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Color Laser Printer Recommendations?
philipborlin asks: "We are a small publishing company that publishes medical reference books. We are currently doing in office proofs on an injet printer, but have noticed that sometimes the images we send to our print shop have artifacts that don't show up on our cheap setup. We are looking to buy a color laser printer that will hopefully alert us to the fact that these artifacts exist and allow us time to clean up the image before sending it to the print shop. We have googled the Internet, but have not found comprehensive details on print quality (besides the quantifiables like DPI, etc). Any ideas where we should start? What price range should we be looking at?"
Is it cheaper to get a printer only to find out that your scanner needs to upgraded?
Perhaps it would be better to get a better scanner and monitors in the first place.
Could it be your original images/scans? A new and better printer won't help you "fix" the problem.
Here. The downside to it is it's windows/mac only as it relies on the driver to do the printer rendering. If you need to connect it to a network, or to a *nix machine, get the 2500L (It's $200 more expensive). Once the 2500L (or equivalent at the time) hits $500, I'm getting one for home. None of that bubble/inkjet shit for me. I've got a B&W laser printer (HP 5L) that has lasted for 4 years now (and I bought it used at the MIT hardware swap for $90!), and I've only had to replace the toner cartridge once.
There's never a substitute for troubleshooting the problem. What artifacts? Why? Once you solve those problems, it may be irrelevant what printer you use for proofing.
In any case, I would strongly recomend against a color laser printer for proofs: they just don't have the resolution that a high-end inkjet printer gives you on good paper (not costco $.50/ream shit). My recomendation would be either a tabloid printer (if you need the size), or a photo printer of some sort. My epson bias is based on some very very poor experiances with HP, whereas Epson's printershave been rock solid for me. Xerox has some nice looking equipment too, though I have never used it.
Burn a selection of images to a CD. Some large, some that you're happy with, some where the color turned out odd, and some that look ok, but produced the artifacts.
Take this CD, with hopefully more or less common graphics formats to Office Depot, Compusa, Staple (I would imagine), maybe even costco.
Tell a person standing around, you've got samples and a need to see how some of them look on their color laser printers.
You might have to buy a ream of paper.
Print them out. Maybe try some inkjets too.
Decide.
If the person who helped you was really helpful. Find their manager. Tell the manager how helpful they were, and how they were insturmental in your company's decision to make this purchase. It might be nice to write a short letter to corporate too.
Most stores can do things like drop ship whatever you want straight to you in a few days. If it's just basic color, it might run less than $700. But depending on the bells, whistles and speed demands, the price tag can blow up pretty quickly.
That said, I'm partial to HP. But I encourage you to bring your images, and make your own judgements.
Link
We don't have to go to Kinko's anymore, since we bought this. Fine piece of equipment. FYI, we replaced one of those 'Xerox/Tektronix' machines with it.
How much do you want to spend?
Xerox has a suite of printers that range in price and keep getting very good ratings. They range from small office printers, copier/printers, to full digital production printers.
The Phaser 6250 prints 26ppm (bw or color) and has a resolution of 2400dpi.
Don't try to do proofs on an office laser printer. That's not going to solve your problem.
What you ought to be doing is sending out for contract proofs. Send your images out to a prepress shop and order MatchPrints or something similar. What you get back will be exactly what you'll see when that picture rolls off the press, right down to the halftone pattern.
Don't waste your time trying to squeeze blood from a turnip. A laser printer just can't give you what you need. Spend a few bucks on proofs to save a lot of bucks on re-prints.
I've been very pleased with our Xerox 7300DN. The print quality is excellent for business, but if you need higher end production quality the Xerox 7700DN is great. It was a little pricey for us. You can call or fill out a form online for them to send you print samples. We had a few Epson printers and found their quality to be unsurpassed; however they were a support nightmare. I wouldn't reccomend them for high volume. For proofing they are excellent. As far as HP I only been happy with their large format printers (aka plotters). We keep finding problems with printing postscript 3 documents to most of their product line. We have a great MAC following in the office, and continually get stacks of postscript garbage even when we tell them not to print anything with postscript 3. As long as they don't do PS 3 emulation you'll be good.
Take a look at Lexmark. We've got a couple of them floating around our place, and they seem very reliable, with quality printing.
This printer probably won't satisfy your need for high-quality images, but it's a relatively cheap (I bought new $900) network color printer for home. I've only had it long enough to set it up, not much printing on it yet. It's a Postscript printer, so you should pretty much be able to get any OS to talk to it. It took some hunting around to find Laserwriter 8.6.5 for our old Mac though. To my not very discriminating eye, the output looks good to me, but I can't say anything about the long-term yet, and I couldn't find many user comments on the internet.
