Which brand of laser printer is best supported on the Mac?

The major brands have the best drivers and most standard drivers are automatically installed... currently about 1.8GB of the initial install is printer drivers.

Just check the specs for support. If you are considering a multi-function unit, check with the manufacture support articles and do a google search for compatibility issues as those functions are usually handled by a stand alone application from the manufacture.

Apple's list of supported printers for 10.4 is here.

I'm very happy with a Brother 5250DN I just bought. Sits on my LAN, prints fast, prints front and back, cost less than $200 and has good print quality.

Brother supports Mac OS (even back to OS9) and the current OSX support is good, if not stellar.

I picked it up from Amazon for $185.

I'm replacing an Apple LaserWriter Select 360 which produced beautiful print quality but without Ethernet or Duplex, I decided to switch to the Brother.

MacBook 1.83, 2GB, 120GB, Parallels - iMac G5 iSight Mac OS X (10.4.7) Been known to use WinXP

I would stay away from any piggie-back toner fuser configurations like most Brother printers use (and now some low-end HP branded brother units) and stick to units with a fixed mount fuser as they have a longer life. My workplace mostly uses HP with hardly any problems. ($199-6000 range)

Think of a toner cartridge that has another toner cartridge attached to it, making it insert twice as far into the printer. The design is such that it is very easy for the user to change the fuser. This is because it is not at all durable and very cheap.

Considering your getting a color unit this does not come into play.

Be very careful choosing even a major brand printer. I have a Lexmark E210 and until tonight (see my earlier post) I couldn't get it to work. It is the only Lexmark, that i noticed, that isn't supported out-of-the-box. If you are curious about a model, check the manufacturer's website to be sure, don't trust the sales people.....just my 2 cents.

Ditto on the 2605dn. My 11 year old set up up, installed the software, and printed the first page. Bonjour makes it easy. I have read about HP nightmares, but that was not the case here. Sadly, some of the print center adjustments and web based controls do not work on Mac, nor can you order supplies automatically on Safari or use Safari to download the driver update. But the printer itself works great. Color. Duplex. Everything as advertised.

I second Rudy's opinion on the Brother 5250DN, as far as a b&w laser printer goes! I got one of these a couple of weeks ago and the setup was super-easy. It has a great feature-set with 1200 dpi and auto-duplexing. The Brother installation software worked wonderfully to set up both Macs and PC almost automatically (I did change it to a static IP address after installation). The built-in ethernet print server's embedded web server administration IS accessible from both PCs and Macs (unlike what I have seen with my HP Directjet web server which I have only been able to access from a PC even with the latest firmware: the only thing that comes up if I try to access the HP Directjet web server administration from Macs is "Hewlett Packard. Macintosh OS is not supported to run this application.")

The Brother's two manuals are well-written and easy to understand also, more so than the manual for the HP 2605DN, which I downloaded (I was thinking about the HP 2605DN for a color-printer).

I am very happy with the Brother and its Mac support!