professional type printer

[eviltwinisdead]

my boss asked me to look into the costs of a really good printer that will produce professional printing quality, A4 or maybe up to A3 - does anyone know any good printers or the kind of specification i would need?

[Goat]

we use S9000 Color Bubble Jet Photo Printers they start at about £300 though if you look about you can find one for about £233.
USB only though

[Sebb™]

If it's professional quality you want, then inkjet printers are not your friend. You'd be better off with a dye-sublimation printer. They're very expensive to buy and run though. What's your budget? I have a shitload of information on them, but it's in college.

[Sebb™]

What was the neg rep for Goat? I'm right, inkjet printers are not great. Dye-sub, however, gives amazing results.

[Goat]

Originally Posted by Sebb™

What was the neg rep for Goat? I'm right, inkjet printers are not great. Dye-sub, however, gives amazing results.

Dye sub are far to expensive.

Inkjets have come a long long way since the dark ages!

[Kenny Everett]

You boys and your neg reps, would it not just have been easier to disagree on the thread?

[djtoast]

What's it for? Inkjets have come on a long way, I wouldn't be that surprised if, for a certain price point, in some respects an inkjet could hold its own against a dye-sub of an equivalent cost. Doubtless a £6000 dye-sub will piss on a £60 inkjet, but say you set a budget of £550, you'll either get pretty much the best inkjet in existance or just about the cheapest, and thus possibly worst, dye-sub.

Plus, while inkjet ink isn't cheap, dye-sub ink certainly ain't either; factor that in and it might be a tricky equation as to whether that's a sensible use of resources.

In which case starts to be worth thinking about the reliability, speed, how good the prints are a year down the line rather than just the first few that roll off (you might expect more from a top of the line inkjet than a bargain bucket dye sub in this respect…)

And in any event (Tony'll kill me for saying this) inkjets are pretty damn good these days; good enough for most purposes I'd say if you're careful with your colour management. At any rate since all our (the qm's) printing moved to digital presses a few years ago we've relied solely on inkjet proofs from the printer with no surprises.

But obviously it depends what you'll be doing with it; it you wanna print materials for archiving, inkjet ink is too prone to fading still despite what the manufacturers claim; the choice of paper for a given result is somewhat restrictive (glossy paper deals with the ink best but would be inappropriate for many jobs).

Get one of those inkjet printers that does 100 meter banner printing and let's stick an altnation ad the length of st enoch underground station platform one night while no-one's looking

[poprock]

Dye-sub, inkjet, laser … it depends what you’re using it for.

Sure, if you’re printing photographs then you’d be wise to look at dye-sub printers, but if you’re printing anything else, it could be a mistake.

Knowing the kind of place you work Elaine, I’d guess that you want to be looking at a contract hire on a full-on colour photocopier system. If that’s going too far, then look at high-end inkjets.

I don’t know enough about digital printers to really advise you any further than that … I let other people worry about the technology here and just use and abuse it every day.

[0x21]

HP do colour laser printers from about £450, which would probably be pretty good for the bulk of your work; fast, clean, high quality. assuming you're doing documents etc.

if its for photo quality stuff then you'd probably need to go high end inject or dye-sub.

but if you're doing both you're better off with both, as using a photo printer for documents is slow and will cost you a small fortune in ink

[eviltwinisdead]

now, i already have this printer

http://www.epson.co.uk/products/all_...hoto_RX620.htm

and to be honest, the quality of print outs even on photo quality paper is pretty poor. We have also have the Xerox Phaser 8200 which is similar to this printer

http://www.office.xerox.com/perl-bin...duct=8500_8550

but the quality can appear a little grainy, but thats on 80gsm cheap paper.

Will a laser printer produce a high enough quality print out that is good enough for flyers.

[0x21]

I've used a laser printer for flyers before but I'm fairly DIY. You're best bet is to try one and see if you are happy with the results

(though I'm pretty sure lasers only work on paper/card and not photopaper, acetate etc)

[eviltwinisdead]

you can definately buy photopaper for laser printers, and i'm pretty sure some can take acetate

[0x21]

cool, just my mum was whinging yesterday about it not working on the laser printer in her work

[eviltwinisdead]

heh - well, just because they say they can take them, doesn't entirely mean it always works

[0x21]

touche'