What laser printer to compliment inkjet, to be used for selections

[Peter David Grant]

Hello,

I'm looking for a laser printer to compliment my Epson 3880, which I use for exhibitions and prints that I sell. Specifically I want it for making really cheap prints to be used on a magnet wall, for making essay selections and book edits.

I've currently got a Brother HL-4150-CDN, but it is horrifically bad for anything other than text, and always has been. At my old job we had a HP colour laser (must have been some sort of industrial thing) which produced very good colour prints. Unfortunately I can't recall what it was called!

Does anyone have any experience with a specific laser printer that they can recommend?

Thanks,
Peter

 

[majid]

Color laser printers are always poor at photos. I can recommend the HP OfficeJet Pro X series, which is inkjet but has running costs comparable to laser, and ultra-fast speed because the inkjet head is the full width of the page and doesn't need to scan left-and-right like a conventional inkjet head shuttle. Image quality is pretty good for a 3-color printer, and way better than any laser printer I've seen.

 

[konicaman]

I use an Epson 510DN - an office ink jet - it has huge ink cartridges. Just give it some decent paper and you can do a lot of printing for very little money. I also use it for printing flyers and leaflets. Great workhorse. 🙂

 

[Peter David Grant]

Color laser printers are always poor at photos. I can recommend the HP OfficeJet Pro X series, which is inkjet but has running costs comparable to laser, and ultra-fast speed because the inkjet head is the full width of the page and doesn't need to scan left-and-right like a conventional inkjet head shuttle. Image quality is pretty good for a 3-color printer, and way better than any laser printer I've seen.

I had no idea these types of Inkjets are around, they seem like the right choice! They are quite affordable too... might be time to sell the Laser!

How about aligning yourself with a pro lab?

The lab I used, if I had the order transmitted to them by 10 AM, it was at my door the next day. They set up the profiles with my iMacs for me.

Only 24 hours in each of my days and I determined to use the lab as I was more productive wih my time working other tasks.

At any rate, that's what I did.

Hi Bill,

I used to do this with 6x4s from Photobox in the UK - quite cheap and good quality, but what I found was, is that I would wait for ages to get enough of a collection before hitting order, which goes against how I work. I like laying out a set of photographs, seeing what's missing, and then head back in to LR to print something else, so the ability to make these selection prints at home works very well for me.

I use an Epson 510DN - an office ink jet - it has huge ink cartridges. Just give it some decent paper and you can do a lot of printing for very little money. I also use it for printing flyers and leaflets. Great workhorse. 🙂

Thanks for the message... after reading all these, I decided to pull out a crappy old Canon Inkjet I had been intending on selling, which I was never happy with the prints on. After putting some decent paper in as per your suggestion for the Epson, instead of the Eco stuff, the quality was much better, and usable - going to stick with this for now, and switch to the HP some time later.


Thanks to all three of you for taking the time to reply - really appreciate it.

Peter

 

[majid]

I had no idea these types of Inkjets are around, they seem like the right choice! They are quite affordable too... might be time to sell the Laser!

Memjet were the first to market with the technology, sold by LG in Korea but not in the US for some reason, not sure about Europe, thus giving HP time to counter. It looks like Memjet's partnership with LG dissolved, and they are now focusing on professional markets.

The HP X551dw is amazingly cheap considering the technology. It's a hulking beast of a printer size-wise, even by color printer standards, keep this in mind if you have UK-sized house.

I wish dye-sub printers were still a serious market. I have a Canon Selphy ES30 which is a near perfect form factor for convenient one-off printing of 4x6 prints, but Canon no longer supports it in current versions of OS X (I use a Windows XP virtual machine to print, which completely negates the convenience). The current Selphy line has an annoying tray design unlike the fully self-contained ES30. Apart from that, pretty much the only dye-subs still made are expensive high-volume units for event photographers.

 

[majid]

Canon no longer supports it in current versions of OS X

I take that back—you can print from OS X using the open-source Gutenprint CUPS drivers. I haven't figured out how to do borderless printing yet from Lightroom. These are excellent printers, where the entire cartridge and dye sub films are neatly contained inside the printer, no fiddly tray to have to attach, and the media are manageable at around 37 cents per 4x6 print from Amazon (not sure what the UK price is).