Good color laser printer? (1 Viewer)

[BradleyS.]

I'm looking into getting a new printer for my house, but I dont know much about color lasers. I want a good,reliable printer thats not overly gigantic( I realize they are all pretty big). If possible I would like to keep the price under $1000. Are the konica minoltas any good?

 

[shaniceMW]

i have a minolta. i love it. but the consumables are pretty expensive. i do a lot of printing marketing material and have to order consumables pretty often. my expenses are lower than having someone to professionally print my items. i have a 2200. my friend has a 2300. my sister has a hp color laser and those consumables are significantly less expensive. for example, my toner cartridges are about 75 for black and about 120 for ymc. i have oil drums which cost about 50 about every three months. i do however have at least 50 black and white pages per day if not more. also, i can print out about 250 full color sheets per week. what i love about my printer is i can tell the printer what card stock i am using and it will adjust accordingly. envelopes and labels are very nice on this printer. when we move, i will get a small mono laser and keep this one for just color printing. oh and btw it has a network card built in. i paid about 1000 for mine. had to replace consumables in about a week because i lost my mind printing so much. called staples and asked for consumables. what do you know, they gave me a new printer. phasers are really nice printers. if you go to staples.com or some place like that, they have nice color lasers always on sale for nice prices. i would stick with hp and minolta as the quality is very nice considering the price. phasers have nice quality but for the ones that i like you are talking thousands of dollars. my printer is now obsolete, but the replacement is somewhere around 600. hope this helps.

 

[Lew Crippen]

An alternative is getting a B&W laser and a color inkjet. Color lasers don’t reproduce color nearly so well as inkjets, so if things like photos are important to you, you might think about both.

On the other hand, if you are going to be printing quite a bit of color in your normal printing, then a color laser may be the better choice.

HP and Lexmark are both pretty good choices.

 

[BradleyS.]

Interesting.... I had no idea that color lasers produced a worse color picture than an inkjet. That was basically the whole reason I was upgrading was for better looking color photos and the speed. I currently have a HP deskjet 722c (you can take a nap before it finishes a black and white page). Is the color picture quality really that noticable between the two?

 

[shaniceMW]

i think it depends on the printer. for what i print (pictures of houses), i am very satisfied. i have lexmark printers that are crap when it comes to photo quality and print speed. also, i got the minolta because i can tell the printer what paper i am using and it will adjust. i can also adjust the quality of the color printing. if i am printing just a draft or if i want high quality printing. it isnt the best printer out there. but it works fine for me.

 

[Lew Crippen]

Yes, especially if you are looking to produce quality reproductions of photos on premium, glossy paper.

HP makes inkjet printers that allow you to replace the black cartridge with a ‘photo’ cartridge. This is a three color cartridge, which combined with the three-color cartridge, gives 6-color printing: cyan, magenta, yellow, light cyan, light magenta and black. This is because it is a bit harder for the inkjets to reproduce the lighter tones. Canon makes inkjet printers that also allows replacing the standard cartridges with ‘photo’ cartridges. In this case you get 8-color printing: magenta, light magenta, cyan, light cyan, yellow, light yellow, black and gray.

Both the HPs and the Canons print slowly when reproducing high resolution color. However when just printing black text they are fast enough (at least for me) at around 15–20 ppm in ‘normal’ and a bit faster in ‘draft’—which is what I use most of the time.

If you are considering quality photo reproduction, I really urge you to check out the inkjets.