I owned and old used LaserJetII (with a duplexor) for years followed by an old used LaserJet 4-Plus (it was awesome!)that both were so reliable, and so Awesome, that I I bought an HP Photosmart color printer. What a mistake. One of those stupid two cartridge models that stopped printing as soon as one color ran out. Plugged heads all the time. Drove me crazy.
Dumped that for a Canon about eight years ago, which so far has been excellent.
The LaserJet 4 Plus finally wore out two years ago. I replaced it with one of those little Brother 2360s. It works fine. Faster to start up a print job than the HP was, but not as fast printing duplex as the HP. Probably faster in single sided.
The end point being, the old LaserJets were built back when HP had not yet lost its soul. The Photosmart Inkjet was the first generation of the "New HP".
I bought one of the page-wide officejet pro printers a while back. (X475DN?) It was amazing! No warm up, 1-2 sec. first page out, fast printing, low energy use. But if you didn't use all the colors on the whole page width at some point, it they would start to clog. Eventually it only printed black reliably, and all the other colors were clogged and useless. Then, like seemingly all modern HP printers, it developed a weird software or controller problem and had to be replaced.
Switched to a lexmark color laser which prints very well, doesn't produce a first page very quickly, but then it started having BSODs.
Replaced with monochrome laser printers (Samsung) and that has gone pretty well. I'm still nervous about HP being involved, but it seems to be Samsung's show with HP just doing the fulfillment.
Edit: just noticed that the HP Laserjet 4+ was introduced at $1,839 in 1994; about $3,230 today.
I owned and old used LaserJetII (with a duplexor) for years followed by an old used LaserJet 4-Plus (it was awesome!)that both were so reliable, and so Awesome, that I I bought an HP Photosmart color printer. What a mistake. One of those stupid two cartridge models that stopped printing as soon as one color ran out. Plugged heads all the time. Drove me crazy.
Dumped that for a Canon about eight years ago, which so far has been excellent.
The LaserJet 4 Plus finally wore out two years ago. I replaced it with one of those little Brother 2360s. It works fine. Faster to start up a print job than the HP was, but not as fast printing duplex as the HP. Probably faster in single sided.
The end point being, the old LaserJets were built back when HP had not yet lost its soul. The Photosmart Inkjet was the first generation of the "New HP".