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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?"
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.
If you really want a top-quality printer, I'd suggest going to your local county auctions. There are often great bargains there. In fact, I have the perfect printer for the original poster's needs, an Apple Color LaserWriter 12/660PS. Fast (though color is a bit slow), crisp, and long service intervals, plus it has ethernet and supports PostScript. If you can find one for what I paid for it ($45, I'm not kidding, with toner even!), buy it, but if you have to pay full price for it ($3000-4000), and need the quality and reliability, it's still worth it. Quality is far better than the HP's, and it's built like a large copier, so service is easier, and parts don't fail as often.
--That's the point of being root, you can do anything you want, even if it's stupid.
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.