New printer…

My old home laser printer (a circa 2002 Konica/Minolta 2300DL) has been getting flaky lately. It took longer and longer to warm up, threw spurious paper jams, and had developed a habit of not feeding paper unless the input tray was almost full. Had not actually planned to buy a printer yet, though, but we found a great deal on a Xerox Phaser 8560N at Costco.com. It was $499 (no shipping) plus tax, the best I saw elsewhere was about $150 more. Ordered on Saturday 9/8, and it showed up on Wednesday 9/12. I did a bit of reading about it to try and make sure I was not getting an product without a future, since it’s not a laser, but uses the Xerox solid ink technology. The solid ink supposedly is much more environmentally friendly than laser cartridges (so says Xerox, and it makes sense). The ink blocks look like chunks of crayon; they come in small plastic containers, like a transparent yogurt cup. Much less packaging & waste. The printer has a high duty cycle, and seems to be what’s advertised. It came with two blocks of ink for each color (yellow, cyan, magenta & black) and my reading seems to indicate that an ink block should be good for ~1000 pages. That sounds like a lot; we’ll see. Ink blocks are ~$30/ea., except for black which is a bit cheaper.

I’ve just installed it today and it seems to be as advertised. It has PC and Mac drivers (we’re a mixed household, 4 Macs & 2 PC’s in regular use, and one more PC when my college-age son is home). Nice print quality on standard paper. Have not printed any pictures yet, but I do have a separate photo printer. It has a ton of functions in the web-based control utility. It’s designed for the small business environment, really, and it has lots of features like job accounting, email alerts on supply or paper outages, notification of job completion, etc. Way more features than I’ll ever use. As you can see if you look at the link to Xerox above, there is a family of these printers, and this is an entry level, but the software is the same for all, apparently.

If you are in the market for a printer, check it out!

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