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Color Printing Without the Inkjet Mess?
Above writes "Many recent /. stories have been about the problems of inkjet Printers. Seems they all want to sell the printer for cheap, and then use the ink to make up the difference. There are also problems where a lack of printing, or printing too much, could make it much more expensive to use your inkjet. So, since mine just died, what are the best options? I'm intersted in two catagories, a 'personal' color printer, probably USB to a machine, and a 'workgroup' color printer, with ethernet, postscript prefered. While Windows is good for my application, something that plays well with FreeBSD and Linux would be a major win as well. I'd consider laser if it's cheap enough (read $500/printer), and I don't think that it is. I'm willing to pay a bit more for the printer if that means bigger ink tanks, better cleaning, and easier to buy replacement supplies, the question is, are there really good options out there or have the low-end 'throwaway' printers taken over the market?" One option is a modded inkjet like the ones here, liberated from tiny ink cartridges. Any recommendations out there for decent color lasers?
I have never regretted the $2K I spend for an HP Color Laserjet 4600... even at toner refill time! It is a very fast, very reliable machine. My old B&W laser seems soooooo slow now!
I recommend Canon printers with the seperate color cartridges. I laugh at my friend who saved 50$ on his printer, but has already thrown out 2 good tanks of red/blue because his yellow ran out.
For a cheap InkJet solution THG recommends the Canon i850.
Check out ebay... I snagged a Phaser 740 for $100 or so, plus $100 shipping.. Though I had to replace a few of the consumables (which can be expensive), its been a great printer.. Networkable, Postscript level 3... Slow to warmup (3-5 minutes..), but hey, it works, and prints great..
I got that for the reason that I don't print enough, and my ink was constantly drying out...
Slashdot is like Playboy: I read it for the articles
You're not going to find a color laser printer for $500. Not even close. You'd be pressed to find a decent black and white laser printer that does postscript for that price. You might want to look into a printer like the Epson 2200. We have several of them where I work, and while not postscript or laster based, there is a continuous flow kit that works pretty well, and they're firewire based so not too bad in terms of speed. As a note on the price range, we spent ~$5k on our last crummy color laser printer and are finally getting a really nice one in a few weeks for $25k. They're not cheap by any means.
Go to http://www.freecolorprinters.com
A friend of mine has two of these solid ink lasers. She has to buy ink from them at normal prices, but she gets all the black ink she wants for free. Service included. You have to qualify in terms of how much of various types of docs you print.
Check out PCWorld's running Top 10 Color Laser Printers list.
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...
While that is a very cool idea, and one I've never heard of, one look at the price says why. It seems logical to me that any 4 color, CYMK printer would cost pretty much the same to convert, but obviously this is not the case. Epson C60 sells regulary for about $65, and the converted one sells for $499 Wheras the C80 sells for about $85 and the converted unit runs $749. Why the extra cost I have no idea. And that website is very porrly designed and aparenty unfinished. While a cool idea, and a 6 color large formant printer like the ones they sell would give great results cheaply. This site offers the kits to do it yourself, so you can save yourself from cartridges and save yourself $200 by doing it yourself in true slashdot fashion.
Bork Bork Bork!!
there have been a lot of specials on color lasers lately.. the cheap minolta has what you need but is a bit more spendy in the long run in terms of toner life.. we just purchased an HP 1500 color laser and just love it. plus.. even the coated and photo-style paper is far far cheaper than their inkjet equivalents (like.. 3 to 12 cents a page when compared with 50 cents with some premium inkjet papers...) in a workgroup situation, i see a color laser far out-producing the inkjet and paying for itself in savings even before the toner runs out.. (the 1500 is good for about 4,000 sheets per drum. plus, it also actually keeps track of how much toner it's used from each color and recalculates the life expectancy of the cartridge.. neat huh?) We're still using up our inkjets.. (two canons, an 8200 and a 800) and love them.. got a big stack of the spendy ink too gott sell or use. oh yeah.. the color last much longer too and is definitely waterproof.. I hate to hock HP a lot, but they have some archival quality paper they call tough paper, waterproof, tear resistant, coated both sides, and are supposed to last 30 years or more.. priced it just under the paper we had been using (premium kodak photo paper) and couldnt believe it.
I think he's referring to the chips in the manufacturers cartridges which have features specifically to prevent refilling. DMCA might have some influence over whether a 3rd party can "hack" the cartridge's chip back to a full state after doing a refill.
