Quality has improved and prices are dropping. How to buy and a sampling of popular printers.
Like badly chosen and applied makeup, business documents printed off desktop color printers used to look odd or silly. The quality wasn't good enough to be taken seriously. People didn't know how to use color effectively.
Technologies such as inkjet and laser printing have become more sophisticated. Businesspeople are doing more with them. Lavender type on a hot-pink background is still a no-no. Color diagrams, color photos, color charts and color display type mixed with black text are a yes.
Before you buy a color printer:
Decide what type of printer you need. There are inkjets. There are lasers. There are others. Will you be using it to reproduce photos, to print Web pages or to print documents with photo images in them? How good do your printouts have to look? How much are you willing to spend?
Watch a demo. This is the only way you will know the true speed and how much noise the printer makes.
Look at samples. If possible, get some of your normal files printed so you can see what they look like.
Find out the duty cycle. Printers are very busy machines. Daily wear and tear takes its toll. Be sure it can handle your daily workload, day in and day out month after month, without visits from a repair person.
Consider the cost of consumables. New ink or toner cartridges add up over time. Figure out the cost of the ink or toner for a year's worth of printing. Add that to the cost of the printer.
Is the ink or toner available locally or will you have to order it? If you have to order it, be sure you can live without your printer for a few days.
Another consumable is paper. Some printers, such as wax-thermal, require expensive special paper. That's another cost to budget for.
Laser Printers
Laser printers use a beam of light to electrostatically charge a drum so that it attracts toner, which is transferred to heated paper. The laser produces a negative of the page to be printed on the charged drum. Where light falls, the charge is dissipated, leaving a positive image to be printed. Laser printers' resolutions range from 300 to 1,200 dpi. Color laser printers typically print two to six color pages a minute. They produce great looking documents in color and monochrome. Big fast laser printers are used for print on demand. Some key laser printers:
IBM's (Boulder, CO 404-238-1234) $5,000 Network Color Printer is designed for graphic arts customers, quick-print shops and corporate users who print sales collateral, presentations and newsletters. It provides 600 dpi resolution and prints three pages a minute. It works with AS/400s, RS/6000s, System/390s and IBM PC servers.
When Hewlett-Packard's (Palo Alto, CA 415-857-1501) Enhanced Color LaserJet 5M came in to our office, it attracted a lot of attention. The big bottles of color toner were fascinating. People wanted to steal them and do creative things with them. Toner wrestling. CMYK hair dye jobs.
Once it was up and working, it was still interesting. It produced beautiful color prints. They weren't especially sharp, but the color was good. This $5,200 printer prints 300 dpi documents at three pages a minute. It comes with Adobe PostScript, 36 MB RAM and a JetDirect card for Ethernet/LocalTalk. It's ready to be hooked up to a network.
Lexmark's (Lexington, KY 606-232-2000) $5,000 Optra SC 1275 also prints three color pages a minute, at 600 dpi.
Panasonic's (Secaucus, NJ 201-348-7000) KX-P8475 ($4,000) prints up to five color pages a minute at 600 dpi. It supports Adobe PostScript Level 2.
Tektronix (Wilsonville, OR 503-685-3150) offers two office color laser printers: The Phaser 240 ($3,700) prints 300 dpi in thermal transfer or laser at two pages a minute. The $7,000 workgroup Phaser 550 prints 600 dpi color laser documents at five pages a minute.
Xerox's (Rochester, NY 716-425-5230) $3,500 DocuPrint C55 Color Laser Printer prints three color pages a minute. It offers 600 dpi resolution. A Web server embedded in the machine lets you obtain printer drivers, software, supplies and service information over the Internet. A "Fax-Friendly Black" feature converts colors, such as those in a pie chart, into patterns of black and white that can be easily faxed. A "Hold Job" means that if you share this printer you can tell it not to print until you get to the machine and push a release button. This gives you privacy. It lets you put letterhead or transparencies into the paper tray for your special jobs.
Inkjet Printers
An inkjet printer sprays ink onto paper through tiny nozzles. Some low-end ink jet printers use three ink colors (cyan, magenta and yellow) to produce a composite black that's not a true black. This uses up those ink cartridges very quickly because you're using all of them all the time, even for black and white documents. Four-color (CMYK) inkjet printers use black ink for true black. Generally, ink-jet printers are less expensive than color laser printers. They usually provide inferior color quality and resolution. Exceptions include Tektronix and IRIS, which produce very high quality ink-jets. Large-format inkjet printers are used to produce commercial posters and banners. Special coated paper handles the ink better than normal paper.
