Which of these HP laser jets?

[Tony Forestiere]

I am lucky... I have been an IT admin since 95 so I have acquired all of my laser printers for free. Companies usually do upgrades every 5 or 10 years and I have been lucky enough to work for companies who like to throw away their old stuff! At one point I had over 100 printer believe it or not... 

Which ones seem to do the best and consistent transfers for you?

[J0K3RX]

I am lucky... I have been an IT admin since 95 so I have acquired all of my laser printers for free. Companies usually do upgrades every 5 or 10 years and I have been lucky enough to work for companies who like to throw away their old stuff! At one point I had over 100 printer believe it or not... 

Which ones seem to do the best and consistent transfers for you?

Well, I only got mainly HP and this was a few years ago so I can only vouch for HP since I have not used the Canon, Fujitsu, Samsung, Brother etc for transfers... The newest HP I had was a LJ4250 which worked good all the way back to really old HP Laserjet 4si which was a giant beast! I can tell you to stay away from the 5L and 6L and the HP LJ1100! The rest of them all seem to work really well as long as you buy OEM HP cartridges and not the remanufactured/refilled ones! The 3rd party cartridges and refills may work on other brands but not on the HP from my experience... I think the make-up of the toner in combination with what paper you use is the biggest factor. It really doesn't matter in my opinion how well the toner is fused to the paper but rather how good is the toner in the first place. When you transfer it with a clothes iron to your enclosure or the copper on your pcb you are basically re-fusing it to another surface. So, the toner itself is very important! The paper is also important obviously... Right now I use a fairly new small LJ 1022 and I used to use a LJ 1200 until I ran out of original OEM toner for it (I discovered that my wife used most of it printing out coupons!) So now she uses it with the sh!tty refill cartridges and I use my 1022 with the good cartridge for transfers only!

Anyway, the older models seem to all work about the same with the exception of how they pick up the paper. Be careful of the older tray feed models like the 4000/4100/4200 etc.. they can have costly problems like bad or on the verge of going bad fuser assemblies, bad rollers, gears etc.. You can tell if you pull out the fuser and look at it which can be done from the back of the printer with a few releases it will come out and you can look at the drum. Look at the ends of the drum, that's where they usually start to show signs of going bad. Again, the older models all seem to work good for transfer. I really can't say about the newer models since I have not tried anything past the 4250. Also, I have noticed that some work better using the generic HP drivers for example (HP Laserjet Series II) rather than the model specific full software drivers. The HP Laserjet Series II driver works with almost any HP printer and if not you will notice right away as it will print out wing dings and funny characters. You lose some of the fine tune functionality settings but it seems to bypass/ignore the energy star and economy settings and prints dark all the time.

[FunkyGibbon]

Just reporting back:

I tried my new Brother HL-5340D laser with inkjet photo paper and ironed that onto copper. I got very good results. In fact, there was no difference between this printer and my old Canon LBP-3000 as far as PCB transfer went. I don't know if other printers make the job easier than either of these two. With both, there was not a perfect transfer - always a little touching up needed, especially in large areas of black. However, not much touching up was needed for either.

Christopher