Well, if he were really looking for a "hardcore printer", as you put it, he would've checked out Tektronix. We have one at the office (model 850) and it's been printing volumes for a while. Very reliable, nice quality, works without a hinch with Linux, PostScript and all. Even supplies seem to be reasonably priced (considering how long they last).
And the coolest thing about it is that it uses ink sticks! You just feed them into the printer, so there is no catrige to replace, no scam with expiring catriges, no ink wasted. As it uses up a certain color, you add more sticks of that color. That's all.
If they ever become available in my price range, I want one at home!
Jobs? Which jobs?
Wish you were right, but...
Google search for Lexmark+DMCA
They've got a color laser at $500. I dunno what the brand was, but given today's printer market, it's probably a rebadged HP,Lexmark, or Epson.
IMHO, Lexmark's arguments are very strained, but resellers aren't looking for a fight, even one they can win. As a result, generic ink cartridges are hard to find.
obTopic: I think a lot of people are boycotting Lexmark over this, so don't go there, whatever you do.
Sig:Why copyright isn't a fundamental human right
I didn't know that LEDs are printers?
a.k.a "cheap laser" printer. Okidata, I believe, was one of the first to make those available at prices that I (student at the time) could afford.
And, if you think about it, there isn't much difference between a LED and a laser in this context - both are just a monochromatic (hopefully tightly focused) beam of light that polarizes the drum.
Jobs? Which jobs?
Most laser printers are immune to the slowdown for high coverage.
For one offs they slowdown for photos, but for multiple prints they will put out high speed continually for even high coverage.
Also your print quality should be a non issue for multiple prints too.
Once the data is to the printer and prossessed everything will run about the same.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
The Phaser "wax" printers were originally popularized (and I believe developed at) Tektronix. They got out of the printer biz some years back and the Phaser is now sold by Xerox.
They still have a number of models, mostly still in the high-end departmental area.
There are certain tasks where the Phaser output is pretty nice. Because the wax-based pigments are opaque the colors are really saturated. Cost and mess factors are very low relative to inkjet printing. All these things make these printers continue to be a pretty strong choice for printing business graphics (charts, graphs, etc.). And as the RIP hardware has gotten much faster, it's not quite as long a lifetime to wait for output as in the old days.
But in terms of capability, I don't think they can touch the flexibility of inkjets. These days there are choices for pigment-based or dye-based inks so you can print opaque or transparently. And inkjets have much higher resolution, more flexibility on printing media, and are cheaper too.
Plenty
Why should the DMCA have anything to do with printer ink? That's a much better question.
We bought a used Tektronix Phaser printer several years ago for the office. We've never looked back. Maintenance is virtually zero. Adding more wax is trivial, possibly easier/cleaner than toner. Black wax is free with our model (ie, ultra cheap per-page costs for B&W documents), and you pay for color wax. Output quality is fantasic whether it's B&W text, solid color regions, or near-photo quality. You could certainly burn a lot of wax if you printed color photos or solid pages all the time, but your B&W docs will be cheap.
As far as connectivity and compatibility...
Windows: Great. Drivers are easy found and work great.
Linux: The printer sits on our LAN with its own IP address, etc. so when I print from my Linux desktop I simply have a script that fires the [text/PDF]->Postscript straight into the printer's listening port. And I'm sure there's a better way to print to this printer from Linux (with Samba) that allows for proper queuing, etc.
First cavaet: The printer has a warmup sequence that keeps itself clean and ensures liquid wax is ready when needed. The good news is you never really have to think about turning it on or off or whatever; it just wakes up and warms itself up. (In fact, don't turn it off or it goes through an extended power-up cycle that burns additional wax.) The downside here is that it does burn a small amount of color wax each warmup and eventually I guess you'd run out of the color wax even if you weren't doing color printing. In real usage, this hasn't been an issue for our office, but I thought I'd mention it.
Second cavaet: This is a fairly big, heavy, expensive printer. It performs like a professional printer, not a light-duty home inkjet. So you do get what you pay for here, in my opinion.
Ours is an 800-series Phaser, but here are some current models from Xerox. And check into the free black wax issue -- I'm not sure if it's still the standard policy.
We got a great deal on Xerox NC60.... or so we thought. It was probably the single worst computer equipment purchase we've ever made.
