damn thing, so I decided to spend a remarkably modest $230 (plus shipping) on the step-up Samsung CLP-620ND (21ppm color or black&white, duplex handling built-in). Street price seems to typically be twice that, but Amazon fronts for a variety of no-name resellers, including one called "eSeller" who seems to have positive reviews.

I figure, no matter the extent to which this vendor screws me, I'm really dealing with Amazon, so if it shows up DOA or something and the vendor gives me grief, I'll still have some measure of recourse.

Did you look into your cost per page for this printer? Buy your genuine Samsung toner from Amazon, you'll be paying nearly 13 cents per page for toner. Best price I found (cursory search on eBay, you may be able to do better) comes out at six cents a page. That's not horrific, but it's still more than twice the cost per page of your CLP-315.

Print 200 pages a week, and your best toner cost comes out at $624 per year. Looks like NewEgg would cost you $1040. Amazon's toner will set you back $1352. These prices do not include shipping. Makes that $230 initial cost look a little less inviting.

tanstaafl.

I find that basing quality judgments on the (nominal) manufacturer is fraught with problems.

It used to be that when you did that, the company was using one design team and one manufacturing facility, but that's no longer the case. Samsung (or HP or whoever) might have multiple printer departments that run in almost complete isolation from each other.

Of course, that assumes that they're doing the design themselves at all. They might have decided to farm out design of the cheap printer to some fly-by-night engineering company in a third world country somewhere.

Even if it is the same design unit, they might farm out one to the lowest bidding factory and make another in-house.

Of course, all of this assumes that it's even really their product at all, and not just some Chinese domestic-market piece of crap that they decided made more sense to rebadge than bother developing one of their own.

Anyway, I've gotten burned on this a few times in the recent past, and I'm not going to make that mistake again.

So far as I can tell, the magic with cheap toner is that it takes the cloners a while to break the security on any given printer so they can ship compatible cartridges. My gamble with the new Samsung is that, by the time I burn through the estimated 2000 pages of life it has in the initial cartridges (notably, this printer doesn't have "starter" toner that's 3/4 empty), there should be third-party discount toner available.

We'll see on that.

Also, with respect to Bitt's concern of getting cheap crap -- my totally unsubstantiated guess is that by purchasing the next model up, which is rated as more of a workgroup printer than a cheapo entry model, perhaps it will be vaguely more built to last.

We'll see on that as well.

Right. They're only half empty. The replacement cartridges are rated at 4,000 pages.

tanstaafl.

Oddly, Samsung offers 2K and 4K cartridges, with the latter costing notably more than the former. Presumably, once the toner cloners come online, they'll sell only the latter with prices lower than the former.

Ah! I hadn't seen the 2K toners. Do the 4K toners cost more than twice as much as the 2K toners?

My CLP-300 is still working flawlessly after 4300 pages, but who knows how much longer it will go? I will be very interested in how the 620D works out for you as I have {just!) enough room for it in my computer hutch.

tanstaafl.

At NewEgg, the prices are a bit odd. They seem to have two prices for the "full" cartridges, which are otherwise the same. Anyway, going with their cheaper prices, you pay maybe $80 for the "half" version and $100 for the "full" version (for black toner -- colors cost more).

The toner cartridges for my Lexmark also come in "two prices". The lower price is for the "cartridge exchange program", where one promises to mail back the old cartridge. The higher price is without the exchange.

Just like many auto parts.

On a semi-unrelated topic, I just watched Who Killed the Electric Car?. At least with printers, it's just the printer companies trying to be monopolistic. What goes on with other industries makes the computer industry seem like altruistic non-profits.

I really dug that movie. You have to take it with a big grain of salt, as it's very biased (naturally), but there are definite facts it presents that can't be ignored. The biggest one for me being "why did GM insist on taking back all the leased vehicles to scrap them?"

There is one main reason for them taking it back, to avoid losing more money on the vehicle. If they didn't take the vehicles back they would have been legally obligated to provide a part supply chain (for 15 years in the state of California) to service them. Since there were only about 800 leased that hardly makes any economic sense. Couple that with the price of the line and the limited number that were being leased, it makes perfect sense to get them off the road and shutter that line as soon as possible.

