I went into Staples on Sunday, in search of an ink cartridge for my Epson ink jet printer. My plan was to only buy the black ink this time and forget about the colour cartridge. We were going to try printing out the wedding invites with the Epson and see how good a job it did.
While I was there, I figured I’d take a look at the laser printers that they had in stock, just for interests sake. I had spent some time on Friday searching the internet for deals so…
They had a Brother printer (can’t remember the model number but I think it was the HL-2040) on sale for $129.99. Actually it was $209 I think with a $30 instant rebate plus a $50 mail in rebate which brought it down to the $130 mark. I figured the ink for the ink jet was going to cost me at least $50 so I decided it was time to upgrade my printer.
I started talking to a guy that I thought worked at Staples. Turn out he was an HP rep who was there to answer questions. I asked him about whether or not the Brother would be able to print on card stock but he wasn’t sure. He suggested we give it a try.
We went over the the print centre and got a sheet of card stock from them. Then we went back over to the printers and fired them up. We tried the brother printer first. It didn’t have any problem printing on the card stock but we only tried using the passthrough, not the paper tray. Next we tried the “bottom of the line” HP, model number was LaserJet 1012, (he was an HP rep afterall) to see if it would do the job as well. He loaded the card stock into the paper tray of the HP and printed a test page. No problems whatsoever. He also noted (and I agreeed with him) that the HP took significantly shorter time to ‘warm up’.
So…now I had to chose between the $180 Brother printer and the $250 HP printer. I started talking to him about consumables, namely toner. The Brother had a two piece toner/drum cartridge whereas the HP had a one piece. The guy told me (and I took him at his word) that to replace the drum on the Brother would cost about $150. He also mentioned that it should be replaced everytime the toner is replaced. Not sure I believe that but… Toner cartridges (or toner/drum cartridge for the HP) were both around $90. I opted to pay the extra $70 for the HP knowing that I’d never have to pay for a replacement drum for it. I’m happy with my decision.
When I got it home, I plugged it into my mac and away I went. I was surprised that I actually had to install the software that came with it, but that was very painless. It has since printed out all our invitations as well as all the envelopes that those invitations are going in.
I’m tempted to stick a piece of photo paper into it and print out a black and white picture but I’m not sure if that is a good idea.