Wonderful features, price was around $1k, great prints.
When you could get them...
I think we probably printed about 150 sheets with the thing. And we had to have the fuser replaced even to get that.
It was impossible to keep it running. It is impossible to get it repaired (without an expensive service contract it costs about $500 plus milage to get someone to look at it.)
Right now it just sits there. It jams every time a sheet goes through.
Any time I see a Xerox product now I run.
For day to day printing, I use a cheap HP 3100 monochrome printer. Toner can be stored a long time, costs little, and gives excellent results. However, businesses learned long ago that owning and maintaining and owning something like a color laser printer can be expensive. When I want to print something special, I use the Kinkos KFP tool and just pick up my prints anytime (open 24 hours). If I want a photo, I upload it to clubphoto.com when they're having a promotion or I'll use the Fuji machine at the local super wal-mart. I generally avoid using the Kodak kiosks as they use thermal dye sublimation, like a color laser printer. The Fuji's use real photo paper and expose the image. Pretty decent results. But my best prints have been from clubphoto and yahoo photo prints. So I've completely eliminated little ink cartridges from my life, that is except for relatives needing them. I usually direct them to ink4art.com.
1. the wax costs $50 per 'brick'
2. $175 fee if you don't send them a usage report on time
3. $150 fee if you don't print enough pages per month (see #1)
Yes- lasers run the whole page over the drum at the same speed no matter what's being printed, so they don't take any longer for more coverage.
The only difference will be, as you said, in the initial data transfer... Which isn't bad at all over USB.
...a more robust setup. I would recommend a monochrome laser printer for text operations, paired with a dye sublimation printer for color.
I use two Kodak 8650 printers (pick one up for a couple grand on ebay) for a commercial application that is probably beyond the scope of the submitter, but the quality (indistinguishable from a lab print), reliability (over 800 9x14" prints/week at times), and durability (light-fast for more than 20 years)
Olympus, Kodak, Sony, and others have items at more reasonable price points.
No doubt; for color, go dye-sub. Then again, I own an Epson 1280 photo that does really nice work as well. I have installed an Epson 2200 for a couple of clients and they are even better.
I picked up a Minolta Magic Color 2200DL (I think that's the model number, there are a couple that are pretty close) for just over $500 from a Dell Deal(tm) a few months back. I'm not a heavy duty user, my HP 5mp is still on its original toner cartridge. The Minolta lacks postscript, so it is 'windows only' but last I checked it looked like one of the ghostscript drivers and/or something from CUPS could be adapted to do the right thing.
Plus side: Takes standard PC100 or PC133 ram, so stuck some old dimms in it to take it up to 192MB or so.
Down side: It doesn't come with much RAM to begin with.
Plus side: It comes with a 100baseT port built in.
Down side: Speaks an officially undocumented, but apparently well-known queueing protocol.
Plus side: It was under $600 shipped.
Down side: Comes with partially filled toner cartridges, good for like 2000 pages instead of 5000 or something equally unfull.
Plus side: You can buy individual toner carts, instead of all 4 CYMK carts at once.
Down side: Toner costs a lot, like $125 per cartridge.
Plus side: Prints really fast, like a real 4 ppm color and a real 16 ppm b&w
Down side: Takes like two minutes to warm up out of stand-by.
YMMV, I was too lazy to double-check my facts and just went from tequila-addled memory.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
My predecssor got suckered by the very cheap up-front purchase price on this machine. It was, IIRC, something in the order of AUD$3900.00.
'course, it is during my reign and my budget that the beast needs new toner cartridges, isn't it! AUD$400.00 a pop (times four, C, M, Y, and K)
This machine proved to be so expensive to run that we made a commercial decision to shut it off for a few months, and now we run it with a FreeBSD box bridging it from the rest of the network, with MAC layer filtering restricting access to just a couple of people.
It isn't even that nice a printer on quality terms. Any cheap inkjet gives far better quality (resolution, clarity, colour match, etc) results than this huge beast!
Your Mileage May Vary - mine obviously does!
I find your ideas intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
And of course Canon printers are supported by foomatic. My BJC-2110 works with Red Hat 9 out of box.
Ask and you shall recieve.
