I'll concur with what Don Ely said, but that being the case, you have to mitigate the downside. High end inkjets are oxymoronic. >From what you describe, in my opinion, you haven't sized your printers appropriately to the job they are to perform. Get the bigwigs a personal laser printer, they'll be happier with improved availability, you'll have less support headaches.
I only ever install the driver for a printer, despite what comes with it. Depending on the end user, I'll leave it to them to install the rest of the crap that comes with the printer. IIRC Dell started making their cartridges proprietary and unavailable anywhere but from Dell. Is this still the case? -Jonathan On Jan 29, 2008 11:25 PM, Ben Scott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > 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> ~
