New Colour Laser Printer

[Ed P]

I need a new colour laser printer as my old one has just died. I’m thinking of a Brother HL-L8260CDW. I would have liked to have compared cost/print data but I cannot find anything on the web.

I was also thinking about a Brother DCP-L2530DW mono laser printer plus small colour printer such as Canon Pixma IP7250 Single Function as an alternative. Though maybe the cheapest option is just to forget colour and use a print shop when required.  (I prefer to avoid an ink-jet only solution as my experience over the years with inks drying out has not been good!)

Does anyone have a better suggestion or comments?

[edit, my previous printer was a Samsung and my experience was good but they have now been taken over by HP and I dislike HP’s efforts to preclude third party printer inks.)

[Ed P]

A friend pointed me to a snapshot printer he uses:  the Kodak Photo Printer Dock PD-450 – it certainly gives a nice quality snapshot print.

[Dave Rice]

I bought a Brother HL-L8260CDW from Printerland back in April. I always look at cost of ownership over headline price, but at £190 ish then and now that was good too especially as it includes full size carts. Beware the cheap Dell deals.

Cost per page I work out for myself if it’s not shown. As I always buy printers that can accept third party cartridges I find myself on ink suppliers sites and they always show this.

Maintenance items are a waste toner and transfer belt units, £70 for both @ 50,000 pages .001 pence per page.

I regularly print CCTV surveys of 40 pages plus and it’s a quick as it claims and I’ve not had any paper handling issues. Quality is what you would expect and it’s not eating toner. You can configure it through a web interface or the BRAdmin windows app.

As it’s currently on offer at Printerland with £75 Cashback, 3 Year Warranty and free next day delivery I’d be biting their hand off.

I use a Canon MG6600 for photos, but when this expires I’ll not replace it as online photo printing shops (or a quick trip to Asda or Jessops) make more sense these days. The ink drying issues on the CCTV reports are the reason I decided on a colour laser (I’ve always had a B&W one which I’ve kept in the workshop).

[Ed P]

Thanks Dave looks good, but I do not see the ‘cashback’! Registered customers only I guess.

Correction, now the green cashback shows – very strange!

Order placed with delivery tomorrow – great start.

[Ed P]

I’m very pleased with the Brother Printer. It was a breeze to set it up in Windows.

I wish I could say the same about setting it up as a wifi attached printer in Linux. I hate CUPS as the database had nothing that looked like this printer! In the end after much hair tearing I found this very simple setup (that needs sudo to launch it and pulls in many hundreds of megabytes of dependencies – probably for the unwanted scanner part).

Strangely although earlier CUPS found the printer without issue when USB attached, the CUPS install locked everything up and needed a hard reset!

[Alan Wood]

I have a Brother colour laser HL-3040CN and am completely happy with it. Reasonably priced consumable replacements are available and I have seen it advertised on the web in the last few days at around £128 which is a bargain.

[Author]

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