I just bought a Kyocera EcoPro EP C170N color laser printer for $200 with free shipping. However, that deal has gone away and with shipping it is about $250 now.
I was concerned about the print quality because there was no way for me to see it before buying, but it looks great to me. On the other hand, I'm not a graphics expert, so there could be flaws that my amateur eye does not pick out. Still, I printed a close-up photo of our cat (among other things) when she was young and you can see the individual hairs and the reflections in her eyes and it looks good to me. Of course the 32lb glossy Hammermill paper probably helps but it was less than $10 for 300 sheets at Office Mumble. A good laser printer is always going to cost much much less in consumables than an inkjet printer, and you never have to worry about ink drying out and clogging, especially if a month or so goes by with no printing. And the ink doesn't run if you get your print-out wet. One thing to keep in mind is that those long feature lists in printer specification are often specific to some Windows utility of driver, so it takes an investigation to figure out what's actually going to function under Mac OS. Much of the functionality of the C170N is accessible through a built-in web server. The C170N has ethernet built in (another plus compared to most ink jets) and in addition to the common TCP/IP support, this printer actually still has AppleTalk support (Appletalk over Ethernet, not LocalTalk media) so it is usable with older OS Macs through the LaserWriter extension. The AppleTalk support is what sold me compared to the Xerox 6180 ($250 w/ free shipping) and the Brother mumble or other. Although, if you want color duplexing, Newegg had the Brother color laser model with ethernet and duplexer for $300 with free shipping. I think all these deals are over now, but that doesn't mean they won't be back. The deal I got cycled around a couple of times before I bought it. The Xerox 6180 was at Staples. I read a couple of reviews in which folks were not happy about the amount of consumables the Xerox uses, but it certainly is feature rich. On the other hand, those people may have had unrealistic expectations. It's hard to judge the sanity of reviewers. The printer I bought was also available on amazon.com for $200 with free shipping, because buy.com apparently has a store set up on amazon.com. So I went that route, since my CC pays better bonus points at Amazon than it does at buy.com. They also had a 512 MB memory module for $28 which maxed out the RAM in the printer. So for about $230 I got a color laser printer with ethernet built in, 640 MB of RAM, and it works well with both the OSX and OS9.x machines in the house. My goal is to use it to print water-slide decals for my rebuilds of classic model rockets. (Decal paper for printers. A month ago I had no idea the stuff even existed.) Jeff Walther --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed Low End Mac's G3-5 List, a group for those using G3, G4, and G5 desktop Macs - with a particular focus on Power Macs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to g3-5-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to g3-5-list-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g3-5-list?hl=en Low End Mac RSS feed at feed://lowendmac.com/feed.xml -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