Many posters seem to mistake the problem here. They already know that sometimes there is a problem. They have no way of detecting it currently. They are looking for a cheap way to tell if there will be a problem. If the colors are off a little they don't care, the finial printer will get them right. If there are artifacts from some step, they need to know that.
The problem might be caused by a scanner, a bad algorithm in their programs, or using the wrong filters. (Just to name a few that a non-artist can think of) It doesn't make sense to buy a scanner with double the resolution in hopes that it fixes the problem, least of all if there are several different sources of the problem.
Well, I work for a local company specializing in duplications and digital output, and I work with this Bad Boy every day. It's got really nice looking output. It will run just about any stock you put through it, and has a nice RIP interface. Also includes many features that require upgrades on other devices.
Its only weakness that comes to mind is the solid and continuous tone color distribution on non-glossy cardstock. The cardstock absorbs the toner/color goop unevenly causing blotches, making difficult to do large areas of dark, even tones. It's a master at color photos, line art, text, et cetera; as long as the paper stock is suitable.
We also use the Tektronix Phaser 780 and it's really slow. It's decent, but slow. I don't send anything to it unless the Doc12 is in use for a long time. I'm not sure if that's still sold, but I believe it would now be marketed under the Xerox name if so, as they've acquired the laser printer portion of Tektronix.
It sounds more like the printing company you are using is doing something wrong. I would look into why they are getting artifacts and you aren't. Are the images you are using simply not hi-res enough for what your print company is duplicating (if this is the case simply buy a cheap hi-res inkjet)? Or is it the fact that the print company is doing something differnt?
The tabloid printer you reference is probably better in this case, regardless of the page size, because it's a PostScript printer.
I'm guessing they're currently seeing artifacts when their layout goes through the printer's RIP, but they're hidden by the raster-only low-end inkjet devices they have now.
Of course, printing to PDF would also be a decent way to proof - this is all fundamentally built in to Mac OS X (just click the 'Preview' button on Print), so if they're using Windows, that would be another way to get better proofing.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Magially appearing artifacts are probaly something else.
I have trouble believing that even a consumer "photo quality" inkject printer wouldn't show that there is a problem.
That and you could zoom in on the electronic image before you print it.
If the final prints have artifacts and you can't see them anywhere else, it is probaly the final printer.
Since Macs dominate the graphics and publishing industry, MacWorld has always been good about doing in depth technical qualitative reviews of the products associated with that industry. Granted I haven't read MacWorld in about 5 years, but unless they've changed drastically they probably have reveiwed color lasers within the last year or so.
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com
Of interest to you is their new color model the Elite Color 16 DN
- 16 pages per minute, Single-Pass Color
- 1200 x 1200 dpi resolution
- Max print area: 8.3" x 13.84"
- Letter/A4, Legal, Executive, Envelope
- 500-sheet Universal Tray
- PostScript 3 and PCL 5c
- 136 PostScript / 45 PCL fonts built-in
- 256MB RAM standard
- 10/100 Ethernet, USB 2.0, ECP Parallel
- TCP/IP
- Rendezvous
Order the Elite Color 16 DN- 16 pages per minute, Single-Pass Color
- 1200 x 1200 dpi resolution
- Max print area: 8.3" x 13.84"
- Letter/A4, Legal, Executive, Envelope
- 500-sheet Universal Tray
- PostScript 3 and PCL 5c
- 136 PostScript / 45 PCL fonts built-in
- 256MB RAM standard
- 10/100 Ethernet, USB 2.0, ECP Parallel
- TCP/IP
- Rendezvous
- EtherTalk®
- Novell NetWare (IPX/SPX)
- SNMP
Order the Elite Color 16 DNeWe've got a Lexmark one here, and it gives excellent, fast quality.
It takes a little while to warm up when turned on (this is solved by not turning it off), during which time you can't print from it, because there's no wax melted, but once it's going it's stunning.
We can do full page, full colour photos in less time than it takes to walk across the room and pick up the piece of paper.
I've worked in prepress for many years, and I can guarantee you that no laser printer is going to work for your proofing purposes. Laser printers will only do an 80 line screen at best, it is good for an overall proof, but it's completely useless if your purpose is to detect image flaws or artifacts, as you describe. Laser prints have terrible color accuracy and flatness problems, even using color control systems. That's just the way lasers are. They'd be adequate for proofing only if you're doing cheap newsprint publications at 80 linescreen, but you say you're doing medical publications and you really deserve a better proof for complex technical work.
