On this forum, I always act like one of the resident computer experts. This is because I generally know quite a bit about computers and software, being in that line of work. But one thing I know practically nothing about is printers.
I’m about to buy a printer for use while directing scholastic tournaments, and would appreciate some advice from the resident tournament direction (and computer printer) experts on what I should look for. What is a good printer for chess tournaments?
A friend of mine is a computer printer expert, being at one time an inkjet print head engineer, and he says that Canon Ink Jet printers are the best, but I don’t think he is necessarily opining from the perspective of a TD. Any opinions on Canon printers?
For most scholastic events I end up printing a lot - team sheets, results, multiple paitrings, all in multiple sections. I commonly print 500-700 pages at a 250 player 5 section 5 round scholastic.
Frequently scholastic tournaments in our area are ASAP events. So speed is critical. I need good throughput on the printer. I use a cheap but fast HP Laser. No tiny ink cartridges to fool with - the toner cartidges are $70 or so but are good for 2500 pages. So cost per page is good. I always have at least one spare toner cartridge. MY low end HP prints 30 pages per minute- b/w only. I do not think you need color, need duplex, network or scan capabilities. All those add cost to the device. I could never use any slower for the type of events I do.
The printer costs 125-175 or so at any office supply place. I’ve used mine for 4 years now at 6 or so event of this size each year with no problems.
I’m personally a fan of the Brother lower end series for a tournament printer. I retire my Brother printers after the drum runs out because the cost of the replacement drum is more than buying a new printer itself as we all know in the printer industry it’s not about the cost of the printer, it’s the consumables where the money is made. Drum lasts about 6 toner cartridge cycles.
I just bought the Brother HL-2240 for $120 from OfficeMax (as I couldn’t wait and needed one immediately) but it’s on Amazon from iDealsLava for $67 (says only 8 left in stock as of this writing). If you’re an Amazon Prime member (which I am, not sure if you are), shipping is free.
I’d go with a laser printer. Generally faster - and you want that to shorten the time needed between rounds. Rarely have to deal with changing the toner on-site, while you’re likely to have to switch ink cartridges sometimes.
About a year and a half ago we got a Monochrome Brother Laser Printer on sale at Office Depot for about $75. It might have been a little cheaper I can’t remember for sure. I’m sure that it wasn’t more.
I’m also using this to print out lesson plans for Chess Lessons that we do for Lakeview Museum in exchange for being able to meet at the Museum etc.
Before this we were using a small Lexmark inkjet and only used that at tournaments. Most of our Scholastic tournaments aren’t that large and the speed is ok. At larger events when we needed speed we would take advantage of the photocopiers that were available. The main advantage of the inkjet was the small size made it easy to cart around.
So what I did when we got the Laser Printer was to get a clothes basket that the printer fits in. The Laptop computer and backpack that it goes in also fits in it. A little heavy altogether but not to bad in that everything is there in one trip. Recently I have been strapping the basket onto one of those two wheel handcart things and that helps.
We have replaced the toner cartridge once so far. And seems like there is the issue that the original toner cartridge isn’t as full as the replacement ones. I think the replacement was in the $45 dollar range.
You should definately price out the price of the Toner Cartridges for anything you are considering.
I’ve been lugging around a Canon MX700 all-in-one inkjet, but it wasn’t made for that kind of treatment, and the lower tray has begun to print crooked pages. It’s probably not worth repairing.
I’d be looking for the best intersection of price (upfront and per page), speed and weight. Based on Consumer Reports’ most recent ratings of black-and-white laser printers, the hands-down winner is the Brother HL-2170W, which is a little slow (13.6 ppm) but weighs only 15 lb and costs only $100 to buy and 1.5 cents per page. Nothing else CR rated comes close.
Having an all-in-one that can make photocopies is nice, but the imaging glass adds a lot to the weight.
ETA: Looks like the HL-2170W is being/has been phased out. From a quick glance at Brother’s website, I think I’d concur with Sevan Muradian’s endorsement of the HL-2240.
I use an aging HP deskjet 6540 (HP 96 cartridges). Even though it is not a laser the draftmode speed is generally okay for an ASAP schedule. It looks a bit bulky to carry around but its footprint is essentially a rectangle with a smaller rectangle sticking off of one side, and that makes a nice carrying point.
As others have said, you are looking for speed (crucial for 50+ player events with ASAP schedules or schedules with minimal time between rounds), ability to be carried (if you can’t carry it on one arm and you don’t have a cart then it probably is not for you), lower initial cost, and lower ongoing cost.
I’ve known of people that get printers off of e-bay for a cheap price primarily to get the balance of the ink cartridge usage.
Thanks for all your suggestions. It seems that laser printers are the way to go. I ended up buying the Brother laser printer from Amazon, which Sevan recommended. I also bought two high capacity toner cartridges from Ink4Ever.com at $30.00 each. Rated to produce 2600 pages per cartridge, this works out to $0.012 per page, which seems fairly inexpensive.
I figure I’ll pay for it by collecting up all the jackets, sets, clocks, etc, which the little blighters leave behind, and selling them on E-Bay.
Now you have something in common with Mark Nibbelin.
Part of me wishes that I had gotten a Brother. But I settled on the HP 1102W and don’t regret it.
While I’ll always pay more for toner, I now appreciate that the printer, with accessories bag, power bar, extension cord, and it’s styrofoam pads, all fit very nice and snug inside one $10.00 Office Depot storage bin. Three bins (second with paper/spare toner, third with miscellaneous office-y stuff,) one bag for files/clipboard/etc. all fit on one collapsable hand truck.
That hand truck, along with my briefcase with laptop/etc., and I have run computers on 125 player tournaments.
I’d wish you good luck with the Brother, but I don’t think you’ll need it - good choice!