It's a Xerox Phaser, which is basically the new version of the tektronix printers (Xerox bought them out a while back). It's uber-compatible, too. PostScript, PCL, Windows 95/98/Me, Windows NT 4.x, Windows 2000/XP, MacOS 8/9/X, version 10.1, Novell NetWare 3.x/4.x/5.x/6.x, UNIX (Linux 5.2+, Sun OS 4.x Sun Solaris 2.4+, DEC, HP/UX 11.x, IBM AIX 4.2+, SGI, SCO).
I would post all the features, but you can view them yourself here.
The best part is it's free if you do enough printing, just sign a contract to buy your supplies (everything except paper) from Xerox for 2 years and the machine is yours.
Work sucked, until it became unemployment, when it became slightly more tolerable. -Tet
The printer has parallel, USB, and 10/100 ethernet connections. I personally use the ethernet connection exclusively. It does 16 pages a minute in greyscale, and 4 pages per minute in color. While a lot of the more expensive color lasers can do single pass color printing and get 20+ ppm, 4 ppm for 8 x 10 color photos at top quality easily beats any inkjet. I printed my Christmas card (~100 copies x 2 pages full color) in under 2 hours. It used to take me days of printing with an inkjet.
My only issue with the Magicolor 2300DL is that it is not postscript. My primary desktop OS is Red Hat 9. Greyscale printing is perfect from linux. Color printing is not photo quality, as you can see patterning in the output. Linux printing is also slower than Windows. Linux printing does work well enough to be usable (it's the only printer set up on my linux boxen), but if you're going for true photo quality, for now, you'll need a windows PC lying around. Linux drivers can be found on linuxprinting.org jump directly to the 2300DL linuxprinting.org page or the driver page, which also gives info on the protocol used by the 2300DL.
As far as toner goes, I've had a hard time finding the high capacity 4500 page toner cartriges for everything but black. The standard 1500 page cartridges go for about $70, the large color ones for about $120, and the black ones (only comes as large) for about $80. The toner is a little more expensive than other lasers, but any laser toner is dirt cheap compared to ink.
The list price is $800, but you can probably pick it up for $600 if you can wait a little while for it to go on sale. It's definitely worth the extra $100 and the wait.
Actually I have tried 2 printers with the gimp-print drivers for linux, both perform better than windows (note i only use b&w).
I had a Desktop 340 (smallest printer i've ever seen, smaller than the size of 2 shoeboxes or so.. and quite old) ... the quality was a tad higher in linux, but the quality is so poor already its hard to notice a difference
Epson Stylus Colour 600 ... now this surprised me.... the quality is poor in windows... even at highest quality at 1440 res... lots of bleeding... in linux it is like a high quality laser printer (even though it takes 10 minutes or longer to print a page), and even with hardware microweaving off (which can damage the heads) it is excellent quality... and the thing is somebody gave me this printer because they were dissapointed with the quality...
my guess is the manufacturers make the drivers use more ink then is really needed so you gotta pay for another cartridge ... or they for some reason cant make quality drivers...
Marge, get me your address book, 4 beers, and my conversation hat.
I've had an Epson Stylus 740 hooked up with a CIS system for about two years. I would do it again in a hearbeat. The benenfits:
.12=(200+150+8*8+75)/4000 (200 printer, 150 for CIS, $8 ream, 75 for ink. Obviously, YMMV.
- You can tell exactly how much ink you left at a glance.
- Your price per page is around $0.12, if you print 2000 pages a year for only 2 years:
- My print quality is very good- no banding at all.
- I run two weekly crons, one to print a color bar pattern and one to run an extra cleaning cycle. Only once did I have a clogged head, and a couple extra cleaning cycles cleared it up.
- With any amount of diligence, you will never run out of ink in the middle of a job.
- You get the satisfaction of knowing you're not paying pure profit for carts.
I would definitely recommend that if you go this route, you get a new printer and do CIS from day one. If not, invest in the cleaning solution to get every last bit of old ink out and your heads totally clean. This I learned the hard way.
If you have more questions, you can email me at jmgallag at attbi dot com.
Also black ink is free. If you buy a color set, you get a free pack of black. Picture of ink. One thing and I can't stress this enough. Ink is not cross compatable across many models, so the bow tie ink should not go into the oval slot even if the color is right. The different printers they make use different temp inks. If you load 800 series ink into an 300 series system you'll damage the print head because the ink will solidify in the tubes. If you do the opposite, you could burn the ink. Common preventative maintanance is to run a cleaning page. If the print has lines in it, run the "light stripes" test. After a while you have to replace the oil roller. There is a small chip on the roller that counts pages to keep you from using the printer past the roller's designed usage period. Also after about a whole pack of ink has been used, you'll have to dump the drip tray. The easiest way is if the tray is still hot, run it under a cold water faucet, the ink will shrink slightly and you can bang it against a trash can and it will come loose.
