Sharp JX 9460 Printer, Great Choice.

Overall features- The Sharp JX 9460 laser printer with JX 9460 toner cartridge boasts with high quality prints at a extremely slow rate of maximum 6 pages per minute at 300 dpi resolutions. Both portrait and landscape page orientation options are available. A 250 sheet paper cassette comes standard with your purchase plus a manual feed slot for unconventional paper, transparencies, film, labels and envelopes. The printer also has five emulations as well as Epson FX 80, IBM Proprinter and IBM Graphics Printer extra emulations. 1.0 MB Random Access Memory comes with the printer.

Interfacing options- Unfortunately, only a very outdated connectivity option is available in the form of a Parallel port. This makes the printer highly unappealing as USB interfacing is the in-thing, with most computers not even accepting parallel ports anymore.

Accessories- A couple of accessories are available for the printer in the form of envelope and paper cassettes, expansion memory, font cards, PostScript Emulation and interfacing boards. Very unnecessary extra's in case of regular printing.

Controls- The Sharp JX 9460 Printers' controls are very user-unfriendly to say the least with a bunch of lights that lit up like a Christmas tree even with the printer is operating even without errors. The control panel consist out of a couple of buttons and lights indicating print status and print options. It is essential to make sure that the printer status is set to offline when attempting to use any of the function keys. Most of the key's are dual function depending on the amount of times and duration pressed. The error light is lit when printing errors occurs. Online light is lit when printer is online and ready to get data from the pc. Manual light is lit when the printer is on manual feed mode and the data light will blink when printer awaits feed commands.

Power saver- The Sharp JX 9460 printers is super environmentally friendly with it's built-in power saving feature. Your printer will be set on this mode upon setup. Should there be no transmission of data or key's pushed for a pre-set time frame, the machine will go into power saving mode. Power consumption is significantly reduced by the reduction of temperatures of the fusing unit by the feature.

Paper sizes- Paper sizes accepted by the machine are very limited to A4, letter, envelope, label, transparency and legal. Compatible envelope sizes are International DL, C5, Business and Monarch. Do not use envelopes with windows, strings, metal tabs, snaps or other attachments as it can possibly damage the printer. It is important to use only transparencies recommended by the manufacturer and remember to set your density accordingly. Make sure you use Sharp toner.

Optional font card- The optional font cards contains a range of fonts not included with the device. The process of loading fonts onto the printer is as easy as pie, just insert the card in allocated slot while on and data lights on device are off and you are ready to go. Erratic prints and hardware errors may occur when inserted during printing process or while online.

Printer Cartridge-The Sharp JX 9460 toner cartridge has a print capacity of about 3 000 pages. The toner is very well priced at US$89.00 to US$ 199.00. An overall good printer investment although rather technologically outdated. Sharp printer cartridge is trusted worldwide.

- Ben Pate