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Graphics Printer Software

Color Laser Printer Recommendations? 39

Posted by Cliff from the print-the-rainbow dept.
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?"
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Color Laser Printer Recommendations? More

Color Laser Printer Recommendations?

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  • 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.
    • They have a point. I'd check with the printer on what software they were using first. Perhaps you need to scale your pictures to fit the DPI/aliasing requirements of the end printing process.

      But, if you're serious about doing printing work, Laser printing proofs is the only way to go! even the best inkjest pale in comparison to Lasers...that's the standard for printwork. but your problem is most likely software and not hardware. [unless you have REALLY crappy stuff!]

  • Here. [hp.com] 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 cartrid
    • 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
    • I would NOT reccomend the 1500/2500 series. I don't know what he means by a "small" company, but my marketing department (6 people) have a 2500N. I am not impressed with the speed or quality. If you have a larger print job(5 or more pages) to send it needs to be sent in pieces. Also, the imaging drum is expensive, along with toner. Overall I am not impressed, I was not here when it was putchased, but would not have bought this model.

      To sum up, the company was in the same position, we were using inkj


  • 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.
    • 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?

  • Buy a photo printer (Score:3, Informative)

    by Maskirovka ( 255712 ) on Tuesday October 14, 2003 @07:19AM (#7207167)
    It would be easier for people to advice you if they knew what your current printer is and what settings and paper you are using.

    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 [epson.com] (if you need the size), or a photo printer [epson.com] 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 [xerox.com] has some nice looking equipment too, though I have never used it.

    • 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

  • Take the Pepsi challenge. (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    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.

    Deci
    • 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.

      ...then why not stick around and watch as their manager spends the afternoon bullying them.

  • Link [canon.com]

    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 [xerox.com]' machines with it.
  • "What price range should we be looking at?"

    How much do you want to spend?

    Xerox [xerox.com] 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 [xerox.com] prints 26ppm (bw or color) and has a resolution of 2400dpi.

  • 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
  • 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

  • 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-artis

  • Well, I work for a local company specializing in duplications and digital output, and I work with this Bad Boy [xerox.com] 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
  • 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.
  • I used to work for GCC Printers [gccprinters.com]. They offer a high quality product for less money than some of their competitors. (I know, I helped write the firmware for several of them.)

    Of interest to you is their new color model the Elite Color 16 DN [gccprinters.com]

    • 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,
  • We'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.

  • Lasers won't cut it (Score:4, Insightful)

    by sakusha ( 441986 ) on Tuesday October 14, 2003 @12:50PM (#7210341)
    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.
    • are Pantone certified. Maybe you need a better laser printer.
      • Bullshit. I can do 200 line screen on my HP B&W laser, but I only get 4 levels of gray and the results are useless for proofing. This is even worse of a problem on color lasers. Name your product and I'll shoot holes in your claim.

        And FYI, there is no such thing as Pantone color on a CMYK printer. Pantone colors are made from up to 11 colors of ink, many of those colors are so intense they are beyond the CMYK gamut, and even beyond the RGB gamut. Why do you think people USE Pantone inks? It's because t
        • They're the ones who said my Xerox 6060 does acceptable coated and uncoated Pantones [xerox.com], for the one with the gamut of our toner.
          • I looked up "your" 6060, and of course it isn't YOUR machine, just because you're the intern who makes copies doesn't mean YOU own it, this is a mega-expensive beast and nobody but large companies could afford it. Definitely more expensive than even an Iris inkjet which is designed just for what the guy asked for.
            The 6060 uses the EFI rip, which if it's like every EFI RIP/laser printer system I ever used, doesn't use halftone screens at all, it just uses variable toner density to produce flat colors. So you
  • Prepress color printing is a specialized field. Beyond all of the usual business requirements there are issues like printing languages, versions, rasterizers, licensed-vs-unlicensed implementations, ppds, color quality, accuracy, etc. Unless someone is well familiar in these topics and up to date with the products on the market the recommendations you get aren't going to be of any use.

    So instead of making blind recommendations ('cause I'm not in the printing field any longer and am not up to date on the v

  • What is the consequence of failure letting defects get to your print shop ?

    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

  • 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
  • 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 Iri

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