New Color Laser Printer - CRAZY LUCKY DEAL Brother HL-3170

[Nifty]

My kids are VERY hard to find presents for. So this year for Christmas I took my kids out on a "thrifting" (something they really like doing) shopping spree to some huge thrift-stores by my girlfriend's house.

Well, as they were shopping, I strolled around the store a bit. Within minutes, I found a dusty Brother HL-3170 sitting on a shelf. New, it's an $800 printer!

No price tag. No idea of the condition.

I asked a worker about it. He said all they do is see if the items turn on, but nothing more... and all stuff is sold as-is, no returns. He looked it over and said, "Ok, it's $14.99. If you want to plug it in, do it over here." and he left.

So, I plugged it in and it turned on with no errors. I did a Google search for "Brother HL-3170 test print" and found the menu to run the print, and got this result:

Everything looked 100% perfect!!!

So, I quickly put it into my shopping cart, bought it, and brought it home

Going through the menu a bit more showed it hadn't been used much. All the parts (cartridges, drums, etc.) were all at about 80%-90% life remaining.

I did some test prints and they came out pretty nice. They aren't great photo-quality... but I don't think the printer was meant to do photographs and/or I wasn't printing on the correct photo paper (I don't even know if that's a thing for color laser printers).

In some ways I'm sad to think about ditching my old ink Canon printers... but I've found I don't print to them as often (now that kids are grown), and when I want to print color, they are often plugged nozzles, etc., which makes me not print in color even less often, which exacerbates the problem further.

I feel like a color laser printer would elevate the ink / clogged-nozzle issues... and for $15, why not?!?!?

My issues now are:

1. It doesn't have a built in scanner/copier which I use a LOT on my Brother B/W laser printer
2. Do I keep my other Brother printer and this one? Seems like a lot of duplication and space
3. Do I keep my inkjet printer(s)?
4. Do I clean this new one up and just sell it?
5. Do I sell this and all my printers and get a nice all-in-one color laser printer?
6. Something else?

 

[Redbrickman]

What a score! but maybe a devil in disguise as it has now made you procrastinate about the future of printers in the Nifty house

 

[Artur5]

6- Get another Ender..

Seriously, consider yourself lucky on this one.
If you have room enough for all these printers, why get rid of them?.Surely you' won't get much money selling them, except maybe for this Brother HL-3170.
Whatever you do, I would keep at least one inkjet printer ( provided it's working now flawlessly ).
Laser printers, demand OEM consumables or the output quality degrades noticeably, but even expensive color lasers with OEM toner/drum don't output photos with a quality comparable to a entry level inkjet with third party inks.

 

[Nifty]

6- Get another Ender..

Seriously, consider yourself lucky on this one.
If you have room enough for all these printers, why get rid of them?.Surely you' won't get much money selling them, except maybe for this Brother HL-3170.
Whatever you do, I would keep at least one inkjet printer ( provided it's working now flawlessly ).
Laser printers, demand OEM consumables or the output quality degrades noticeably, but even expensive color lasers with OEM toner/drum don't output photos with a quality comparable to a entry level inkjet with third party inks.

Valid points (and suggestions)!

I hate to admit it, but I just don't print color photos enough to keep the inkjet from clogging up. So one option I'm looking at is keeping the (or a different) color laser printer, and the very rare times I actually need printed quality photos: I'll just ride my e-bike 5 minutes to local Walgreens and get the pics printed for $0.15. (this is what I just did for my passport photos when my Canon i560 plugged-up on me).