Excellent little personal laser printer

I purchased this printer at Office Depot for approximately $50 after rebate. Without rebate, the printer retailed for $120 before taxes. I actually forgot to send in the rebate, and it expired. Regardless, I still feel like I have gotten the better hand here, as this printer has exceeded all expectations.

For starters, you unpack the printer, and remove the protective tape holding various doors together. You then tear open the black wrapping of the included "starter" toner cartridge and insert it into the machine. Be very careful to not touch the green roller, and do not expose it to direct sunlight. It is photosensitive and excessive exposure to light will reduce its lifetime.

It isn't a full toner cartridge, of course. There are not many printers, regardless of whether it is laser or inkjet, that include a 100% full cartridge. They include starters, to get you on your way.

This may not be much of a worry here, as lasers generally print quite a bit more per cartridge then an inkjet. It all boils down to the percentage of ink laid down per page. Let's say you run a little ebay business from your house, to earn a little income on the side. You might print 60-120 ebay invoices per month. The amount of toner laid down on each of those invoices is miniscule. You could easily get years of pages from the starter cartridge at that rate. Now however if you are printing graphics, that uses much more toner, and you may get less pages.

My reason for favoring laser printers, is that they start out with dry "ink". Inkjet printers (most of them) use a water-based ink, which will smear when it gets wet. The exception here may be certain Epson photo printers. Regardless, if not used often enough, this liquid ink may dry in the print heads and clog, if not used often enough.

The toner in a monochrome laser printer (such as this one) is dry from the start. It is generally a mixture of carbon black and a powdered waxy substance. In a nutshell, what the laser printer does is coat the paper, with your printed pattern, with this dry powder substance, then run it under an extremely hot roller (called the "fuser") which permanently bonds this "ink" into the paper. It cannot be erased, scratched off, or smeared off in water.

Color laser printers work based upon a very similar process, however since this is not a color printer, I will digress.

The speed of this printer is very surprising. It is rated at up to 20 pages per minute. I didn't pull out a stopwatch, but I believe it. It is incredibly fast. The sharpness in the prints is absolutely astounding.

I run Windows XP and driver installation was a snap. Insert the CD, click thru the installation procedure, plug in the printer, and it just works. It was as easy as that.

In the event of a paper jam, it is pretty easy to clear. There are several hinged doors with visible tabs to pull in order to open them and clear the jam.

When I first bought this printer, the first and only real "major" jam I've had was when I forgot to extend the printed paper tray guard. This is the plastic extension you can extend in the tray where the printed paper lies.

I didn't extend that, and the paper was flopping onto the floor, so as i tried to extend it during the print job, all the paper started to "accordion" inside the printer. Fortunately the printer is well designed to be opened up and have paper easily removed.

This was not a fault of the printer. This was definitely a fault of me being a clutz.

The warranty on this unit is one year carry-in or ship-in for labor, and one year on parts.