Forgotton: printer jams, network tie-ups, cursing.

We've been using the 4000N in our plant office for about 7 months now. We got it from an old plant from a company we bought out and shut down. But ever since then, things couldn't be better.

Stop the madness!
Our last office printer was the worst. It was an HP LaserJet 4, but it was a top-loading personal-laser printer. It was never designed to be a small office network printer used by 6 people. It would always try to take 8 or 9 sheets at a time and the ink would smear everywhere. The paper would jam up. And when that happens, all HELL breaks loose. Toner.... paper.... screaming.... name-calling.... Mass hysteria.

The 4000N was the end of all that. This one is really a small work-hourse. We haven't had a paper jam once in the 7-months time we've used it (knock-on-wood). We go through about 1/2 ream of paper per day. No snags. No fuss. We're all much happier for it.


Expandable memory
This thing uses the standard 72-pin slots of yester-year - the same stuff your old pentium-class computers used. So if you need to expand more memory to handle those really large print jobs - like the 30-page reports we need to get from SAP every day. We have ours at 16 MB of RAM, but can be easily upgraded. It is somewhat difficult to pull of the plate that covers the memory slots. But all things being equal, it's much easier than fixing a paper jam.

Cost
Given the low down-time we've experienced and the ease of use, this printer is well worth a $600 price tag. The best thing is that you can get it cheaper than that (although not cheapter than if you inherit it through a corporate take-over). But you definately get the peace-of-mind that you want with your printer.

Connectivity
This thing will connect in just about any way possible except USB or Firewire. This is okay because you don't really need either of these protocols just for printing. It has a built-in ethernet port, parallel port, serial port, or attachable infrared port. So you have every way possible to connect this printer directly through your desktop or to your network.

Could be a little faster
The only real slow-down from this printer is when you print graphics. It's usually not too visible, but it is there. In this case, any type of graphic on a word document will take a couple of seconds longer. SAP screen-dumps (just a print-screen of your SAP window, essentially) take a couple of minutes. But I guess that's exceptable. Most other things - standard Word or Excel documents - take as much time to go through our network (which is pretty slow on the whole) as it does to get up and walk to the printer to pick them up. So no big loss either way.

What could make it better?
There are a multitude of things that would be *better* (like digital, color, laser quality). But, come-on, be reasonable. This thing does everything we need it to do ("JUST PRINT THE DAMN REPORT!" - we used to scream at our old printer). So the only things that could really make a difference is a bigger paper tray (enough to hold an entire ream of paper), more life-time on our toner (which has only run out once in 7 months, to my knowledge), better diagnostics, and better paper-size options. But all in all, we don't use this printer for any funky tasks. Just standard 8"x11" paper. If you need to switch between paper sizes (legal and standard), you need to go through the printer's operating menu and select it before you load the paper into the paper tray or manual loading bay. If you do this a lot, then there are other dual-tray versions of this printer (like the 4050N). All in all this does everything we ask it too and it doesn't even talk back.