I am in the same basic market as you are right now, and looking into the
same issues.
The issue of refilling is a real problem, because many of the companies
which offer refill kits are a little coy about either how involved the
process is, what other parts may be required (such as counter chips
which cannot be reset) how long other consumable parts will last (such
as drums in refillable cartridges), and of course, how their toners
equate in quality to the originals.
Things are further confounded by the manufacturers who are often very
short on details to how their cartridges work, if they have "loyalty"
mechanisms built in, and how much toner comes with the original unit to
begin with.
I would to hear from any color laser toner refillers here, or anyone
with experience with doing their own or getting refills for color laser
printers.
Here's what I have found, overall... HP color laser printers which are
some of the most common in the retail chain and seem to have a wide
variety of models and price ranges starting from as little as $150 CAN,
are similar to inkjet printers in the starter cartridge situation. The
very lowest priced machine come with partially filled cartridges
(usually 50% of the standard cartridge), and those smaller machines cost
more to replace the cartridges per print, even when you do get to full
cartridges.
As an example: (darn, I just can't find the paper, so I'll be going on
memory...)
the CP 1210/15 and CP 15??IN models come with toner cartridges for 750
copies at 5% coverage per color.
The 1600 come with half filled cartridges good for about 1000 prints at
5% per color. The full version is double that, and cost about $100 each
The 2400M (networked) come with the same type of cartridges the 1600
does, but they are full, so good for 2000 prints at 5% per color
The 3600N comes with full cartridges , but they are twice the size as
the full ones for the 1600 and 2400, offering 4000 prints at 5% per
color and 6000 B&W. The cartridges are maybe 20% more costly that the
1600/2400 models, on replacement (about $120 each CAN) so this is a
considerable savings.
All these printers use self contained toner drum units, and do not
require an optical transfer belt, as some printers do, so the only
consumables are the cartridges/toners. I believe they recycle the
excess toner on the drum, but won't swear to that. I have no idea how
many refills the drums will hold out for. The smaller the drum diameter
(some of the small desktop models have very small drums) the less life
they probably have since they get used more per print.
All the models listed above are available her in Canada between $150 and
$300, in part because some are being discontinued. In terms of speed,
image quality etc, it is worth reading reviews because they very much
vary, and don't reply just on magazine reports because sometimes user
experience is very contrary in one direction or the other.
I should mention that the HP models I listed above are just the tip of
the price iceberg. There are many higher end models which cost up to
numerous thousands of dollars.
The other thing you will probably notice is that the duty cycle is much
greater on the more expensive units, and I mean significant differences,
suggesting that even slightly more costly models are possibly
considerably more durable.
Obviously there are other brands of color lasers out there than HP. I
have just been researching HP because they are heavily discounting their
lower end models right now. Brother, Lexmark, Samsung and Xerox are
also major players. Samsung seems to be going for small desktop units a
lot, and the consumables are a bit trickier to figure out because they
use canisters of toner which are quite reasonable (and maybe even easily
refillable, I don't know) but they have other consumables that require
replacement on different intervals, like transfer belts or drums, so you
really need to look at their web pages for details.
The main caveat in purchasing a laser printer these days, and especially
a color one, is that the price of acquisition has little to do with the
real cost of operation, other than the usual inverse relationship
between cost of printer and cost of consumables, so just like with
inkjets you really have to take note of the cost and availability of
consumables, and like the OP asked, what models allow for refills or 3rd
party consumables.
As to image quality, that really comes down to seeing it in person, in
my opinion, because I can't find any agreement on what people expect of
a color laser printer. Most companies will provide you with samples by
mail if requested by phone or on line.
Oh yes, a few more considerations, for commercial use, you may wish to
increase the amount of memory in the printer, so look into
expandability, how much is provided new, and if standard memory can be
used. Proprietary memory can ruin any savings you though you had. Other
considerations are paper tray sizes and amount of pages they can handle,
ability to accept non-standard paper sizes, bypass paper slots, ability
to handle card or glossy stocks, toner surface (matte semi-gloss or
glossy), first print out time, and of course, electrical consumption.
One final comment on this... Most manufacturers list their toner
coverage as 5% per color. This allows for reasonable comparison, but it
doesn't tall you the real story regarding printing photos.
A photo image can easily use 30-60% toner coverage per color per image.
Yes, I know that's more that 100% by quite a bit, but just like inkjet
printers, color laser toners are translucent and over print to create
tones other than the base colors of CMY and K. So, a deep orange, uses
coverage of both M and Y, a high density blue, uses both M and C
together. A dark royal blue uses C, M and K. So, depending upon your
type of image, you can consider dividing the print count numbers offered
by the manufacturer by between 6 and 12 to get photo output. That
means a 2000 image cartridge set suddenly goes down to 166 to 333
prints. Not so cheap all of the sudden when a set of cartridges (at OEM
cost) is nearly $500 (and that doesn't include the printing substrate).
Art
If you are interested in issues surrounding e-waste,
I invite you to enter the discussion at my blog:
http://e-trashtalk.spaces.live.com/
Mike N wrote:
> I'm looking for recomendations for a color laser printer which has
> good photo quality and the ability to refill toner cartridges so as to
> keep cost down. It is to be used in a small business. We currently
> use a Canon Ink Jet & refill ink cartridges manually, but this is a
> rather messy prospect (& the inkjet printer just died).
>
> My Criteria:
>
> - Reasonable Purchaes Cost, it can even be out-of-production &
> available only used (on eBay for instance)
>
> - Must have the ability to refill toner cartridges (or have
> inexpensive after market cartridges available)
>
> - Good color photo quality (speed or B/W performance is not critical
> as I have a monochrome HP Laser Printer)
>
> Thoughts?
> Mike
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