New Printer Suggestion

[jerome8283]

Hi,

I'm looking for a laser printer that prints black & white that can auto sense paper type such as letter, legal etc. Can someone offer a suggestion?

[PrntRhd]

I don't know about sensing sizes automatically, but the Samsung ML-2550 is priced relatively cheap, prints 22 ppm. Toner cartridges last about 10K pages.

[Rick]

The auto detect on most printers only detect the grade of paper.
not the size.

A good way around that is a second tray.
Upper and lower tray selection for 8.5x11 and or legal

[Erik]

Yeah you will need to get a printer that has two trays, or can have an extra tray added. Setting the size of paper you want to print to in each application will cause the printer to pull a sheet from the proper tray.

You could always just use one tray and manually switch paper size if you don't need different sizes much.

[Whyzman]

Xerox uses "Smart Paper Trays"...Auto Tray Selection where the machine chooses the correct paper for the copy job based on the size of the originals being scanned.However, this has to do with with initial scanning.

If a printer has dual paper trays I suspect that you'd have to somehow inform the printer of your intentions during the formatting stage. That is, whether you are default establishing a standard 8 1/2 by 11 and rolling into a second page, etc. Or, you initially set up to do your work on legal size paper...

I suspect that the formatting is sent to the printer based on how you set things up in whatever document software you'd be using and selecting paper accordingly...

[Erik]

Well how a printer with multiple paper trays works involves configuring the printer in Windows to reflect how it is actually setup. So say for example tray 1 has letter and tray 2 has legal. In the printer options menu there would be the option to set paper size for each tray, instead of just one like with most printers.

Then when you are doing say a Word document, say a letter to someone, you would be set to be on letter size paper by default. You press print, and it picks up a sheet from the letter tray and you are done. Now you need to go into Excel and print out a spreadsheet that won't fit onto a single letter page because it has a coulmn or two that hang over. You choose legal paper and print, and the printer will pull the sheet from the legal tray.

As far as I know there is no printer that will select paper size by how big/small what you are printing is. You need to tell it what size of paper you want to use in whatever application you are using. It will then print the page as if it were using that size page, even if you don't have that size paper loaded.

[Whyzman]

You need to tell it what size of paper you want to use in whatever application you are using.Elst, how would it know not to take a legal document and split it into two 8 1/2 X 11s? Computers aren't intuitive yet...:rolleyes: