LaserJet 4000N: Reliable and Long-Lasting

Introduction:

The LaserJet 4000N is a printer for a medium-volume workgroup printer. You may be wondering why a 18 year old college freshman has one. The reason is because I have 10 older computers, which all can use an older printer. They use older operating systems, and so a new printer would be unable to be used by them.

Reason 1 for having the printer:

I have 4 Macs that run Mac OS 9.2.2, and I needed a printer that would work with them. A 4000N works perfectly and has PostScript Level 2 for when I want to print PostScript documents. This makes it invaluable.

Reason 2 for having the printer:

Also, another reason is since it has a high duty cycle, I can print documents from whatever computers I have hooked up (I only have room for 4 computers up at a time, we have a really small house). I like being able to print all I want (we just don't print as much as we could, we have 4 printers, with the 4000n being the most powerful by leaps and bounds).

Personal reason:

Another reason is I like the physical design of the older 4000 Series LaserJet printers. This is a personal preference, not a statement on its capability.

Problems with the printer:

Do I have any problems with the 4000N? I have a few, sadly. The first is a problem with the 4000N in general. I read that the 4000N can jam paper in a specific way which will cause it to continue to feed the paper as it jams. This means that the jammed sheet of paper is torn all to pieces and you will have to take apart the printer completely in order to remove all the paper. Luckily I have not had that occur.

The second problem is that in my particular unit, the pagecounter forgets the last 3 pages you print on it every time you turn it off. This means that it has a much lower lifetime page count than it should, as I have had to turn it off a significant amount.

The third problem is if PCs do not print to it within a certain timeframe, it will become unreachable by PCs. Macs can still reach it (through AppleTalk) perfectly, no matter how long you wait.

Printer Specifications

My printer has these specs:
100MHz RISC CPU
8MB RAM (the stock amount)
17 pages per minute
65,000 pages per month maximum duty cycle
C4127A (6,000 pages) and C4127X (10,000 pages) toner cartridges
No duplexer
500 sheet primary paper tray
100 sheet multipurpose tray
2-line LCD for printer status, errors, and configuration

Differences from stock configuration:

2 JetDirect cards, one a JetDirect 610N J4169A 10/100BaseTX Ethernet connector-only card for connection to the router we have, and the other is a JetDirect 600N J3111A 10baseT/10base2/LocalTalk card for connection to individual computers. I found out that the J3111A was actually the stock card, my 4000N came to me without a JetDirect card.

The final word:
I will probably have to print a lot in college, considering I want to teach history, and maybe computers too. This makes a high-volume printer useful. I recommend it to anyone, especially fellow college students like me who want (or need) to print a lot.