What is the sysadmin's dream network printer? 6-8k pg/mo. Xerox, OkiData, Lexmark and HP are all fail
- by Jacob
How do I find out what printer brand and/or type doesn't suck? This information is hard to find and manufacturer's websites won't reveal any issues with certain printers.
After 10 years of dealing with network shared printers, I can't say that I have been impressed with any of the printer brands I've seen. Brother's little laser MFPs have been close to ideal for low volume, but that is it, period. OkiData, Lexmark, HP, Xerox solid ink printers, they all sucked in one way or another.
Currently I'm looking to replace a Xerox ColorQube 8570 because it fails to print on a regular basis. Sometimes it doesn't even boot VxWorks fully - it just hangs at 2% or whatever. I've used Xerox 8860MFPs and they sucked just as bad. I won't talk about ink jets here, that's most likely not what I'm looking for.
We currently spend about $4k on paper and ink per year for this printer at up to 6-8k pages per month, letter, mostly black and white, low color usage. I want the printer to feed paper correctly, not crash and burn when a PDF isn't according to its taste (my favorite Xerox problem here) and with decent drivers for Windows and OS X. Print quality is not of the utmost importance but paper does get sent to customers.