I just had to share this! I am so pleased. Background: 7 years ago I ditched an inkjet (ink costs) and got a very cheap personal monochrome laser printer, a little Canon, 50 UKP (AROUND 77 USD) and was very pleased with it. It worked fine for all of those 7 years, on two successive computers (XP and Windows 7). Running costs were negligible - it is still on the original toner cartridge, although I had to get it out and shake it a few weeks ago. However just after upgrading to a new PC and a month later, Windows 10 it vanished from Devices and Printers. Latest driver, follow instructions to the letter, uninstall, reinstall, no go. I didn't mind too much because I had been hankering after a colour laser and this could be the excuse. I narrowed my choices down to 3 - a similar mono laser, again 50 pounds, a basic HP colour laser, around 99 pounds (144 dollars) or (the Devil tempted me!) a better Canon colour laser, 129 pounds (200 dollars). I could get any of the three from a big office supply company (the name is the same as those things that hold sheets of paper together).

Yesterday I had a day off work and called the local branch. Plenty of cheap mono printers, but neither colour model I asked for in stock! I really wanted to pick up a printer that day. The guy on the phone must have SENSED my disappointment because he asked if I particularly wanted these models or was i just looking for a colour laser. I said that was the case, and he said they had an ex-demo printer, no packaging, but brand new unused with still sealed toners, an HP Laserjet Pro 200, model M251nw, and I could have it for 50 pounds with a 2 year warranty if I came and collected it myself. I did a quick Google while talking, and saw that model on UK sale for up to 240 pounds (371 dollars!). I said "I'll be there in 30 minutes!". It is a beast! Big and black and weighs 41 pounds. My wife was a bit taken aback, but she was won over by the price and the print quality, and she agrees it is built like a battleship. It has wireless so i can Telnet into it... hours of fun... And I have money in the bank for toners in (hopefully) quite a few months time.
Excellent... i love stories like this...even when others get a great find it makes my day.Great to hear that and had a laugh at the business name description that hold paper together.

I have had pretty good luck buying demo models off the shelf, however I thoroughly check them out first to make sure they don't have random destructive customer syndrome where people by accident or intentionally break the demos on the shelves and have no signs of falling off the shelf to the floor. I generally shake them and the store clerk looks at me funny as I listen for any broken pieces that are floating inside or a penny floating around inside as I had happen with a demo inkjet Epson year ago. That some little kid must have dropped into it expecting something in return, malicious customer being funny, or a cashier that went to pop open a roll of pennies and one of them went flying and landed in the top paper tray as it was one of the old top loaders where paper rested upright.

When it comes to open box items though... I haven't had such good luck. My worst purchase was a Pentium 4 2Ghz HP Pavilion full size tower in 2002 for college that the same business that holds paper together had when I was looking for a college system upgrade to handle the Visual Studio . Net edition that my Celeron 700Mhz wasn't enough to run it as well as video games I had at the time were struggling with it and the GeForce 2 32MB PCI Video Card. I got that system that was normally $999 for $719 as open box discount, and didn't thoroughly check out all specs. Upon first boot up it was registered to another customer and it was loaded with a porn virus that caused it to stack dirty website windows the minute it was connected to the internet. Thankfully it did come with its system recovery CD's and so I just blew away the problems on the HDD, however it was an AS-IS purchase for an open box PC and so while HP had a warranty on the computer that was still good, I couldn't return the system to the business that holds 2 sheets of paper together because it was an AS-IS purchase. The biggest problem was that the games I wanted to run on this $999 computer needed a video card and not integrated video and while I did save $280 off retail buying open box for a model they still sold new for $999, it didn't have an AGP slot and so I was stuck with only PCI which was not so good for video games of the time. I tried to make it work by REPLACING the GeForce 2 32MB card with a GeForce 4 MX440 64MB, but still the PCI BUS was a serious bottleneck and so performance was poor. Later getting a Pentium 4 2.4Ghz for free with a GeForce 4 MX440 64MB AGP carded system I realized just how much of a performance difference there was with the PCI bottleneck that AGP did not have. I ended up using this system for a short while while in college but when the Advanced C++ Programming with Visual Studio .Net 2002 was over with, I ended up having to replace it to get a system that could game. So I bought a Compaq Presario S6030NX with AthlonXP 2800+ 2.08Ghz with 80GB HDD and 256MB RAM ( after first CHECKING at Radio Shack to buy just the tower and asking the store associate if it was ok if I opened the side panel to look in and he gave me a screw driver and allowed me to take a look since the box didn't state if it had an AGP slot or not. They had this model on sale for $549.00 for the tower in which you could itemize your purchase and buy monitor optional for like $249 more. I saw the AGP slot and said SWEEEET! I'll take it ). However Radio Shack didn't sell any parts for upgrades and so I ended up having to go to the place that holds 2 sheets of paper together to buy a 256MB DDR 333Mhz RAM stick and a GeForce FX5200 8x AGP 128MB video card for it to make it into a gaming system and 512MB of DDR 333Mhz RAM. Games ran so sweet on that computer. Back in 2003 AMD was outperforming Pentium 4 and so that's why I went with the AMD. Ever since then I have mainly bought AMD even though Intel has been beating them out in the benchmark wars for quite a few years now. Today all that remains of the original Compaq S6030NX is its case. It has gone through an evolutionary upgrade process ever since 2008 when the motherboard died. About 3 upgrades since 2009 and is currently a Athlon 64 x2 4450B overclocked to 2.53Ghz with 4GB DDR2 800Mhz Corsair XMS2, ASUS AMD ATI Radeon HD5450 512MB PCI Express, running Windows 7 64-bit with 1 SSD and 2 HDD's with a 550 watt PSU.


Best of luck with your recent purchase. I have the Multi-function Laserjet Pro 200, That is definitely a huge bargain for a huge printer. I've had mine over a year now and according to it's report page I've printed about 300 pages with it (Mostly test output from the software I work on) or so with the stock Toner cartridges and it is at 60% Black and 80% for each color toner. Pretty sure I paid full retail, bought it online from the same paper fastener big-box.

The closest I come to bargains is when I see eBay listings for broken game consoles that I know how to fix (specifically, Gamecubes listed as not reading games, which is a simple laser potentiometer adjustment).

No matter how heavy it is...that printer is worth waay more than you got it for...Congrats.Quote from: BC_Programmer on August 08, 2015, 01:54:48 PM

I've had mine over a year now and according to it's report page I've printed about 300 pages with it (Mostly test output from the software I work on) or so with the stock Toner cartridges and it is at 60% Black and 80% for each color toner