The experience GM gained during that program along with advances in technology directly lead to the Volt, which is due out this year. I hardly think they can be called the bad guy in this case.

Probably the most interesting factoid in the movie is that, during the 90's, the U.S. administration invested maybe a billion dollars on R&D for the Big-3 automakers to develop hybrid drivetrains. This freaked out the Japanese enough that Honda and Toyota started their own efforts. What the Japanese didn't know is that the U.S. effort was all show and no go, and now look at who's selling all the hybrids.

Have you watched the movie, Tim? What you say makes sense, but I don't think I'd say that GM wasn't the bad guy. Besides, apparently the cars were extremely light on maintenance and easy to repair. I find it hard to believe that GM of all companies didn't have the money to support 800 electric vehicles.

I don't see why the price of the line makes any difference. I never said they had to keep making them, I just thought it was awful the way they scrapped all these perfectly functional vehicles. Seems to be the opposite of green.

Besides, when Pontiac stopped making the Aztec, why couldn't they mercifully take all those vehicles back, so I could stop seeing them on the road? (I'm joking here, I just hate those cars)

I am very excited for the Volt, though it does seem like they're dragging their heels on getting it out there. I'm sure it's not an easy car to get into production, but it seems like the release is always just around the corner.

Speaking of the Volt, what is with GM's design team? The car initially started out looking like this:


and ended up looking like this:


Regardless of your opinion of the styling of the prototype, it at least looks like something; it has some character. The production model looks like … nothing. Okay, it's not quite that bad, but it looks like a knockoff Prius.

I can maybe understand the desire to be generic in this case; you don't want to turn off people with styling they might not like who are more interested in the drivetrain. But it's an endemic problem with GM, the new Camaro they released being a notable exception.

I don't know; maybe they feel burned by the Asstek and the SSR.

Wow, thanks for the comparison, Bitt. I hadn't really seen the two together, and you're very right. There are plenty of cars with wide appeal that have far better styling than that. The way it is it just looks like every other sedan in the world with a bit of a raised up hood.

It's not like the toned-down result is even good styling. Just look at the way the front passenger door ends at the front of the car. It might be nit-picky, but I really hate the way it cuts into that line on the bottom of the car. It looks sloppy or something.

I'm definitely still excited about all the tech inside the car, though.

I haven't watched the movie, from what I have heard about it was that it was a documentary with an agenda. If I heard it was more of an unbiased documentary that was talking about the history of the hybrid/electric vehicles I would have watched it.

The reason I mentioned the line price is because it figures in to the total cost that GM already lost on the experiment. They produced about 800 cars at a price of about $1B (around $1.25M per car). They were already way in the red on that program and having to supply parts would have made an already huge crater even larger. Since they were leased vehicles, it was actually cheaper to get the cars back and destroy them than to support them and build that infrastructure.

Incidentally, the Aztecs weren't just leased, those vehicles were purchased so they couldn't legally take them back. I agree with you, they were hideously ugly and I have no clue how they ever left the design team that way.

I thought the original Volt design was awesome and was looking forward to seeing them live. Sadly, things almost always change between prototype to production. I miss some of the prototype features on the Camaro that didn't make it to production. There are reasons things change, even if we (the consumers) don't like them or agree with them. For what it is worth, I do have a 2010 Camaro.

Uh yeah of course it does they want it to look like a Prius.

Out of curiosity, who paid for all of the charging stations in California? In 1990, GM made a serious commitment to manufacture and sell electric cars that they later backpedaled from. If the tax payees of California were responsible for the cost of getting the charging stations in place, then that reversal of commitment was a major blow to the public. It's not a wonder they were pissed off enough to make a documentary with an agenda.

From what I remember, it was GM in conjunction with local power companies. I am pretty sure they weren't publically funded, at least in AZ. CA might have been different, but I don't remember that being the case.