Used office style photocopier for home office. Good or Stupid idea?

Forums › Desktop computing › Used office style photocopier for home office. Good or Stupid idea?

Scott3

1035 posts

Uber Geek

Lifetime subscriber

#272934 25-Jul-2020 23:07

Thoughts on the above?

A little background. My wife runs a professional services business & works from home 3 days a week.

I have had brother laser printers for the past decade. First a series of Mono printers, upgrading each time we got to the end of the drum. Entry level > auto duplex + network > Multi-function based version of the previous printer. Highly satisfied to this point. Brother Toner's had a reasonable cost per page, so I always used them.

Only thing that sucked with the above was that it was more cost of a drum was more than the cost of an entry level printer (including both a drum & a low yeild toner). Pretty wasteful to bin a perfectly working printer....

Currently have a brother MFC-9140CDN colour laser. Up to 12,200 pages, so running towards the end of the life of the drums (15000 pages, but drum replacement is cost effective in this model $207 for all four). Not so satisfied with this one. Have been using aftermarket toners this time, as the Brother ones (per page cost of a set of 4 brother toners are quite expensive). Have been suffering from poor print quality, and poor yield off the toners. (Bit harsh to blame brother for this). Also no duplex on the scanner for this one, manually duplexing scans is a chore. It has had one fault repaired under warranty

Tossing up between the following options:

Get used business machine & deal with the chore of getting the bulky heavy 120kg machine up the stairs
Replace current Multi function with a better home focused one.
Try get current printer to work better: swap out aftermarket toners for brother toners, Poss new drums as-well. - Perhaps getting a Mono printer (HLL2310D) to run along side it. - That printer is cheap, faster & has 3000 yeild toners available - would mean we could minimize wear on the color printer drums etc.

gzt

11545 posts

Uber Geek

Lifetime subscriber

#2528817 25-Jul-2020 23:49

Surely there is a double side scanner you can add to your existing print shop? or an all-in-one.

Andib

1102 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

#2528827 26-Jul-2020 08:45

I would avoid any form of full sized MFC for a home office, They are power hungry and expensive to maintain (there is a reason most companies 'lease' them and pay per printed page vs owning them themselves).

Have you looked at HP Laserjets? They have a number of models that have duplex scan and are fairly reasonable for consumables.

richms

23470 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

Subscriber

#2528946 26-Jul-2020 12:42

Biggest problem I have with the big ones is the looooong warm up times, and the smell when hot.

Richard rich.ms

Bung

3372 posts

Uber Geek

Subscriber

#2528954 26-Jul-2020 13:53

Scott3: Get used business machine & deal with the chore of getting the bulky heavy 120kg machine up the stairs

You'd have to be mad to do this. I did it once in the mid 80s and before I got a chance to use it a family member came round while I was out and did a huge mailout using up what life was left in the drum. Totally uneconomic to fix so had to lug the heap of scrap away again.

mdooher

Hmm, what to write...
1148 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

Subscriber

#2529016 26-Jul-2020 17:03

Scott3:

Thoughts on the above?

A little background. My wife runs a professional services business & works from home 3 days a week.

I have had brother laser printers for the past decade. First a series of Mono printers, upgrading each time we got to the end of the drum. Entry level > auto duplex + network > Multi-function based version of the previous printer. Highly satisfied to this point. Brother Toner's had a reasonable cost per page, so I always used them.

Only thing that sucked with the above was that it was more cost of a drum was more than the cost of an entry level printer (including both a drum & a low yeild toner). Pretty wasteful to bin a perfectly working printer....

Currently have a brother MFC-9140CDN colour laser. Up to 12,200 pages, so running towards the end of the life of the drums (15000 pages, but drum replacement is cost effective in this model $207 for all four). Not so satisfied with this one. Have been using aftermarket toners this time, as the Brother ones (per page cost of a set of 4 brother toners are quite expensive). Have been suffering from poor print quality, and poor yield off the toners. (Bit harsh to blame brother for this). Also no duplex on the scanner for this one, manually duplexing scans is a chore. It has had one fault repaired under warranty

Tossing up between the following options:

Get used business machine & deal with the chore of getting the bulky heavy 120kg machine up the stairs
Replace current Multi function with a better home focused one.
Try get current printer to work better: swap out aftermarket toners for brother toners, Poss new drums as-well. - Perhaps getting a Mono printer (HLL2310D) to run along side it. - That printer is cheap, faster & has 3000 yeild toners available - would mean we could minimize wear on the color printer drums etc.

I'm in almost the same situation as you, Wife works from home and until a couple of months ago the same printer. (now sitting gathering dust) I've always had some form of laser, never owned an inkjet... so unhappy was I with the colour on that particular Brother and the fact that every 2nd third party cartridge leaked, I got a Brother MFCJ6930DW inkjet.

