Great Cheap Printer, but you need to work around some things.

I bought this printer yesterday to replace a 7 year old IBM laser printer that would no longer recognize that it had paper in it. Also, it was starting to streak the prints.

So far I have to say that I really like the quality of the printouts and I do get pretty close to the speed they claim.

I purchased this purely based upon price, and while I was at the store I had my brother on the phone looking up toner yields. They make a 6K page cartridge! I'm not sure what all of the complaining is about from some of the other reviewers regarding supply costs. KonicaMinolta's price for the 6K page cartridge is the same as IBM's for the printer I just replaced. Also 20K pages on the drum isn't too shabby. If you really do high volume printing then buy a higher end printer! But I digress...

I am in the habit of having cartridges refilled or purchasing new ones on Ebay. Check around, there are bargains out there. The counter chip is pretty crummy though. Unfortunately I have come to accept that this is the world we live in. Eventually these things will be licensed and 'improved' (like info-lithium batteries).

So onto the networking deal:

This is a GDI printer; what that basically means is that the printer does not process a document, it relies on the computer to do it. At the time I bought the printer I didn't realize this so I fully expected to be able to hook it up to my DLink 301P printer server adapter. As has been stated in other reviews, I was WRONG! These adapters don't work easily with GDI printers, but they can work (at least in Windows NT, 2000 and XP, maybe 98 also).

So set up your printer adapter as you normally would. Next, set the output to RAW (Check your adapter manual if your not sure how), then in the Printer Properties Ports tab disable the bi-directional printing. The status monitor will pop-up to tell you it requires bi-directional printing, just close it. That's it. Set up all of the computers on the network this way and your done. You can now print from any computer you have hooked into the network.

For more detailed info about this check out this link from Intel (http://support.intel.com/support/netport/sb/cs-015186.htm).

Unfortunately you lose the status monitor doing it this way but you still keep all of the printing and quality options the driver allows. One thing you know for sure is that after x-thousand number of pages the unit will stop printing. Keep a spare toner cartridge on hand!

Another way to network this printer would be to hook it up to a computer on your network and serve all of your pages through that. This way you also keep the status monitor.

Bottom line here is that this is a cheap printer, with great print quality. It is easy to use and set up. If it cost more I might have greater expectations of it, but so far I am not disappointed. If that changes in a few months I will post an update. I might also breakdown and buy the proper networking adapter for it.