Amy ran a wet page through our current printer and it hosed up the drum. We needed to get new brochures out for an upcoming event so we headed to Staples to buy another one (it was going to take too long to get a new drum. I’ve since replace the drum with a kit for about $35 bucks.) They no longer sell the HL-1440 at Staples so we took a look at the other offerings.
Color lasers had really come down in price. One in particular was the Magicolor 2400W from Konica Minolta. It was $400 and has a B/W price per page of about $0.02. The color cost is about $0.08 per page (it’s a 4 pass CMYK process — so duh, it’s 4 times the cost. 🙂 The only downside is that it’s a Windows only printer. We decided to go with it and have printed about 5000 sheets with it already, mostly without a hitch. It’s quite a bit louder than the Brother, but it also prints faster. The output looks more crisp and has a glossy sheen than the Brother’s and I suspect it has to do with the composition of the toner.
If I had to do it over, I’d probably get the Magicolor 2430DL since it’s network-able and is compatible with the Mac and my Linux machines. Overall though, I’ve been very happy with our purchase.
