Refurbished HP

Mark · January 10, 2013, 02:44:46 PM

What is your opinion on purchasing a refurbished HP 1200/1220? I HATE all the newer printer/scanner combos that are available and we LOVE our 1220's. You may already know, they don't make or sell the 1200/1220 anymore. We've tried out a handful of replacements and they are not as good as the 1220. I use 1200/1220 interchangeably since they are the same printer and we have extra scanning heads for them.

I found some refurbished for around $130, but I can't decide.

Jeff Golas · January 10, 2013, 02:59:15 PM

I say for $130 buy away. Nothing wrong with that. I've bought several used HP 4200's (not refurbished) and have had no issues.

Mark · January 10, 2013, 03:00:19 PM

Where did you buy them from? We have a 4250 that needs to be refurbished, lol. Haven't used it in a couple of years.

Jeff Golas · January 10, 2013, 04:03:03 PM

I have a local guy who was a reseller with a warehouse I was able to explore through :-)

As far as refurbishing - literally - buy a "maintenance kit" which will include paper pickup rollers, a transfer roller (black spongy thing) and a fuser. Pick up a can of spray duster, a cheap 1.5"-2" paintbrush, and have a shop vac on hand. Open the printer up - pull out all the drawers, vaccuum all the paper dust out (use the duster and the paintbrush to sweep out the nooks and crannys), and follow the maintenance kit instructions. You most likely won't even need a screwdriver and the printer will be like new. The maint kit should include enough paper pickup rollers to cover the most optioned out models, so usually you'll have a couple spares you can keep handy.

I even give them a shot of 409 on the external case to make em smell minty fresh :-)

After that I typically use a brother p-touch to print the date of refurb and printer mileage and slap it on the back of the printer. You can monitor useage/life of the maint kit as well (you reset it when installing the kit). We have 4300's with over a million pages on the odometer at this point.

Mark · January 10, 2013, 04:05:34 PM

When we looked at the price of a fuser (probably included installation) we decided to just toss it! lol

We ended up with a new MFP from Ikon and I think we're better off this way anyway. It's really little and we needed a new copier on this floor anyway.

DebAmstutz · January 10, 2013, 04:09:53 PM

I think our office has the last HP LaserJet 1100A's on the planet! The owner bought refurbished ones for years. I have one of those 1100A's and except for pulling a couple extra pieces of paper through once in awhile, it works fine. I need something that will copy because I don't want to take the stairs too many times a day to get to the big copier upstairs! This same unit has worked for me for the past 10 years.

Mark · January 10, 2013, 04:20:46 PM

Quote from: DebAmstutz on January 10, 2013, 04:09:53 PM
I think our office has the last HP LaserJet 1100A's on the planet!

But, then there's this one!

Jeff Golas · January 10, 2013, 04:24:54 PM

Ikon overall was a great company to us but when they got bought out by Ricoh our service just went down the tubes. In addition to Ricoh gear which...eh, they actually reprimanded me for hacking/deploying a PS printer driver to work like the usual HP PCL drivers (in terms of pre-sets, settings, etc). The fact that they actually showed up at our door to do this proved they weren't the company for us anymore. Our new copier company which is a local firm is brand agnostic and was all ears as to how I got the Fiery drivers to deploy :-)

Jeff

Quote from: Mark on January 10, 2013, 04:05:34 PM
When we looked at the price of a fuser (probably included installation) we decided to just toss it! lol

We ended up with a new MFP from Ikon and I think we're better off this way anyway. It's really little and we needed a new copier on this floor anyway.

Mark · January 10, 2013, 04:25:59 PM

Nice job, Jeff!

DebAmstutz · January 11, 2013, 08:15:13 AM

But, then there's this one!

That one doesn't look like it's used much, Mark! LOL

Charlie Charbonneau · January 11, 2013, 09:40:00 AM

We still have a lot of HP 1200's in house, but I've found that I like the Dell 1700 series. Footprint is a tad bigger and a little boxier, but seems to work great.

Gene Foraker · January 11, 2013, 10:28:19 AM

Quote from: DebAmstutz on January 10, 2013, 04:09:53 PM
I think our office has the last HP LaserJet 1100A's on the planet! The owner bought refurbished ones for years. I have one of those 1100A's and except for pulling a couple extra pieces of paper through once in awhile, it works fine. I need something that will copy because I don't want to take the stairs too many times a day to get to the big copier upstairs! This same unit has worked for me for the past 10 years.

I still have an HP 1100A next to me right now at my workstation. Page count is only 50525, but I send large jobs to the HP4200n 20 feet away. It never feeds 2 pages at once since the free fix they offered years ago.