======= Date Modified 28 10 2009 20:10:51 =======
Hello. Mrs Ontheroad and I have had almost enough with our hand-me-down HP Photosmart All-in-one inket printer. It scans badly, prints badly and copies badly, all-in-one. It drinks ink like an American car, and it chews paper up like a combine harvester chews crops, only nothing edible or useful comes out of it.

So we're looking to replace it with a budget (< £100) mono laser printer. It must be able to print duplex (double sided). Amazon and a few other retails have some tempting machines, but few seem able to do duplex, and there are far too many all-in-ones that are inkjet rather than laser.

Any suggestions from home working PhDs? Built in wireless networking would be handy, and it must be Mac compatible.

Thanks!

Try looking at the business section of printer manufacturers' website - they do no-frills, high ink capacity office machines that you won't find on the normal consumer sites (just remember to add on the VAT). I was looking for a laser printer, but found a HP Office Jet on the HP business website that has a really good ink capacity.

first stop should be your IT department at uni. I have just ordered a colour laser via IT (sounds posh, but it is necessary, my supervisor sends comments back in colour and now chapters are getting larger it takes ages to print on an inkjet and a b&w laser isn't really an option, unless I want to go through it all and highlight the comments) and firstly it is coming out of my expenses and thus my fees, so is really 'free' and secondly they got a fair bit off the listed price.

I think we had your printers long lost brother in our lab :) the ink cartridges almost had to be replaced on a weekly basis! Im not sure about laser printers but I have a really good canon inkjet printer. I bought it 7 yrs ago for 160 pounds or so and its still going great. I printed off 5 copies of my 300 page thesis before xmas and only used 1 black ink cartridge to do so. cartridges are about 12-15 pounds - I do a lot of printing but only go through about 2 cartridges a year so i think its quite economical :) It also prints pretty fast and its never ever eaten a page on me in the 7 yrs Ive had it :) It might be better to go with a quality inkjet printer than a cheap laser printer if you can afford to.

I'm using a HP laserjet 1320. The print quality is very high - a real improvement on some of the inkjet printers I used previously. But most importantly it's FAST. I don't know how I'd cope without a laser printer.

The cartridges last for ages - I've used one a year and do all my printing at home, plus I use my scanner (not part of the printer) as a photocopier so it's very busy.

If you buy the HP toner cartridge on the high street they're quite expensive c.£50, but I got my last ones on ebay - genuine HP sealed cartridges for c.£20. You can also get refilled/refurbished cartridges from high street places such as Cartridge World for c.£35 and non-HP generic or refilled ones on ebay for less than £20.

Oh, and yes, it does duplex printing by pulling the page back inside and flipping it over to print on the reverse and works without any installation (like most printers, I think) on my Mac. I'm not sure about the wireless printing as I haven't tried it.

Looking on the HP website it appears that the particular one I've got has been discontinued, but the subsequent range seems pretty similar.

printerbase uk is great, I picked up a xerox 6110 laser colour printer for around 80 squid.

Thanks for all the tips, will follow them up (up)