In our school, our teachers would love to use color for the materials for our students. So we purchased several color inkjet printers over the years, but all bar one have now been ‘retired’ because they were just not practical and/or expensive. The typical inkjet printer has a tiny cartridge meaning that although you spend quite a bit of money on purchasing the cartridges, you get only a few hundred pages out of the cartridge. This means that changes are frequent if you want to do any regular color printing and the page cost is quite high.
I noticed recently that the Konica Minolta Color Laser printer was on sale, and was considering purchasing a color laser printer for daily use. The criteria are perhaps obvious but we’re looking for a machine that can install easily in our mixed OS network, is reliable in operation, and has a decent print speed for color pages. The output doesn’t have to be the highest quality, but it must be decent. Though this machine has a scanner, fax and copy function, they are not a requirement for our usage.
The other concern is how often we have to replace the cartridge. If you’re in the middle of a printing job for your class, there are ten minutes to go and the phone is ringing, you don’t want to be replacing that cartridge after it was just changed last week! So the printer cartridge should be large enough to print at least 1000 pages without a change, be easily purchase and reasonably affordable.
The Konica Minolta 1690F seems to satisfy those criteria.