[cenutrio]

Hi guys,

I'm wondering if you can help me out. We have some money to spend on a good color laser printer to hook to a mac. We also need to get a printer to hook up to a new scope computer (PC), so that we can print out scope pictures (both small and large).

Any suggestions as far as brands? models?

BUDGET (less than $800)

[tooki]

I don't think you're gonna find a good color laser for $800. In fact, I wouldn't recommend you buy a color laser for under $2500. Cheap lasers are very slow (old, slow 4-pass color technology), and the print quality probably isn't as high as you probably want.

Consider whether a black-and-white laser of similar price wouldn't fit the bill, or a nice Canon inkjet (fast, cheap ink, awesome print quality).

I guess the main question is, what is the printer needed for? Office color? Photos? Waterfastness? That's going to determine the best printer for the job.

tooki

[mbryda]

Originally posted by cenutrio:
Hi guys,

I'm wondering if you can help me out. We have some money to spend on a good color laser printer to hook to a mac. We also need to get a printer to hook up to a new scope computer (PC), so that we can print out scope pictures (both small and large).

Any suggestions as far as brands? models?

BUDGET (less than $800)

I've seen the output of the $700 Samsung color laser and it's quite nice.

As is the output of Okidata's color lasers.

[cenutrio]

The $800 budget was quite modest, we can go up to $1500 if it really makes a difference, provides photo quality output (A4 area), and such printer may be hooked both to a PC and a mac, and to the whole lab network. An interplataform solution. Macs would run panther and the PC XP.

[tooki]

No color laser (not even an $8000 model) will give you real photo output: an inkjet will beat it any day. Color laser output tends to look closer to magazine output (but at lower resolution of course). The tradeoff is that lasers are faster. But it depends on what you're printing. Low-end lasers have slow processors that may take so long to process a complex job that you could just print it on an inkjet.

tooki

[Casper Crane]

yeah, get a decent B&W Laser, and a really nice inkjet for color.

[OreoCookie]

Originally posted by Casper Crane:
yeah, get a decent B&W Laser, and a really nice inkjet for color.

I second that.
Get a good BW laser and a Canon inkjet printer. For that money, you won't get a good color laser. No way.

For suggestions on laser printers, do a search. Ditto for inkjet printers. Consensus seems to be that Canon inkjetters are the best choice nowadays (and I am a happy Canon customer, and I've been a long-time HP owner (1 inkjet, 3 lasers, 1 scanner over 10 years)).

On lasers, there is less consensus.
But even cheap lasers have excellent text output, bw graphics are a different question.

If you give us more details on the amount that you print out per month, color and bw, we could give you more suggestions.

[cenutrio]

These printers would be used in a lab by a maximun of 15 people with lots of pdfs, word documents,, etc, and also many photos taken in a scope attached to a PC, and overall lots of graphics, etc.

Good quality is a must for publications and so on.


Thanks for the feed back.

[G-mac]

For an inexpensive color laser, HP and Samsung are the only ones I'm aware of. The Samsung's output looks pretty good, but I haven't really compared it with that of other color lasers.

Good luck with your search.

[OreoCookie]

Originally posted by cenutrio:
These printers would be used in a lab by a maximun of 15 people with lots of pdfs, word documents,, etc, and also many photos taken in a scope attached to a PC, and overall lots of graphics, etc.

Good quality is a must for publications and so on.


Thanks for the feed back.

Photos don't come out too well on color laser printers, diagrams are fine as long as they are fairly unicolor. But still, for this budget, I don't think you'll be able to get anything that can cope with your requirements.

Take a look at the Kyocera-Mita 1020D which has a duplex unit included (printing on both sides), 20 ppm (DinA4, I don't know about letter), Postscript 3, very cheap consumables. It is rated at 2800 pages per month on average, 15000 max (all A4). I have seen it for 345 Euros (including VAT) ...

Higher-volume models are also available, but more expensive.

Then, on the inkjet side, Canon i865, quite fast, cheap consumables. Good quality for photos, presentations (another think inkjets can do better than lasers, higher contrast on overhead slides), fast, ... Around 170 Euro.

All these printers will be pretty safe for future use. Canon has an excellent history of including drivers for OS X (when I bought my S630 in the 10.0-days, it was among the first printers that were supported). Postscript 3 is supported by every platform, all you need is the postscript description file ... No problem in multi-platform environments.

[OreoCookie]

In case you wanna go laser, take a look at the Oki's 5300 printer (= 5100 + Postscript). 12 ppm in color (DinA4), 20 ppm bw.