Any recommendations for a good low cost laser printer that my daughter can keep in her dorm room?

School printer in dorm basement is not working reliably, she would like a printer in her room.

gg

They are usually pretty big...

A lot of color? not much? wireless? Duplex? If she prints a lot, toner will kill you $ wise.

If you just want a basic color laser, Id say something like a Xerox 6500. Silent went off, and first page out in just a few seconds. Think they run $250? new, but I found mine on eBay for $120.

generic toner is super cheap. [www.amazon.com]

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Edited 999 time(s). Last edit at 12:08PM by jdc.

Thanks, I think that is more than she needs. No color needed, looking for something small occasional printing. They get 200 pages per semester included but it is not working for her new Macbook pro. Tech support at the school only said "It should be working"

Wireless would be nice.

I used to see good feedback for brother. But a lot of the reviews are bad now especially for use with MAC.

If she wants a compact black & white printer the small brothers are good.

Staples has the Brother® HL-L2320D Monochrome Laser Printer on sale this week for $59.99:

[www.staples.com]

So far the bad reviews I have seen had to do with Apple not having up-to-date drivers, but these can be downloaded directly from brother.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/09/2016 11:46AM by Janit.

Six or seven years ago I happened to enter an Office Max and saw this Samsung printer on the shelf, sale price $40 (including a toner cartridge):

It was >$300 on Amazon. Bought if for my college-bound son and it was perfect, small and quiet. Like your daughter, he just needed convenience printing. The toner is not expensive, and the printer still works fine. No duplexing or fancy features, though. It might have been handy to have scanning and copying functions.

All this description of an obsolete printer is merely to suggest perusing your local brick-and-mortar stores: you never know what deals you might find!

Sorry, for some reason I read "color" in there somewhere -- dunno why.

Brothers are still champs, I just saw an article one the other day praising it... wish I could remember where I saw it.

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Edited 999 time(s). Last edit at 12:08PM by jdc.

does she need B&W Proofing?
not sure if Brother still makes LH-2280DW, that is Duplex and Wireless, the only things missing are fax and auto-doc-feeder for scanner.

Edit: airprint is also missing on that model. I would say get a model with Airprint, in case she gets an iPhone or iPad.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/09/2016 12:06PM by space-time.

Fwiw, I've had excellent r suits buying used HP small office/workgroups printers on Craigslist/Ebay. I live in a large metro area, which helps. Also, you want one with a low pages printed count.

I would only buy a printer that is duplex, wireless, and AirPrint-compatible.

Would suggest buying one that scans too, because with that it's easy to make photocopies, but its size may not be worthwhile in a dorm setting. And kids these days are good at using their phone cameras instead of photocopiers.

Brother printers have superb Mac support. But I'm never sure if it's Brother behind that support, or the open-source GIMP print effort. Either way, there is always an update a few days after new OS releases.

Another for the brother.

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“There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in."

Goose,

Compact laser all-in-one. Brother has a solid model that is a print/copier/scanner. If I were a college student, I'd want a way to do photocopies and scanning without having to leave my room. An inkjet all-in-one may prove sufficient, too. wireless and duplexing are a given, too. AirPrint friendly is handy but not as important in my experience. Note, you may not be able to use it on the network connection in the room, else everyone has access to it. Hardware USB or direct wifi to it will do the job.

Robert



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/09/2016 01:41PM by Robert M.

You might want to go with a cheap Brother for cost and other reasons. My son had a Xerox 6280 duplex/color/USB/Ethernet (this was 2011). He was very popular on his co-ed floor, enough so that I had him pay for his new carts.

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Saint Cloud, Minnesota, where the weather is wonderful even when it isn't.

I know this goes against the norm, but you do not want wireless printing in a dorm. Once the password gets out (and it will), the printer will become community property.

Just get a long USB cord and stay secure, and be able to easily police it (hard to say no when something is already printed out and sitting there).

I got my son a Canon MF216 AIO for $100 last year. The temp cartridge that it came with will likely last him all through school. It is rated for 1700 pages. He has found that very few profs wanted printed material, everything is submitted online. The MF216 does have AirPrint, but he has never used it.

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“No persons are more frequently wrong, than those who will not admit they are wrong.” -- François de La Rochefoucauld

"Those who cannot accept the past are condemned to revise it." -- Geo. Mathias

The German word for contraceptive is “Schwangerschaftsverhütungsmittel”. By the time you finished saying that, it’s too late

Once the password gets out (and it will), the printer will become community property.

good point... but you can always change password, it turn WiFi off.

You definitely want wireless capability, even if you don't immediately use it.

B&W toner refills are so inexpensive, there are worse ways to create some social traffic in a dorm than being a printer option.

just get a cheap brother

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mattkime
just get a cheap brother

avoid cheap sister

Thanks for all the input, shopping online soon. See what I can come up with in the Brother products.

gg

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goosegunner
I used to see good feedback for brother. But a lot of the reviews are bad now especially for use with MAC.

Brothers are still good, I run about five of them in my office, with constant, heavy use, we get 3 to 5 years out of each unit....

I'll be the only vote for figuring out why the dorm printer doesn't work. Welcome to the real world, figure out how to fix things and you are going to be a lot better off.

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C(-)ris
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I would tend to agree with Chris, but that's not her job.
I would recommend a brother laser printer if it wasnt for the drum errors I kept getting after two cartridges. Their inkjet printers I can recommend. No problems there.
Ive had a Canon imageclass 6030w [www.amazon.com] for a while now. Got it for $60 on sale. Currently at $80. It takes generic carts no problem. Have it on my home network printing off Windows and Macs.

Carm,

Agreed. While teaching oneself how to troubleshoot and repair a printer (and/or computer issues in general) is a great idea and definitely worthwhile, maintenance and repair of a dorm printer is not her job at all. Her job would be to report the situation with the hope it'll be resolved in a timely manner. The fact that it is unlikely to be handled quickly is reason to have a printer in her room.

The last thing a student wants is to need the dorm printer for a paper or other task, only to find out it's out of service. The sheer inconvenience alone is enough to justify a printer in the dorm room. Same thing when it comes to needing to make photocopies or scan things. Best bet in the dorm situation is a printer connected via USB or wifi direct.

Meaning, a hardwire connection as necessary or wifi but not on the dorm network. The printer creates it's own wireless network. On the computer, you choose that network and print as necessary. Switch back to the normal network afetrwards. Definitely inconvenient. Workable but inconvenient. I can vouch for that from experience.

Robert

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Janit
So far the bad reviews I have seen had to do with Apple not having up-to-date drivers

They're up-to-date now, Janit:

[support.apple.com]

Brother Duplexing unit FTW, IMHO.

Disposable color inkjet for those few color images that 'must' go into some reports.

We got Baby Buzz a Brother 2280DW for his dorm days, back when it used to go on RYF deals every few months. Trick was to hook it up to his own private wifi router (which was a campus no-no), and keep the SSID hidden, and only share the printer w/ his roommates. While the setup worked, they ended up mostly using campus wifi, and hooking up to the printer via a USB tether, rather than swapping System Pref locations for printing. Millennials being Millennials. Kinda big, but they really appreciated the scan/copy feature. Not sure what the current equivalent unit is, but if it'll fit in the dorm room, that's pretty much what she oughta get.
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