| I bought a used Ricoh Aficio SP C821DN about 8 years ago for little more than the price of shipping, and have been very happy with it. It was sold by a company that liquidates old office equipment (this one came from Honda) and, as far as I can tell, makes money on the logistics (i.e. freight). Toner lasts ages (40k-100k pages), paper handling is adequate, performance and quality are great. It's been reliable despite the fact it got pretty beat up in shipping (guess you get what you pay for - company offered to send a second unit but I didn't have the space). It's not on a UPS (most of them explicitly state not to use with laser printers) and survived power outages that occasionally knocked out other equipment. I've made a handful of repairs on it myself, and do my own calibration. The insides are reasonably accessible. I got a copy of the service manual and some little-known tips on useful service codes (like overrides) found in online forums. If you think vertically you can fit it into a smaller space than you might realize. It lived in my tiny old apartment in a "cubby" I built under a raised, theater-style couch. At my current place there's to-ceiling shelving above it for storing supplies and various specialty papers. The C831DN is an updated model (with faster time-to-first-page) that was too expensive at the time but what I'd have bought say 4 years ago, and maybe still today (depending if it's successors are any good). |
A printer being down whilst the power is out isn't usually a showstopper, and it's not as if you're likely to lose state as with a computer. But losing the magick smoke is still something of a downer.