Forums | MacLife

We've had a GCC Elite 20/1200 at work for a little better than a year now.  It's a workhorse, the price is right, the print quality is excellent, and it's toner use is good.

But, and this my just be something that I do wrong (their tech support just shrugs and says they'll call me back), It seems to print things a hair too wide.  When I print a 9.5 x 11 page from Quark 3 it prints out at about 9.625 x 11.  It's really, really weird.   It fortunately hasn't been a big issue because we don't use it to create a lot of camera ready art anymore, but it could be an issue if something is very, very particular.

Other than that, the printer has X drivers available, though I haven't tried them.  The other factors that may be an issue for you are that it has PostScript I installed, it only emulates level II, and I believe it's only 10BaseT.  The max RAM is a bit on the low side (I can't remember it's maximum right now, I think it's 96MB).

But again, for the price, the printer is a real workhorse.

It may not be as cheap as the others, but I got an HP 2100M at home and it's been perfect.
I beleive the same model now is the HP 2200M and comes with auto duplexing. It's priced in the mid range at $1000 - $1100, but the toner lasts a long time and it comes with 2 paper trays and PS Level 2.

At work we use an HP 4000N and it too has been flawless. It's much faster than my 2100 at home.

Both have a max size of 8.5 x 14, so if you need larger these two are not the ones, but there are equivalents (I just looked up the HP5100tn to do this at a whopping $2100).

Another thing I like about HP is that every box of toner comes with a pre-paid fed/ex return label to send the empty cartidge back to HP. It doesn't do you any thing to send it, but it keeps the sucker out of the dumpster - toner isn't good on the environment.

Both printers work flawlessly with OSX using the drivers that ship with OSX. I haven't had to download and install anything. Also, depending upon how many users you have, these HPs get their ethernet capability from a small print server that plugs in internally in the printer. So if you have a bunch of users then this printer really shines as it can manage it's own print queues and can also do IP printing.