I'm getting very close to launching my new letting agency (Micawber Lettings) and I just wondered if anyone could recommend a printer.

It's only a small business but one which will hopefully grow over the next couple of years so I need to upgrade from my current inkjet printer to a laser printer.

Can anyone recommend a good, low maintenance printer that won't break the bank in these early days.

Regards

Rob West

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With sixty seconds worth of distance run,
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We got ours from: Konica Minolta Colour Laser Printers

We have found Konica Minolta to make good printers but we were of the view that it is best not to scrimp when buying a printer as the low budget ones never last.

The only problem is last week we had to replace the toners and drum and it came to £550! Thats where the main expense is, on the ink....

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Rob

As per Labno look at the cost of the ink. We print our letterhead on the documents as we produce them. You will find it is the cost of the ink in the longterm that is the expense.

Check out old posts I can remember one member stating they had a unit that scanned documents very quickly which enabled them to move forwards to become a paper free office.

Rob,

We run a small business overseas with only six office based staff. They do this every few years - look at total cost of ownership. One thing they have is the annual throughput for both printing and photocopying. Our last photocopier lasted us 12 years, and the current one was a third of the capital price, but no change to the consumable costs.

On the subject of printers, you really have to know or estimate as well as you can your total throughput, because all printers have a target market in mind. But you can still get it wrong because there are other parts besides ink that need to be replaced, like "the drum", which can be expensive.

Did you search for any forums like Which, or ask anyone at PC World, for example? They could save you a lot of time and comparison, but you really need to be able to estimate your throughput. There are only two of us at our home office, and much of what we print out is not for public consumption. For speed more than anything else, we put the default setting on Draft mode, and that saves about 50% of the ink, and spits out the papers so fast they go to the other side of the room if the paper stop is not in the up position.

Avoid having a large colour logo too, or any template documents that print a lot of solid colour or even black. The standard page quoted on ink consumption assumes 5% page coverage by ink - that's one space in 20 spaces. Try to get one that logs the total pages consumed in memory - most do these days, so that at least if you don't know your consumption, you will know it as the months roll by, and can then more accurately monitor your total cost of ownership per page.

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That's great - gives me some useful pointers. Let you know what I go for although I have been offered a second had Dell (don't know the model yet). Obviously if the price is right, it might be worth considering but will investigate costs involved in replacing ink/drum etc as suggested.

Thanks for the input.

Regards

Rob West

__________________
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it.