I picked it up at OfficeMax/Depot for something like $50 and got a $30 rebate (it was listed on slickdeals.net). I then go over to eBay and buy cheapo ink from someone and buy enough of it to make it last for about a year. Total $$ spent, less than $70. Works good enough for me and the little bit of printing that I do. Even looked pretty good when I used the free borderless glossy paper that came with the printer.
Its a USB printer, so I can use it with my iBook and my PC, will someday setup the wireless printer through XP, but that is another post.
I just bought an HP 2000c for $5 at a salvation army. You should check out your local resale shop.
what sig?
I recommend the Canon i850 Color printer. It does excellent photos, is relatively inexpensive and canon doesn't seem to encumber their ink cartridges.
I also got a hawking USB print server (~ $60) and it's now a network printer.
Take a look at how easy it is to assign this thing an ip address and have a network printer.
If you don't spend their secret Priceline minimum required amount on ink sticks, you have to pay a $75/month fee.
For that money you can get a business lease on an HP4500, which is a far better printer.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
I generally avoid using the Kodak kiosks as they use thermal dye sublimation, like a color laser printer
I would just like to note that color laser and dye sublimation are two totaly different technologies... dye sub prints are vastly superior to laser prints, and have nearly the shelf life of a standard wet print. If you are looking to print primarly photos... get a dye sub such as a kodak 8500 or 8660.. or heck even a cheep olympus p400... youl never regret it.. espicaly since unlike inkjet prints... dye sub prints are totaly water proof... spill your coffie on em??? no problem.. just wipe it off!
True but like all inkjets. Take care of that printhead. The number one repair complaint I got was related to bad print quality. Which could be traced to two things. One customer using the wrong ink in the machine. The customer let the unit sitting around a long time without doing at least a print a week. Using good quality paper is also important (especially for inkjets).
BTW Don't forget to periodically clean the unit inside. You'd be surprised how dirty these units get inside.
Kyocera printers will cost you in time and headaches, they make truly shithouse printers. we have 2 fs3800's at work. one is a pleasure, the other has had EVERYTHING replaced and still friggs up. and dealing with kyocera is as fun as snapping on a glove and trying to caviety search a herd of hippos. Kyocera will give you service kits which don't match what you ask for and take weeks to replace urgently needed parts without apology. avoid them at all costs.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
I gave up on inkjets last February. I had already switched to doing my photo printing using dotphoto.com for about .15-.19 per photo.
I bought a Minolta 2300 DL network color laser on sale from OfficeMax for $600. The network interface is included in the base price, which makes this printer the best bargain I've seen in a color laser printer. An optional duplexer adds about $330 to the price. The protocol used by this printer is Zenographics ZjStream (JBIG based). I wrote an open source driver for it, called foo2zjs.
The printer with my driver is good enough for business graphics and casual photo printing. The resolution of this printer is 2400x600 with one bit (1 dot size) per CMYK color plane. The printer is not good enough for photo printing, but I prefer dotphoto.com for that anyway. For the price, I would buy htis printer again.
I've also got an unreleased driver for the HP LaserJet 1500 color laser printer. This printer uses Oak Technologies OAKT protocol, also JBIG based. This printer has two bits (3 dot sizes) per CMYK plane. The driver currently produces output that can be parsed and turned back into the original page images, but has never been tested on a real LJ 1500. I shelved further work on the OAKT driver due to HP's lack of interest in loaning me a LaserJet 1500 for final testing.
Also, it's somewhat slow. It takes about 15 seconds to print one side of a sheet which is has already processed (i.e. 30 sec for a double-sided sheet), and much longer than that for most of the first sheets that have to be processed. Our configuration doesn't have a hard disk, so it can't "quick collate" multiple copies, either. When I'm saying that it's slow, however, I'm comparing it to our huge laser monochrome printer that churns out a double-sided A4 sheet in under two seconds. Now THAT's fast enough for most of my printing tasks.
