Recommendations for a home printer?

ckester

ckester

My old HP Laserjet 4+ is broken and I'm thinking about buying a new
printer. I'd appreciate hearing recommendations from the forum.

My requirements:

  • Compatible with FreeBSD (obviously)
  • Laserjet preferred. Black & White only. I don't need to print photos or business brochures.
  • Very light home usage. (Tax forms and the occasional printout of a software manual for offline study.)
  • Low upfront and maintenance costs. Printers are like the old Gillette razors: the money's in the blades (toner or ink cartridges), not the device.
  • Any interface is OK. Parallel, USB, networked.

Or, since my usage is so light, would it be better to just go to Kinko's?
 
Warren, that's exactly the kind of answer I was hoping for! I just wish I could "thank" your post multiple times.

Toughness and low operating costs are indeed important to me, having wasted money on too many flimsy products in the past. (Including operating systems ;) )
 
Just to clarify a couple of points:

The LJ4050 has an instant-on fuser. It's fairly large. I was just trying to say that some of the newer HP lasers are smaller and still have instant-on fusers.

Parallel and even serial ports are standard with the 4050, but no USB. The 4050N comes with an additional Ethernet port, too. EIO cards to add Ethernet are pretty cheap, or at least some models are. There are even EIO cards with USB, but they're not as useful as an Ethernet port and I've never seen one in the wild.
 
Check the printer listing at the OpenPrinting website.

If the CUPS driver is listed as "working perfectly", then the printer will work with any OS running CUPS. Even if it's a USB printer. :)

We have a Samsung ML-2010 at home. Works perfectly with FreeBSD, Linux, Windows XP-7 (all those have been used at home). It requires the print/splix port to be installed. Once it's installed and working, don't bother upgrading CUPS or SpliX. :) Upgrades will sometimes break the printer.

We've had the printer for over 3 years. We were given the printer by an in-law who used it for over a year. He was given the printer by a family friend who used it for over a year. And we're still on the original "sample" toner cartridge. We've gone through 4 or 5 reams of paper so far, without losing any darkness in the output.
 
I'm a big fan of Brother printers. My HL-1850 works flawlessly with CUPS/Foomatic on FreeBSD-Kirkwood and is shared over the network. My printer doesn't have an instant-on fuser, but I love the built-in duplexing unit.
 
Like phoenix, I like the Samsung ML series. We have an ML-2510 here and it comes on fast, has a small foot print, and is really inexpensive - around $50. Note though that one of the reasons these don't cost much is that the supplied toner cartridge is relatively short lived. A new (full) one is about $80 but should then last some years for home use. I consider it good value. Some of the these Samsung printers have drivers immediately available and others (like the 2510) need the Splix FreeBSD drivers package.
 
The Samsung and Brother printers I've seen weren't bad. If I had to choose, the Samsungs seem a little better. Thing is, a used HP office laser blows them away in build quality and cost per page, and usually can be found pretty cheap. If you haven't yet bought a laser, I have notes about these used office-class models in the link in post #2.
 
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