Cheap (but good) color laser printers

I'm looking for an inexpensive (<$200) color laser printer for a PC. I mainly print black and white, but will occasionally print color PDFs, images, etc. Two questions:

1) What is the best color laser printer in that price range?
2) What is the very cheapest color laser printer available that isn't a complete piece of junk?

Thanks.

 

Always look at the price of the toner cartridges before you buy, as some makes can be very expensive.

 

I'd stay away from Brother unless it's a good deal - they have additional parts that require replacement over time, making them more expensive to operate. They also tend to feel more flimsy than an HP or even Canon.

Having been employed by them, I have to urge you to check out HP's high-effiency inkjet printers. The Officejet 8000 series runs you $75-100, the Officejet 8000 CB092A is $75 on NewEgg and does color and black and white printing, and also serves as a network printer. The C9297A runs $100 and is identical to the other, only offers wireless networking built-in.

Both printers us the 940 series ink cartridges - the XL versions of which offer something like 1200-1500 for $15-20 for color (magenta, cyan and yellow cartridges for more efficient replacement) and 2200-2500 for $30-35 for black, with an average cost per page of I want to say $.0026-.0032 per page, besting most laser printers (and any I can think of).

It's not bad, and if you're thinking laser solely for cost per page reasons then you definately need to head out to OfficeMax/Depot or Staples and check out the 8000 series - if you need a multifunction HP also offers the L7590 for I want to say $200, with similar efficiency using the 880 ink cartridges but also a scanner/copier.

The only time one of these printers has not worked versus a laser was when a customer needed to print on a special kind of paper where it was more likely to run when printer from an inkjet versus a laser.

HP Officejet 8000

HP Officejet 8000 Wireless

 

The low end laser printers come with low yield toners too. If the laser printer cost you $200, you probably spend $300 on the replacement toners each time (4 toners total). These toners are most likely rated at 1500 pages at 5% page coverage, which is very optimistic. Unless you absolutely need laser quality pictures for stuff like presentation I'd suggest using business grade ink color printer for the color and a monochrome laser for B/W. This way you are saving money over the long run because it's a lot more efficient.

As for question #2, I'd recommend the Brother HL-4xxx series color laser printer (~$300 depending on feature when on sale). These don't need to replace the drum afaik and they have very good quality. Similarly priced HPs are too slow (12-13 ppm color....).