Ditto about brownish color on grayscales at high quality. This is because it uses color ink for all gray tones in this mode, resulting in smoother appearance (more weaker dots) but overall brownish color for gray. In the same high-quality mode it lays more ink on color images resulting in a better look for them. I wish it could tell color elements on the page from grayscale elements and include an option to print pure grayscales with black ink, uncoupling the two features. Alas, it merges them in just one mode.
I don't know about the costs. It's free for the employees.
17779 eligible voters in a district, 17779 'vote' as one. This is Russia.
MagiColor 2350 by QMS.
Cost my about $900 at Office Max on sale.
More than you want to spend tis true, but it is a damn good color printer.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
Tektronix/Zerox gave us 3 of the 840's (educational institution). They print very nicely, with vivid colors and good saturation.
But, it continually shit its ink into its drip tray that I had to dump out every few days. Tek said there was nothing wrong with the printer and to just order more ink (not cheap!).
We finally turned it off. We had gone through 3 sets of ink and only a couple hundred pages. Now, if someone needs a print, we turn it on for them , they can print to it, and we turn it off again. It costs much less that way.
Also, you don't want to put your prints in the cover of a plastic binder, since the wax will stick to the clear plastic of the binder.
As someone else pointed out, color laser prints and dyesub prints are two totally different animals.
.. but, that's generally the difference between a $5000 printer and a $25000 printer. :) The silver halide printers are harder to tweak to output the "right" colors though -- the colors generally look "flat" (best word I can use to describe it) out of the box. They're also harder to maintain -- the one we had back at the office could have some nasty chemical spills and whatnot. I probably wouldn't use a kiosk that has one of those built in -- I'd rather send it off to a large facility that spends more time keeping their printers in calibration.
Dyesub printers, while sometimes finicky, produce excellent quality prints. A company I used to work for uses them in all of their portrait studios for "on demand"/instant prints.
It is definately "different" than the print you get with a silver halide printer
It seems like a lot of people forget that, I know I did until recently. Ink jet printers seem to be a cheap solution - until you realize just how much you are spending on ink.
I own (but no longer use) an Epson Photo Stylus 700, which I bought because I loved the quality of the output when used with the "special" photo paper. I never printer one picture on the paper. I think the greatest thing I *ever* did with the printer was make some nice Thanksgiving party invitations.
It seemed like I was always buying ink - because we rarely used it, but left it turned on. This tended to leave the print heads uncapped (I think they do this on purpose, rather than auto-capping, to sell more ink), and caused the ink to dry out prematurely. But you wanted to leave it on, because it seemed to take forever to "boot" (turn it on, and after minutes of "self-checking" and "cleaning" it would finally be ready. I took a look at how we were printing (rarely, but we wanted good output *now* when we did), what we were printing (most of the time, simple text only stuff, black and white) - and I bought a printer based on that.
I ended up buying a used HP Laserjet 6 (there is a P or something there at the end, too), and a refilled toner cartridge. Total cost: $170.00 - and I have postscript, too. I installed some old 72 pin SIMMs I had lying around to bump the cache up some, and I haven't looked back.
The printer is great - what was really nice was the low page count (25000 pages). I also like the fact that I can use el-cheapo paper in it, and it still looks great (the Epson, on anything under 24lb weight, would "fuzz" - lighter weight paper had more "fur", and the print wouldn't have crisp edges). I also like it that I can leave it on - and then when I want to print out to it, I instantly can - and it just works!
Now, maybe if your job or hobby requires color, an ink jet is what you need to get. But I learned my lesson quick - I don't have *any* need for color. If I want to look at pictures, I look at them on a screen. Just about anyone else can do the same (most people I know have a computer). If I need a print of an image, I will print it in b/w for "checking", then the final can be done at a copy shop or something. I have yet to need to do this, though - but it is the most sensible option, for me.
I will never regret buying that laser printer.
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
I've got one of the newer Phaser 860 printers from the FreeColorPrinters program.
The ink has been reformulated and will not scratch off the page like the old stuff. You'll destroy the paper before you get the ink off. It won't melt either. You can photocopy prints made with this new ink. It also won't melt like the old stuff if you happen to leave a print in your car or in direct sunlight.
It's not fast, but it's not unreasonably slow either. For most of our jobs (black text with some small color graphics/logos) we get about pages per minute duplexed. The duplexing feature is great! Pages with lots of color coverage at high quality will often take more than 30 seconds, but with the cost of the color ink so high you're not likely to be printing many pages like that!
