I have a Brother ink jet that prints 11x17. My Brother laser is a great printer but won't do 11x17. Don't know of any mfr that does an 11x17 laser except maybe an expensive high capacity.

It doesn't really matter which one you pick you want to look at getting a service provider to maintain the thing when it wears out. I dont know what model we have but with the amount of use it sees I have seen the service company called at least once a year to maintain the device.

We have Konica machines here and they seem OK. I'd consider a color machine, I was told by IT that getting the color machine doesn't make much difference in price and the operating costs are about the same if you print in B&W when you don't need color.

Quote (LionelHutz)

I was told by IT that getting the color machine doesn't make much difference in price

Interesting. I was wondering how that works IRL. Its also easy to accidentally print some images or something which equals like a dollar of toner per page.

Toner is a LOT cheaper today than in the past. Our local print shop charges $0.35 per color copy, and eBay shows a listing for a 4-pack of toner at $34.20; even assuming 1000 sheet life, that's 3.42 cents per copy.

TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg
FAQ731-376: Eng-Tips.com Forum Policies forum1529: Translation Assistance for Engineers Entire Forum list http://www.eng-tips.com/forumlist.cfm

For my home/low volume use I stopped buying HP printers and started using Brother printers. Love those Brother printers: (1) setup is easy and (2) ink cartridges are individual, not in a gang, so you only purchase/replace what is needed when it is needed. Never going back to HP.

At my company's office space (when we go back, anyway) they have decided on corporate high-volume Xerox units (including 11x17, color, double-sided, hole punch, stapling, scanning). After you get used to them, they are simply amazing and very robust. I imagine also crazy expensive.

Our IT/Printer folks tell me that my Department gets charged $0.25 per B/W page face, and $0.50 per color page face. The only bugaboo is that I must disable the default-color print mode if I want to print a B/W page else it considers it color and charges accordingly. They have not been able to figure out how to default it to print B/W mode (some sort of networking glitch). It's been months and I quite worrying about it, it costs what it costs.

TygerDawg
Blue Technik LLC
Virtuoso Robotics Engineering
www.bluetechnik.com

We just setup the default print driver to print as B&W so we have to go into the settings when printing and change it to color to get color. Doing that doesn't change the defaults, only the job specific printing.

The contract we're on includes all consumables and service in the per page charge. I'm not sure what the cost is though.