Printers

[#1]

Being in the sad position of needing to replace my ink-jet printer (again!!) I'm wondering that since colour laser printers have become so much cheaper these days, how do they compare with cost of printing per page, print quality compared to ink-jet and cost of colour printing medium.
Is it a worthwhile alternative to ink-jet?

[#2]

I don't have one  but a friend has a cheap laser printer and the print quality (text) is excellent on draft setting and he has never had to replace the cartridge (several years).
However he does a small amount of colour printing which he is happy with - BUT - the colour cartridges have just about run out and they are expensive

[#3]

I'd say it depends on what you buy / find really. I've only ever had one laser printer and its been the best bit of kit I ever laid my hands on. Someone gave it to me free on freecycle as it was dead. I got it working the same evening and its been in use for the last 3 years. I've never even needed to change the toners  
It did let me down once a couple of months back, can't remember what happened it was something to do with the paper tray upsetting something else and I had to have the thing apart to realign a plastic gear but even since then it's been faultless and at 10 years old and 5th hand (I know this from the service dept) it's been a solid machine.
Mine is a Konica Minolta and having spoken to a few printer specialists while trying to get to the bottom of my recent fault, I was told that they are very well made machines that will live almost forever. It's an old office type printer though so its large and it retailed at around £800 when new apparently (though I've seen them online at £3k). I've no idea what the home units are like but having now had a laser printer for the last 3 years, had no hassles, no inkjet costs etc, I don't think I'd want to switch back again.
So is it worthwhile alternative to inkjet? As far as I'm concerned yes definitely. If you get a good one that has decent toner capacity then it will keep you going for years. Then there is the print quality.. this is something IMO that an inkjet printer cannot match.
I am slightly biased though as this printer isn't what you'd find in most peoples homes so you might want to bear that in mind. If you do want to get a laser though and you have a reasonable budget (eg say £500) you can find some very good laser printers out there (heck 2 weeks back someone was trying to sell one like mine on ebay for just £15 fully working so there are good machines out there to be had cheaply too).

[#4]

Laser printers are great for text and the odd bit of graphics i.e. a colour logo and a small picture etc.
I've always found them to be lacking for printing out decent quality photographs - inkjet printers still have the edge by far on this.
However for cost of running and the fact they don't eat a chunk of your ink to clean the heads every time they start up, the laser printers win every time for me.
I've got a Samsung CLP-300 colour laser in the workshop (biggest load of rubbish ever), a Brother HL-5380DN network mono laser duplex printer in the workshop and a OKI B4350 mono network laser in the airing cupboard for the family to use. I also have an Epson Stylus Scan 2500 inkjet printer for printing out onto transparencies for making printed circuit boards - it's old (>12 years) but I've kept it just about going !
I also had another Brother home network mono laser printer which I lent to my parents. They loved it so much they tried to buy it off me.

[#5]

Quote from: picbits

Laser printers are great for text and the odd bit of graphics i.e. a colour logo and a small picture etc. I've always found them to be lacking for printing out decent quality photographs - inkjet printers still have the edge by far on this.

Having had a few inkjets I'd have to disagree. I never found one that could print photo quality and if it came close, it would leave the paper slightly creased from the soggyness of the ink. With the laser printer I've never had that effect and found that the image comes out a lot better.

[#6]

I find that laser printers struggle a bit with large colour areas (due to issues with the way they work / static charges on drums etc etc) and colour matching can be very hit or miss with them.
That is unless you spend a fair few £££ on a pretty decent colour laser.
The best printers I've found for full page colour graphics are the dye sublimation printers - I briefly had a Tektronix Phaser but didn't have enough room to keep it running. I also ran one in a large business when I was an IT manager and it was fantastic and relatively cheap to run.
The printers we used for presentations were generally Epson A3 using the proper injet paper. These interleave the print pixels so one row has a chance to dry out a bit before the next row is put down - this reduces the paper wrinkle and will generally give you near photo quality prints.

[#7]

Quote from: picbits

Epson

Don't ever swear at me like that again 
I must be pretty lucky with this one then as I've never had any major image problems. The only thing I do have problems with is pdf files that are 3-400 pages (or rather swmbo has a problem printing them). The printer seems to run out of memory and then the pages start turning into garbage.  It doesn't happen to me though lol. The duplex is also very handy but a shame it takes so long to flip over the paper internally as it really slows it down.