From a cost standpoint, you do have to be careful what you print with this printer. We went through a couple hundred dollars of ink sticks in the first month. But now we're doing minimal color stuff and haven't bought ink in 4 months.
Printing some photos every now and then won't break the bank. Just don't do like we did and print 100 the first month!
We just bought a Tektronix 8200, and it rocks. People who are so used to inkjets and lasers are really amazed when I show them a) how easy it is to check the amount of color left (pop the lid and count the wax blocks) and b) how easy it is to replenish the color (each wax block is uniquely shaped so that it only fits in one hole -- virtually idiotproof).
The output is gorgeous. It is big and heavy, like you say, but it's a workgroup color printer with postscript. It's not expensive; in fact, it's quite cheap. After all, it's not competing with inkjet printers, but with color lasers. We bought a color laser (Tektronix 7700) at the same time, and the 8200 was about half the price of the 7700.
www.freecolorprinter.com Does not have a 75 monthly fee. Thats www.freecolorprinters.com (XEROX) please carefull what you type. Because you are bashing my company. (www.freecolorprinter.com) Cadapult Graphic Systems... Any problems or questions about my company, site, program, or products please let me know. I will personal help the situation. Especially for a fellow slashdoter... Thanks
We use quite a few of these printers at work--quick synopsis, if you're considering one:
:(
Phaser340 and ilk: These are the old, old solid-ink tech. Don't consider anything before the 840 series. They really suck--the heat from a photocopier is enough to melt the wax off the page.
Phaser840: Don't buy this printer. Every one was made with a defective clutch, and all the replacement clutches seem to share this design flaw. Don't expect a clutch to last more than 25,000 sheets.
Phaser850: Clutch problems seem to be fixed in about 50% of the cases. 850 and 840 have a defective Appletalk stack in the firmware that causes the printer to drop off Appletalk network after 28 days, requiring a reboot.
Phaser860: First with USB option. For home use, might be a good option as it's got the cheaper USB (860B) model, and seems to be nicer from a power-sucking standpoint (could be my imagination, though.)
Phaser8200: Easily their best so far. Great quality output, faster processor, internals seem solid. Ink has changed--8x0 had 'free black ink for life', meaning that you got free blacks with each color, or you could order free black. The ink shapes changed, AND I'm pretty sure the ink type changed as well, so on the 8200 you don't get any free ink. But, the price of the printer dropped around $500 or so to compensate for this.
So...for home use? They're a little expensive (intial investment), but so are color lasers. But they _definitely_ make up for that cost when you consider the price of consumables. On a laser, you've got toners, imaging units, fusers, transfer rollers, etc. On the Phasers you just have ink and the maintenance cartridge. Expect to not need any parts repairs until ~50,000 sheets.
I'd really discourage getting a used Phaser (hell, any used laser/big printer.) If someone's getting rid of it, it's because it's got problems and you'll probably sink more money into it in repair parts than you paid for it.
I'd get one for home use, but they're out of my budget (and A/C capabilities)
Recently bought a Xerox Phaser 8200 for
my department. It uses wax transfer rather
than ink or toner. It costs about the
same as a typical color laser, the consumables
are much cheaper (40% cost of HP laser
per page), is extremely fast, and produces
breathtakingly beautiful output. Perhaps
more impontantly, it produces beautiful
output on cheap paper stock. You don't
need fancy coated paper or extra bright
stock to get production quality output
as you do with lasers and ink jets.
The version I got is network enabled,
duplexes, and I believe runs postscript
so Linux should be good to go.
FWIW, my calculation of actual cost per page
for printing out typical full color brochure
pieces is about 8-9 cents per page (plus the
cost of paper.) Although it has a slow
time to first page, when it gets going it
cranks out pages about one per second, even
when duplexing.
If you want to do full color brochures I'd
highly recommend it. (Only downside, it only
prints to within 5mm of the edge.)
They don't have any right now, but about every other week, I've seen a couple HP Laserjet 4050's (or 4500) Colour Laser Printers at AuctionDepot starting bidding at around $200. You could probably get one for ~$500 as you said. They also often have old rack cabinets (great for geek-class bookshelves - if not a little expensive.. but definitely cool. :D
You might wish to go back and check the per page cost again. Most analysis today state 2-3 cents/page for black and 12-15 for colour on a laser. Double that for an inkjet.
SDL