I too am a HP fan. One of my concerns is the availability of supplies after the fact. I've been burned by buying Brother/Panasonic/etc. fax machines for which I had to mail order ink cartridges a year after purchase. My LJ4 is over 10 years old & I can still wander into Staples & pick up a toner at a reasonable price.

Some of the smaller Samsung printers are often available for $50 or so. The last one I had worked well for a couple of years of light use. And you can refill the toner carts for $7-10.

Here's an example of such a deal.

I swear by my HP Laserjet, but it's such a workhorse it's at least 5 years old...great machine, no software bloat (unlike our HP Inkjet all-in-one, which I hate). Tech support has also been terrific, by web or phone.

Don't know the reliability of the newer machines, but if they have managed to keep up their former standards, stick with HP.

My experience is the old HP laserjets are wonderful, and that the HP ink jets are cr@p

It's not the ink technology. My inkjet just stopped grabbing the paper and sliding it through the drum, despite dabbing the rollers with alcohol as indicated in some obscure HP tip

I too will vote for the Samsung ML series laser printers. Both of mine works fine and I know of 3 other people with different ML models and the love them too. Great pricing and the original cartridge toner will print 3000+ pages rather than 1000 pages for some other printers.

MisterNice

The OP said he wants to use a print server. Many of the lower cost laser printers use something like a GD driver. The computer not the printer does a lot of the work, the printer has a slow processor and not much memory. Those type of printers don't network very well, if at all.

Brother has a number of laser printers that are designed to network. Both Staples and Office Depot recently offered the Brother HL 2070N for sale for around $80.

Thanks, that's what I'm looking for. I've had no trouble at all setting up a wireless network in my house and in my "road" apartment, but my wife and I, with a multiplicity of laptops between us, still have to plug into a printer to print. The one thing preventing us from a hassle-free (except for her asking me to get up and get the document off the printer ;) ) experience is the lack of a good wireless print server that will let us work completely wire-free and not require a PC be plugged in and running all the time. I tried using one of Linksys' print servers with our MFP and the results were less than great, so I want something that is designed for the situation.

Do you want the printer to have wireless enabled internally, or be able to USB to a wireless print server?

I have deployed many of the simple HP 1012/1020 lasetjets. Not color, but fast and cheap. I don't think I have replaced the toner catridge in three years of reasonable duty, although I print to draft usually.

It works with my print server on the network fine.

Good question--are the internally-enabled printers usually fairly reliable, or am I better off having the server separated from the printer?

I'm fine with a B&W printer--aside from this one, I have (let me think) four extra color printers to choose from, including a couple of multi-function printers I can use as a fax machine, so I will probably keep one and sell/donate the others (I'm moving soon and have no need and no place for all of them.).

The internally enabled printers have a wired network port. Can you put the printer in the same room as your wireless router? Almost all wireless routers have 4-5 wired ports. Run a cat 5 cable from your printer to your router and any computer in the network can use the printer. Otherwise you'll either use your print server or could use a wireless game adapter (or an extra router configured the same.)

The point is a network laser printer, even if you still use your print server, won't have the windows-pc-driver issues that some of the other cheap printers have.

edited to add it's possible some of the more expensive printer have wireless networking built in but AFAIK the lowered priced printers don't.

New Samsung SOHO just announced
 

http://www.macnn.com/articles/07/12/....2851.printer/

About $340

As far as the extra "stuff" the HP drivers include, if you install them without the setup program you won't get any of it. The trick is when Windows prompts you for the driver hit the second option to select a path and browse to where you extracted the download. You want to point it to a folder with a .inf file - often the folder is called Win2k_XP or something along that line.

Worst case scenario for actual (B&W) Laserjets is that you can almost always use one of the older provided-with-Windows drivers for the basic functionality. Pretty much everything is backwards compatible with the Laserjet 4

Other than HP, I've had the best luck with Lexmark. I've also had good luck with Xerox as well, but just on high-end ones... no experience with their cheaper SOHO stuff. Aside from the HP 1000-series which looks pretty good, take a look at the current Lexmark E series - I've had an E310 since 2000 and it still runs well -

Also check out the XEROX Phaser series 3124 which does duplexing and is pretty fast, for about the same price as the cheapest HPs and the Lexmark

I've seen some pretty junky machines from Brother and Samsung, and have had somewhat more mixed experience with Okidata and Panasonic.

I second this vote. I did the reasearch recently and Brother is the one I will be going with.

We bought a pre-owned LJ5 for our lab. It feeds paper reliably and is mechanically very sturdy. We made the huge mistake that we shut it down during semester breaks and killed it very, very efficiently. Never got rid of the toner streaks after two six weeks pauses. And displacing of the thingie wasn't cheap either. If you want a printer that can be hibernated for a reasonably long time, do not go for the 5 series or for the smaller 1010, 1020, 1200 they are are not sealed sufficiently to snooze for long.

And while I love HP hardware - I find the fiddly to use on Linux platforms, especially multiuser print jobs which are partly erroneous are difficult to separate.