I have a sammy laser which I use for black and white documents. I've had it since ~2003, and I've refilled the cart which came with it once.

Unless you need colour, you can't go wrong with a cheap desktop laser.

Could do with colour tbh, though photos I'll get done properly.

http://www.brother-printers.co.uk/A4-Laser-Printer.html 

Ok, looks maybe doable. Out of interest do laser printer toner cartridges "go off" if not used for a long time? In terms of printing we don't do that much, but when we do, it's important.

nope - its basically a powder. you might need to give them a shake.
my laser printer toner cartridge is at least 5 year old & I got another one I bought the same time still in the box.

Just be careful with newer stuff - HP for example put chips on their ink cartidges that expire if not used by the expiration date.
No idea if they do that for toners.

Quote from: zpyder on March 14, 2012, 12:24:19 PM

Could do with colour tbh, though photos I'll get done properly.

http://www.brother-printers.co.uk/A4-Laser-Printer.html

Even their A3 printers are cheap, even if you never after an A3.

I've had trouble with the really low end brothers before, but I think that was more end user abuse with the feeder tray playing up, they were the JCW series.  I would probably go for an MFC Series.

I'm personally a big fan of Brother Inkjet and Lasers (when not a serious amount of yearly cylcle), easy to setup, great functionality as standard, duplex, networking etc and the software/drivers are simple and clean.  Unlike HP's photosmart suite.

Anything more serious I go OKI, IE 50,000 + Pages a year.

Samsung A4 Lasers are not bad either.

Bought a Laserjet 1100 from ebay about 6 years ago for £18. Cost more to ship it (£25).

Came with a toner in it, have still yet to change it despite the cartridge being listed as "used, no idea if anything is left".

Have printed a fair few hundred pages on it, black and white lasers are awesome.

The old LJ series printers do some serious work and are easy to service

yep they are workhorses.

We got about 25 pages from a set of ink cartridges that were put in about a month ago.

Obviously something is seriously wrong with this printer. Looking on the internet, it seems not that uncommon for poor quality control from kodak regarding their print heads.

Kodaks response was to send me to their page on optimising ink usage. I'm sorry, but I suspect no amount of optimising will help increase my pages per cartridge from 25-50 pages to the official reported figures of around 350 pages...