It prints A3 and most cool of all for a home device it has an A3 double siding document feeder. I have set it up to scan to email (you need to download extra firmware just like the laser)

So maybe in your case a the mono laser and one of these?

Matthew

wazzageek

Go Hawks!
1017 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

Subscriber

#2529137 26-Jul-2020 19:11

We’ve just upgraded to the brother mfc-l3770cdw - it performs a lot quicker than the previous brother, duplex scanning and printing - the hp I looked at didn’t do duplex scanning for the same price.

If you do a lot of printing, check carefully if going the inkjet route.

We stuck with the brother because its worked with all our gear.

Scott3

1035 posts

Uber Geek

Lifetime subscriber

#2529211 26-Jul-2020 22:17

The office size MFC I have my eye on has two toners above 80%, and includes a replacement for the other two.

Has yields of 20,000 on the black & 15,000 on the colors. Genuine replacement for the black toner (20,000 page yield) is $70.

Likely sale price is substantially less than a set of genuine toners for my current home MFC. Is tempting.

Power consumption in Energy saver mode is less than 106W, and Less than 4.3W in auto off mode. Not a deal-breaker.

Good point about maintenance. - When I worked in the office with several photocopiers, it seemed like a service tech was on site every couple of weeks. I was hopeful that as a mechanical engineer, and with a low print volume I could keep the thing running, but this may be unrealistic for a machine that was designed to be looked after by specialist technicians. Likewise hopeful I could reset the drums like you can on brothers to get a bit more print volume through before forking out for replacement, of throwing the machine away.

The more I think about it, the weight of the machine probiably is a a deal-breaker. Our home office is upstairs. 120kg's is a lot to manhandle up the stairs (even If I could get the weight down a little by removing toner, drums etc). And when the machine hits end of life, I would have to repeat the process, and pay dump fees. - these are obviously intended for office buildings with elevators...

While throwing away fully functional consumer laser printer sucks from an environmental perspective, at least it fits in a standard wheel bin, so doesn't cost me money.

@gzt - Honestly the single sided scanning isn't enough of a pain from me to go and buy a dedicated scanner. Can duplex it manually using software. Plus dedicated scanners with sheetfeed's tend to be specialized and run at $500+. That said, it could be a factor that would motivate me to upgrade my current MFC rather than forking out for a new set of drums & toner.

@Andib - I am aware of HP Laserjet's - Basically the direct competitor to what I have now. If I decided to swap out my current machine with a home office style color lazer I would need to do a comparison.

@Bung - Thanks for sharing your feedback.

@mdooher - Don't really need A3 - Need long document life, so a preference for laser. Need to think about if a mono laser could do for all the archive documents...

Frankly I have been put off inkjets from the amount of repair needed, and ink costs of a cannon photo printer we had in my youth. I just use a professional photo printing service these days. Haven't really thought about modern ink jets, but aware some of them market laser competitive running costs.

@Wazzageek - Print volume is actually not that high. Has taken a few year to run up that 12000 page count on this printer (although we keep running the old mono printer for some time after we purchased it, in order to run down the consumables).

Still fairly satisfied with brother, based on the run of mono laser's I had at uni (where we truly did do a very high volume of printing). In those day's I was happy with mono, and had access to fairly nice color printers at uni for the rare times I needed color.

Swapping to the mfc-l3770cdw looks to be a good option, Similar in speed to the mono printers I am used to (the MFC-9140CDN is really slow in comparison), and duplex printing fixes my bugbears. Hopefully the color print quality is better too. $490, and include's normal yeild drums, and 1000 page yeild toners. Reasonable value compared to putting new drums and toners into my current printer. High yield colour toners available too.

If I went that way, I think I would run genuine consumables after my current experience. Guess I need to handle color printing with respect if it is going to cost me $0.30 - $0.40 a sheet.

wazzageek

Go Hawks!
1017 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

Subscriber

#2529840 27-Jul-2020 21:40

Scott3:

If I went that way, I think I would run genuine consumables after my current experience. Guess I need to handle color printing with respect if it is going to cost me $0.30 - $0.40 a sheet.

I did look at the the aftermarket toners for my last MFC - what I found was that for the yields claimed by the aftermarket units, you were looking at just over three toners for the same expected yield of one genuine cartridge - I think the cost looking just at that was more than 50% more. And that was before looking at the quality.

Just my experience ...

PS - I'm really happy with the MFC-L3770 - we have an A3 inkjet model (a brother) at work ... and tbh our experience with it hasn't been that great so far - duplex printer never works from my desktop.

Handle9

4136 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

Lifetime subscriber

#2529847 27-Jul-2020 22:31

I just changed my Brother colour laser for an Epson Ecotank Multifunction printer. The only feature it doesn't have is auto duplex.

The printer is a little pricey but the per page cost is very low and the print quality is excellent. It's worth look.