anybody played with color printers?

[orion_joel]

I would and have many times suggest people go for two printers. Especially from a business perspective. While at a stretch you can get away without a fax or scanner, or the ability to print photo's for a few days if something goes wrong. There is so many times that printing is needed. For example You do most of your invoicing on Wednesday Tuesday night the 1 multifunction you have breaks and has to get sent away for repair, either you have to go and buy another printer now anyway or wait to do you invoicing till the other one is fixed. Either way you are out of pocket money for a printer or not getting paid by clients. Same token if you were doing a mailout or printing some brochures for a client.

The two printer's dont always have to be two lasers, you can go with a Colour laser which will more then likely still offer better price black and white printing then inkjet anyway (it can be worth finding out). And a Inkjet Multifunction which will give you the photo quality for printing in the personal area). The only downside to a solution like this is if you receive a high volume of faxes.

In the realm of paper there are a few options and i am unsure if you will find that they are available in the US or not. The main brand of paper for colour laser printing that i use is named NopaColor I think from memory. It is a 100gsm paper designed for better quality printing on not just colour laser printers but also inkjet printers.

If you are printing business cards i would suggest looking for something at least 200GSM, but this is where it can be tough with laser printer's not all of them will actually print on anything above 200gsm, becuase of the way the paper feeds through the printer. Then even if it will print on it sometimes it can curl. My personal preference for business card's unless it is really small run's because they change often is getting it done at a print store, they generally offer a much better quality then inkjet, and it is much easier then trying to print them yourself on a laser.

[SteveC]

My advice would also to be to go for different units... we have a fax/scanner/printer injet that is used simply as a fax and back-up printer... we also have another couple of injets and seperate scanners... with the main printer being a brother color laser printer.

Our aim being to ensure if something goes wrong, it doesn't affect our business.

[billbenson]

Since I already have two printers and one is a lousy inkjet 3 in 1, and another hp laserjet in the garage that is older, but works the backup is in place. I guess the real question is if there is a color laser 3 in one that produces the quality that the one SteveC suggested? In a home office space constraints is an issue as well.

[orion_joel]

I found the brother to be a good unit, and when i was selling this sort of thing had about 10 times the number of inquiries for the brother over any other model. I think the cartridges are a little more expensive however, i think it is about on par with the other's just less often.

[LJLynch]

I really like the Xerox solid ink printers. These units deliver near photo quality prints for a very low cost and there is almost no waste. The printer only model starts at $699 and the multifunction at $1399, so maybe these are way more expensive than you are thinking. We have an 8560 duplexing printer and you would have to fight with me to get it out of my office. We have also sold several of the multifunction devices and our clients love them. They come with a one year on site warranty, and I would never consider sending a printer anywhere for repair. I've found over many years of experience that most cheap printers are anything but in the long run.

[billbenson]

Ya, if I print 20 pages a week that's a lot. Wifes a camera bug, and occasionally I need some really good quality business cards or brochures, but that's not common. It sounds like a 300 dollar lasar black and white all in one and and steves brother color printer would be the best solution. Steve, have you done photos on the brother printer you recommended? If so, do they compare to photos from the photoshop?

[Marcomguy]

I've never used a laser all-in-one, but based on my experience with Brother inkjet AIOs (I've had two), if I were to buy a laser AIO, I would select Brother.

I found the Brother inkjet models to be the best all-round. Lots of features for the price, better scanning of documents and pictures than HP, very easy to use. In fact, after 4 years of using a Brother, I thought I'd try a different brand. Bought a mid-priced HP machine, returned it two days later, got a new Brother.

[billbenson]

I forget if I mentioned this above, but I have a hp scanner model 4850 that I bought strictly for OCR. I don't know that it is that good for photos, but the OCR is amazing. Different fonts; small print; export to word; do a spell check and there are only a handful of words with errors. It really works well.

I wonder what law offices and the likes use for archiving large amounts of printed pages?

[orion_joel]

The only problem that i found with Brother AIOs is that one range they had out a few year back, had many problems with the print heads, however at the time it was something they decided to cover under warranty for an additional year as it was a fault with the manufacturing that caused it i think.

In regards to high volume archiving, i believe that there are high speed, scanners which you can stack the pages on and they get fed through like a fax machine. no flatbed area just a feeder. I actually did see one a few years ago at an insurance companies office, but HP has at least one if not a few models. One of them is "HP SCANJET 7800 DOCUMENT SCANNER" and retails for about $1500 in Australia. This model only operates at about 25pages a minute and does duplex i believe, but i am sure there are much quicker models as well.

[billbenson]

This kind of goes back to the manufacturer providing a decent database of products thread. A year ago, I received a printed price list and an excel sheet. Half the products in the printed price list aren't in the excel sheet and the inverse. I just received the new excel sheet a week or two ago and the new printed price list a couple of days ago. I haven't had time, but I bet there is very little correlation between the two.

While its still a lot of work to scan to word, look for errors, and stick the printed price sheet in the excel file, that HP OCR scanner worked great. Looks like I'll be using it again, but not this weekend. Doing taxes (I filed an extension in april). Going to the accountants on monday.