My main printer for the past decade or more has been an Apple Laserwriter Select 360. It's slow, heavy, and the paper tray is impossible to pull out, but it works. It talks Localtalk, so I was using an Appletalk bridge (an old ISDN router actually) to connect it to Ethernet. I think I paid about $1200 for the printer when I bought it new.

I actually have two of them. The first started to have printing problems and needed a good cleaning inside the optics to fix. But I found a secondhand one at Weird Stuff for $30 and it worked perfectly, only having ever printed 1200 pages. So I kept the first one for spares and carried on with the new one for another couple of years. Printer cartridges are available, but they are getting pricey, so recently when the toner started to run low I went searching for a replacement.

The result is that I now have a $100 laser printer that is a fraction of the weight, much, much faster, and takes cheap cartridges -- a Brother HL-2070N. It comes with a Mac driver and runs Ethernet or USB and has a print queue built in in case I ever need to talk to it with a PC.
It's not a Postscript printer like the Laserwriter, so the host does the RIPping. But that is OK. The host is much faster than the printer and the network is 100BaseT, so the result is that it beats the pants off the old one. The Mac driver installs and works just fine. The printer can be configured and monitored via a web browser. It isn't any good at printing photos. But again that's fine by me.

Any takers for two unwanted Apple Laserwriter Select 360s?

Tags: Printing, Apple, Brother, Networking, Interesting Stuff