What you really need is a system designed specifically for digital proofing, like the 3M Rainbow or an Iris. It's going to cost you big bucks, but just think of the money you'll save on botched print runs. Rainbow and Iris prints are widely considered "contract proof" quality, although nothing's going to come close to a real Matchprint made from film seps.
I'd rather not support the companies that hurt me. From other posts in this thread, there are plenty of alternatives from other organizations.
Digital Citizen
So instead of making blind recommendations ('cause I'm not in the printing field any longer and am not up to date on the various offerings) I'm gonna suggest you better places to find more appropriate assistance:
Any of those venues is going to get you better quality answer then here. Also don't be too cheap to pay for advice & support in this. Getting everything set up right, all of the parts properly meshed together, making sure any glitches are not endemic but isolated incidents that can be properly resolved, that takes some sophisticated knowledge and skills. The same as you'll save money using a prepress printer in-house the same goes for having a smooth pre-press process in-house.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
What is the occurance ?
Now multiply the two together and that is the cost to your business of failure
Now, getting a new printing environment - should lower the occurance of the failure, and therefor you have how much it is worth it to your company to buy a new printing environment. I guess the interesting analysis would be - which printing environment lowers the occurance by how much (and how much does that setup cost)
Notice I am intentionaly calling it an environment - there are many factors beyond a simple printer that can cause failre
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
are Pantone certified. Maybe you need a better laser printer.
We had the same problem. We needed a color laser with good enough quality for proofs, and we needed to use it for small print runs (500 or less). After a lot of looking around, I picked the HP 4600DN.
It costs around 2300-2500 (Page Computers had the best price, and very fast delivery). Figure about 100 for delivery. It uses 4 carts, at $120 for black, and $180 each for C, M, Y. 9000 sheets at 5%, but figure about 14 cents for light coverage, 25 for medium, 50 cents for very heavy.
It leaves a 1/4" or less border, of course, but its as small as you can get. It runs PCL or PS, over 95 network, Win2k, or TCP/IP. I set it up on my Linux box as a generic PS printer and it works famously. The color quality is exceptional on plain paper, although my old HP932 made the glossy paper look a little better. You really don't need glossy for this anyway, since being laser, it puts a slightly better than mat finish on it anyway.
Once it calibrates (once per day, first print job) it is super fast. 17ppm, and it seems to really do it. My desk is next to the printer room, and a single page is always done before I get to the printer, 20 feet away. (assuming it has already calibrated)
It has great features, you can run the admin software (not required) on any windows box, its not too large (but over 100 pounds) so it sets on a spare desk. The DN model has duplexing (N is for networking, has a NIC built in). It has a front bypass tray and a 500 sheet tray. You can get an optional tray for 1000 more pages for about $400-500 more.
It uses pc100 sdrams, and I think 512 max ram, which is plenty. I installed generic ram and it accepted it fine. We have 352mb in ours. You do have to remove about 8 screws to get to the ram, but then you just slide out the motherboard and put the ram in. It has one chip you have to keep (fonts) and one other chip for 96mb stock, and two empty slots. (32/64/0/0)
Like all laser printers, you CAN get some streaked lines if you are doing something very saturated, but its less than most. Most images come out very lifelike. You can preview them at most Office Depot stores, but they are not a good place to buy them.
Hope this helps.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
What about a tektronix phaser solid ink printer.
Very good quality and extremely good tek support.
As a designer, I have to caution you in just using a colour laser printer to solve your artifact issue. Other's have mentioned some of the solutions of Iris prints and Matchprints. Another alternative is a dye-sub printer.
None of the colour lasers are true pre-press proofing devices. Either send the files out to a service bureau (- hire a competent graphic designer that knows what the hell they are doing!) or have your printer provide you with a Matchprint colour proof.
There is a difference between an Iris and Matchprint. The Iris is a digital print of the file going through pre-press while the Matchprint is made with film from the file. Big difference. 99.9% of the time the Iris will show what the Matchprint does but I have seen errors that have not shown on the Iris and have shown on the blueline.
There are the few instance that will cause problems through the imagesetter (have to love postscript!)
Are you pdfing the files in house before you send them out to your printer at their press settings. I have seen files crash on distilling the pdf that will go through a postscript on a laser printer.
Good luck. Sounds like it's a designer issue first and formost of not preparing the image files correctly. No laser printer, Iris or Matchprint will solve that. Since I make a living repairing such files, the majority of the time it is in the orginial files prepared by the graphic designer.
design is art - art is design
They're the ones who said my Xerox 6060 does acceptable coated and uncoated Pantones, for the one with the gamut of our toner.