Which printer for printing large volumes (10.000 +) pages per month?

[printer]

I need a printer capable of printing 10.000 pages and more per month for printing out books. Price is most important. Easy of use, too ! So I do not want to have a printer that I have to take care of, I want it to print. Therefore I am looking forward to the HP models, they are reliable and they do play nice with third party toners from what I heard.

This is what could work out:

• Laserjet 4015X
  With around 1.300 Euro it is expensive. I do not need its speed.
• Laserjet 9000DN
  Around 500 Euro. Third party toner is 50% more expensive than the one from the 4015 model.
• Laserjet 8150DN
  Around 500 Euro. Maybe too old. Still rather expensive in my area, costs as much as the used Laserjet 9000

What are your recommendations?

[Big Al]

As far as I can tell the pages per month listed in the HP specs are not realistic. How much speed do you need? The printer I use to print about three thousand pages a month is an HP 4000. Over the years I have worked on a lot of these and they have few problems, are reliable, parts are readly available and inexpensive. You can get a duplexer and an envelope feeder and both work quite well. Here in the USA you can get one for about $100, not sure what one would cost where you are.

The only issue with the 4000 is once in a great while it will jam right at the top of the paper travel where it turns back to go into the print station. It does not happen often but does take about 15 to 20 minutes to take off the upper cover, remove some screws and a small cable and remove the jam. This is the only defect I know of with the 4000. The speed on these is about 10 pages per minute which is 4,800 pages in eight hours. You can also get high capacity paper trays which are very easy to install giving you a thousand pages without having to load paper. It uses the HP NIC which you will also have to purchase if you want to network. The older 600 NIC's work fine at 10 MB/second. Drivers should be available for MAC. There is no USB port on these.

Al

[cs_steve]

Of the 3 printers you mentioned, the LaserJet 9000 is the hardiest... the maintenance kit (fuser & rollers) will last longer than the P4015 or 8100 series. It's a very large printer but probably the best suited for the type of volume you'll be printing.

[printer]

Thanks for your ideas!

I am also leaning towards the Laserjet 9000. Currently I use the Laserjet 4300 but the paper in the paper output tray is not in order, and it is rather slow. Having said that, speed will not be an issue, as I plan to place the printer in my basement. But in this case, I do need around 3000 paper input and output capability, and only the Laserjet 9000 provides that for below 1.000 euros. I would like to use the Laserjet 8000, too - but I do not have access to a paper output tool for cheap. The same goes for the Laserjet 4000. I'd have to pay the same money as for the 9000 series.

Having a good paper output is very important for me.

[jeffpt]

This may not be advice that pertains to your situation, but if I was running lots of prints every month, and my income depended on it, I would get TWO laserjet 8150's or 8100's instead of one 9000. These printers should be cheaper in price, and toner will probably be cheaper per page than the 9000, and this is key, you'll have redundancy if one printer goes down. You don't want to be in a situation where you can't print if it's a key part of your business.

[printer]

This is a good advice! I am lucky that I have the opportunity to print my A4 books at around 3 times the price it costs me doing it myself with the HP Laserjets. Not so expensive for a short period of time.

The Laserjet 9000 (1000 Euro) is available with the 3.000 paper output which has the additional plus that each book is shifted some mm to the right / left so I can easily identify them. With this printer, I can click on a button and return one and a half hour later collecting all prints. I do not need the fast speed of this printer.

Unfortunately I do not get the Laserjet 8150 (250 Euro) with an nice paper output for less than 2x the price of the used printer (500 Euro for the paper output alone). I do want to click a button, then wait some hours, coming back and collect all the prints. With the two 8150 I have to return for each 1.000 sheets printed. For the price of the Laserjet 9000 plus the 3.000 paper output I could get four 8150, and then have 2.000 paper output sheet capability. Maybe their footprint is equal to the heavy 9000 with the 2.000 input tray and the 3.000 paper output but four printers are more complicated to set up than one.