Prediction

Matts on 2002-10-02T06:57:26

In two or three years colour laser printers will be common in the household market.

Today I saw a colour laser for just £599 (QMS CM2300). That's an amazing price, and makes me seriously consider getting one for printing our digital camera pics. The results are just so far ahead of colour inkjets it's not even funny. Plus I'm fairly convinced after having owned a b/w laser printer for a few years now, that the running costs are lower with a laser printer, and the time before it gets so gunked up you have to replace it is much higher with lasers (due to less gunk I guess!)

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Colour Matching

2shortplanks on 2002-10-02T08:00:25

From what I understand, the major problem that I've heard from designers is that the colour matching between what you see onscreen and what you get on a colour laser printer is not as good as what you get with in a inkjet

If this is a artifact of the technology involved, or just that colour lasers are farer and fewer between that colour matching techniques have not been as widely applied, I do not know. I'd have thought the latter rather than the former, but maybe there's something about the physics I don't understand here.

Printing Pictures

Thomas on 2002-10-02T12:48:56

I've never bothered with printing my own digital pictures. I recently found out that our local Wal-Mart do 4x6, 5x7, and 8x10 prints, so I tried it out and the quality is exceptional. I can really recommend using a service like that. Just bring in a cd with the pictures you want printed, they even accept 8 bit tiffs at my local store. (You likely wont have a Wal-Mart in England though, but I'm sure there's other stores that do the same kind of service.)

Re:Printing Pictures

Dom2 on 2002-10-02T13:47:31

Boots the chemist in the UK does a similiar service. They have a PC loaded up with just a cd and just about every memory format reader (except memory stick, sigh). You pick the photos you want, they copy them, you come back later. It's great!

It's also a damned sight cheaper than most of the other shops I went to. One place quoted me a two week turnaround!

-Dom

Re:Printing Pictures

Thomas on 2002-10-02T13:54:40

Which kind of machine do they do the actual printing on? at Wal-mart they have some pretty hefty Fujicolor machines that they do all their prints on, both normal film and digital photos. They actually scan in the negatives with a highspeed scanner and print it using the machine. So you get it on "real" photo quality paper (matte in this case).

get a tektronix/xerox :)

hfb on 2002-10-02T13:01:41

I waited 10 years to finally get a Phaser and, sadly, will have to part with it before we move due to the power difference and difficult availability of consumables in .fi but you should look into buying a new or reconditioned one from Xerox. Having a colour printer at home is so luxurious it feels decadent :)

Canon also makes some very impressive photo/colour printers for the home these days in the under $600 range. One really nice feature of the Apple store is that they list the price of the printer and the price of the consumables for all the printers they sell since people often don't take that into consideration when buying a printer.

Re:get a tektronix/xerox :)

ajtaylor on 2002-10-04T16:12:24

How much do you want for it? And what are the costs of consumables/drums/etc?

Re:get a tektronix/xerox :)

pudge on 2002-10-06T02:14:25

I got a Canon inkjet photo printer recently, and the output on photo paper is remarkable. I can barely see any dots; from a few feet away, it looks as good as a "regular" photo.

Re:get a tektronix/xerox :)

ask on 2002-10-06T11:47:24

I have a Canon S900. It's great. I meant to return it to get the S9000 (bigger format, otherwise the same) instead, but was never able to part with the S900.

Really nice quality photos; and much faster than the Epsons. The only thing I am missing is proper ColorSync (which the Epsons have), but with a bit of trial and error in the beginning it makes really nice colors now.

  - ask