Just speaking on price, Dell is running end of the year promos on printers. They are discounted heavily. I think they are doing 2 fer 1s.
Add a support contract, you are golden. Been using them for 4+ years. Never had a software issue. A dell tech has had to come once to fix the 11 we have - but it had about 300K pages already printed to it. -----Original Message----- From: Ben Scott [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, January 29, 2008 10:26 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Printer brand recommendations Howdy list, So, after some truly abysmal tech support experiences with HP this month, I've decided it's time to look at other printer brands. I've been buying HP's almost exclusively for over a decade, so I'm starting from scratch. There are so many brands that even a product field survey is non-trivial: Dell, Samsung, Canon, Epson, IBM/Lexmark, Xerox, Ricoh, Sharp, Toshiba, Panasonic, just to name a few. Recommendations? Opinions? Horror stories? Relatively small company, roughly 75 workstations. Mostly monochrome laser printers serving workgroups of 5-10 people. Typical volume might be 1K-3K pages/month. A couple color laser printers serving supersets of same. A few bigwigs have color inkjets in their office, because of course they're too important to have to walk out to the printer in the hall, but they also don't want to clutter up their fancy mahogany office furniture with a larger laser printer that might actually work. For example, the Director of HR. Since she works with personal/private stuff, she wanted one of those print/scan/copy/fax jobs (reasonable, I guess). The supposedly high-end HP inkjet we bought has been a disaster, which is why I'm here. Almost every printer we have is network-attached (easier to manage, they roam with the user profile if hardware is changed, enables the frequent requests to share printers). As I recall from some experience a few years ago, that seems to be a common failing with many brands. Even if they have a network jack, functionality/features are severely reduced over the network. One thing I really dislike is printers which require special software installation to the tune of hundreds of megabytes, a few startup programs, a dozen desktop icons, and their own support, update, and maintenance hassles. Windows has APIs for printing and scanning; if we stick to those, support and training are so much easier. Thoughts? -- Ben ~ Upgrade to Next Generation Antispam/Antivirus with Ninja! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbelt-software.com/SunbeltMessagingNinja.cfm> ~ ~ Upgrade to Next Generation Antispam/Antivirus with Ninja! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbelt-software.com/SunbeltMessagingNinja.cfm> ~
