Unfinished Bitness

For the last several years I’ve had a Canon MG-6120 color ink jet printer.  The print output quality is incredible.  However, it chews through ink wells just about as fast as you can replace them.  During ownership there has never been a time when at least one of the ink wells has not been “low” or needing replacement.  Canon cites a ~450 page yield for cyan, yellow, and magenta, and pigment black at 328 pages.  Grey is better at 1515 pages, and normal black at 2185 pages.  During the time I’ve owned the printer, I’ve gone through two reams of paper (1000 pages) at most.  So, I don’t print a lot, and never ever print photos.  The Canon page yield seems closer to 50 for the color ones, and the grays and blacks showing about one fourth of their stated yields.

Here is a cost breakdown for the Canon stated page yields showing both retail, and street pricing with cost per sheet:

As you can see, even at the maximum yield, this printer is quite expensive to run with cost per sheet between 3 and 5 cents.

I’ve grown tired of constantly replaced one ink or another, and having to wait 30+ seconds before it decided to print.  Recently after replacing yellow at $14, and a week later needing to replace magenta and cyan (with basically no color printing occurring), I bought a tri-color refill for $46 (post taxes).  I was so disappointed that I returned it within two days. I thought about my need for color, and weariness of constantly filling inks.  I knew there were monochrome lasers available for under $100 so I started looking at replacements.

Using the same cost breakdown as the Canon above, I created breakdowns for many laser printers, both monochrome and color.  I ruled out the color options after carefully considering the amount and type of color printing I do.  I can get by with black and white just fine.  On those few occasions I need color, I can take the document in PDF format to local pharmacy and have it printed for relatively cheap.

I had several criteria a new printer had to meet.  The top three of those are duplex printing, AirPrint support, fast time to print.  I previously used Printopia on my Mac to offer AirPrint for the Canon printer, but that means the Mac has to be awake for it to work.  I wanted to eliminate that as well.

Narrowing the choices down to eight monochrome laser printers, I weighed the availability of replacement toners and drums, the costs, and user reviews.  The two Samsungs at the top of my list were quickly dismissed after reading a ton of reviews citing paper feed issues.  A Xerox, Okidata, Canon, and Dell were also eliminated for one reason or another.  The Xerox and Dell due to replacement consumable availability, The Canon due to operational page cost.  The Okidata due to unit cost.  This left me considering two Brother monochrome laser printers: HL-2360DW, and HL-L5100DN.  Both of these printers had excellent reviews, and excellent operational page cost.  Here is a cost breakdown for both:

The breakdowns include a standard yield toner, high yield toner, and image drum.  I computed the cost per page for each, then added the image drum cost per page to each toners cost per page to come up with a total cost per page.  Both of the Brother printers offered excellent total cost per page, with the SOHO business unit (HL-L5100DN) coming in at 1.7 cents when using the high yield toner.

The Brother HL-L5100DN also has a few additional features I was interested in.  Primary is duplex printing.  Secondary, is Epson FX and IBM ProPrinter emulation.  As an avid Atari computer enthusiast, being able to print to the laser using the emulation is a nice benefit, and in fact I will cover this in the next post.  Tertiary is the fast time to print.  The HL-2380DW has a first page print in 8.5 seconds, while the HL-L5100DN is 7.2 seconds. In addition to the consumables cost I also looked at printer memory sizes, power consumption, and noise (db level).

For about $20 more the Brother HL-L5200DW offers wireless printing, and comes with a standard yield toner instead of a starter toner.  I went with this printer.  With a 3000 page yield on the toner and 30 page yield on the drum, I shouldn’t need to replace either for quite some time.

It arrived 2 days after placing the order with a favorite online retailer.  Setup was easy.  And one thing I was extremely happy with is that the driver installation installs JUST the driver and not a bunch of crapware I don’t want or need.  Yay Brother!  The only complaint I had during setup was the firmware update.  There were two firmwares to update (a primary, and a sub), which required two update cycles.  Each update reset the network configuration, necessitating network password entry three times.

Output is crisp and clear.  After printing the Brother test page, I test printed various documents and a picture.  As expected the picture was less than stellar with only grayscale, but I don’t do any photo printing, so this was just a curiosity more than anything.  All other documents were extremely clear using the 600 DPI setting (default).  I haven’t tried using the 1200 DPI setting yet.

I also tried AirPrint and it works flawlessly. One I had all the modern computers and devices printing to the new Brother HL-L5200DW, I wanted to get an Atari’s output to it.  After a few hours of various configurations I did get it to work.  I’ll explain how next.