Looking for older color laserjet printer, work horse and possible costly units

Hello, I run a small home business and have been purchasing the printer listed below for many years and now I am trying to consider with all the printers out there if anyone else has a good recommendation for another older printer that works for them too.

I have been using HP cp2025 color laser printer for many years, I have a total of 4 of them in my home office and every 1 to 2 years instead of fixing them, when they mess up I just replace them with another used printer the same model. They usually start to mess up after about a year some have lasted 2 years. These printers can be picked up for around 150 to 200 dollars each, toners, I only use genuine toners so Genuine HP toners can be picked up for low cost as well around 100.00.

I print full color 8.5 x 11 and 8.5x14 pages on regular paper, 24lb, 28 lb, 32 lb, card stock, and even 66 lb photo paper. I shut off the toner is low setting and I can easily get around 1, 000 copies per 4 toners cartridges at around 100.00 total cost of all 4 toners.
I print business cards, flyers and post cards on card stock and photo paper and my stuff comes out great.To me is a great printer, however I want to get or see what is out there for a bit more money out of my pocket.
a few questions...

Do any of you know of a color laser jet , older model for around 600.00, 700.00 that is a work horse with cost effective toners? That you have used if in the same situation as me. It can be discontinued (which most are) in the last 5 to 8 years that are reliable?

Also I am considering purchasing a printer, bigger unit off lease, there are companies that sell these units for around 1, 500.00 to 2,300.00 which is fine by me (Ricoh,Canon, Bizhub) but calling these companies on the phone they all say this one is good or this one is bad and out of calling about 6 or 7 companies not one of them said any of the good ones others said were good, were good. Basically they are sales people just trying to sell an off lease machine they have in stock.

Maybe Ricoh, Sharp, HP or another branded printer. Paper sizes I typically use is 8.5 x11, 8.5x14 and I print post cards/card stock on that machines as well. Looking for small printer recommendations and in August I am thinking of buying a bigger one for around 2300.00 to 2500.00. Thanks ahead of time.

 

The reason I say used/refurbished is that is how I purchased all of the units I purchased and I have probably purchased about 15 of these machines in the past few years. Nothing wrong in my opinion with going refurbished.

 

I worked in a photo store and we used a Xerox Phaser 7760 quite a lot. Later, I bought the machine from the bankrupt company and printed greeting cards on it for former customers. The machine is discontinued, and as someone said, "long in the tooth", but we used it almost every day for 10 years, and had almost no problems with it.

The exception to that was when I was trying to find cheaper toner supplies - I figured that the Phaser 7700 must be "in the same family", and was able to buy cheap 7700 toner..... It cost me over $500 to fix that! The 7700 toner is not the same toner as what the 7760 used, and screwed up my printer royally!

But I found a series of good posts about Xerox toners that were in use at that time, and discovered which models used which type of toner (there were at least 4 types, all completely different, and only 2 of them were switch-able). By buying the cheaper toner cartridges and reloading mine (and installing a new, cheap Chinese chip), I was able to reload each color cartridge for around $50-100. (The official OEM ones were going on eBay for around $300 each at that time.) These were large cartridges, too - page counts were about 25,000 for the colors, and I think 30,000 for black.

Very dependable machine, and it had a batch of different finishing options, none of which I really needed. The colors were beautiful. Cards, posters, brochures, color labels, all came out really nice!

On the downside, they are about the size of a full-sized copy machine, and very heavy. You will need a dedicated spot for one of these, but once you learn how to use it and learn how to refill the cartridges right, it should give you many years of good service!