Canon (Lake Success, NY 516-488-6700) sells a slew of color bubble-jet printers.
The $280 BJC-4200 printer produces one color page a minute. Its resolution is 360 dpi. It comes with more than 300 TrueType fonts and seven bitmap fonts. The BJC-240 ($200) prints .27 pages a minute at 360 dpi. It also comes with 300+ TrueType fonts.
Canon's BJC-70 prints .8 pages a minute at 360 dpi. It comes with 20 scalable TrueType fonts and seven bitmap. If you've ever wished you could print from your laptop while on business trips, look at Hewlett-Packard's DeskJet 340. This small $300 notebook printer weighs a little over four pounds. It prints a 300 dpi page in two to four minutes. It holds up to 30 sheets automatically.
HP's DeskJet 890C Professional Series printers ($450) print five pages a minute. They work with networks. They can handle 3,000 pages a month. The $600 DeskJet 1000C Professional Series printer prints up to 3.5 pages a minute at 600 dpi.
Tektronix's $3,500 Phaser 350 prints six pages a minute at 300 dpi. Their $1,500 360-dpi Phaser 140 bubble-jet printer and $8,000 Phaser 300X solid-ink 300 dpi printer are for graphic arts, business and scientific applications.
Dye Sublimation Printers
According to Tektronix's Web page (www.tek.com), "Dye sublimation printing is a cross between thermal-wax transfer printing and photographic processing. It produces gorgeous continuous-tone, photorealistic output, and if your presentations include bitmapped or scanned images, the print quality is particularly outstanding.
"Although it has a faintly Freudian ring to it, sublimation is the scientific term for converting a solid to a gas without going through an intervening liquid phase. Dry ice, the staple of Halloween parties and ice cream storage, is perhaps the best known example of a substance that undergoes sublimation.
"In dye sub printing, the coloring agents are in the transfer roll -- a plastic film that contains consecutive panels of cyan, magenta, yellow and black dye. The transfer roll passes across a thermal printhead consisting of thousands of heating elements, and once the dyes are hot enough to vaporize, they diffuse onto the paper's surface. The process requires special paper that's designed to absorb the vaporous dye on contact.
"Each heating element in the thermal printhead produces 256 different temperatures, and the hotter the temperature, the more dye is transferred from the transfer roll to the paper. So, by controlling the amount of dye that's vaporized, the printer also controls the density or intensity of the resulting dot on the paper and produces continuous-tone images."
Fargo's (Eden Prairie, MN 612-941-9470) $2,200 PrimeraPro Elite Color Printer prints in both the dye-sub and wax thermal transfer methods. Wax thermal transfer melts wax-based ink onto paper. It uses a ribbon containing an equivalent panel of ink for each page to be printed. The PrimeraPro Elite produces 24-bit, 600 dpi color prints, signs and tee-shirt and coffee mug transfers. An 8.5" x 11" document takes 4.5 minutes to print. It supports Adobe PostScript Level 2.
Sony Electronics' (Montvale, NJ 800-686-SONY) $7,500 UP-D8800 and UP-5500 are fast for this type of printer. The UP-D8800 prints at 97 seconds per A4 size print. It outputs at 300 dpi resolution. The UP-5500 A5 size printer prints photos at 30 seconds each.
Photo Printers
Olympus and Panasonic introduced photo printers this year.
The Olympus (Melville, NY 516-844-5000) $400 P-300 Personal Photo Printer prints a 4" x 5.5" 24-bit, 300 dpi page in a minute and a half. It can be directly connected to an Olympus digital camera. Then it lets you create an index print of up to 30 images on a single sheet. Create instant proofs during photo shoots. Produce instant reprints of photos stored in the camera. Or print photos from files.
Panasonic Interactive Media's (Santa Clara, CA 408-653-1888) $550 TruPhoto Digital Photo Printer produces 3.5" x 5" photos in two minutes using heat and ultra violet light. It comes with MGI PhotoSuite software.
