From what he's said the printer James Montalbano uses is very good for type work.
But I don't remember what it was. :-/ Hopefully he'll chime in, or maybe somebody
can scour the archives here.

hhp

There is a rather surprising variation in quality from device to device. I don't have any experience with recent tabloid-size devices, but was surprised to see how much toner splat there was on my HP LaserJet 1200 compared with a Brother device (model number not handy).

Perhaps you should see if you can get print samples from the devices that remain on your short list. I'd also be interested.

[BTW, we're trying to decide between an HP CLJ 3550 and a Konica Minolta 5430 DL, both 20 ppm color letter-size models, as the basis for doing some halftoning and color profiling work. If anybody has experience with either of those, I'd like to hear it as well, and apologies for veering slightly OT]

Oh, and as long as I'm leading the topic astray, if anyone knows of a good cheap laser printer capable of printing on 9 inch wide paper, let me know. Inkjets very commonly give you a half inch of slop, but that seems to be a lot less common on lasers.

If you want Adobe PostScript instead of a clone, the Xante and Xerox use it, while the Minolta-QMS and HP do not.

On the other hand, the mid to high end HPs are remarkably engineered workhorses mechanically. They last darn well forever. The mid to high end Xeroxes are also pretty good in this regard.

A few months ago I splurged on a Xerox Phaser 7300 for a mix of uses at home. It's the most expensive thing I've ever bought that wasn't a car. Adobe PostScript 3, full color, up to 12x18 (tabloid extra) and duplexes with that size as well. The LED engine melts toner on the page just like a laser, but with a different imaging tech. Max res is 600x2400, but the LED also lacks the edge enhancement tech that is pretty much standard with laser engines, so overall it's no better than a 600x600 laser for plain black text.

T

The design office I just left has an HP 5000, and while it was generally a pretty good machine it would periodically choke on some medium-sized files while printing other larger files with no problem. I've always wondered if it was due to the emulated Postscript.

The Xante printer is by far the least expensive of the five, and what little info I've been able to glean from online user comments is mostly positive, but it is not the established brand that HP or Xerox is.

I also worked at another design office three years ago that had a tabloid-capable Phaser color laser. It was damn fast, and I thought the color/image quality was fine for comps and presentations. If money were no object I would have sprung for a new Phaser like you did, instead of the Epson inkjet I'm now using.

dh

Don:

Quite possibly the emulated PS. I've seen quite a few bug reports that turn out to be flaws in emulated PostScript of one flavor or another, including several in HP's emulation. Many of them get fixed eventually, and we do report them to the printer developers when we get them as app bug reports. When possible, we even try to put in workarounds in our printing (though at some level it is irritating to essentially fix other people's bugs in their clones of our page language!).

Xante was making printers back in the mid-80s, by my memory. But they've always been kind of a niche vendor. We bought a Xante 2400-dpi b&w laser for the Adobe type group a few years back. It's nice and all, but on text the quality doesn't seem noticeably better than 1200 dpi. I seem to recall (I think) that at 2400 you don't get the edge enhancement; certainly having 2400 addressable dots isn't the same as having toner fine enough to really exploit that resolution.

My 9-year-old LaserJet 5MP is still going strong. I have only now replaced it with the Xerox.

With regards to the Xerox (formerly Tektronix) Phasers, originally the Tektronix devices all used solid wax sticks and melted them on the page. The brand has since been broadened, and now it seems it just applies to all Xerox's serious color printers. Some solid-wax ink, some LED, some laser. There was a laser device similar to the 7300, namely the 7700, which would have offered sharper line edges for text, but it was quite a bit more, and I was already pushing my budget with the 7300.

Cheers,

T

T

I might be in the market for a printer again in the next few months. I gave up on having a printer a few years ago, because I found I only wanted to look at 2400 dpi imagesetter proofs anyway, so figured I would save my money for the service bureau. That's worked well until now, but it turns out that the demand for paper output is now so low that my bureau isn't going to be offering this service any more. Worse, there is only one roll of paper left in the local distributor's stock, and they are not planning on ordering any more. So if I want imagesetter proofs, I have to order a whole roll of paper and then beg the service bureau to do the output.

A new business venture "Bureau Tiro - proof printers to the typographic elite" perhaps? You could even hire an intern to do all the hard work.

Si

I have been so happy with my Xante Accel-R-Writer 3G that I recently purchased the new 4G. 2400 dpi does make a difference. But Xante products are not cheap.

I've had the Minolta QMS PagePro 9100 from your list for about a year and have no complaints about it. You mention that you are running a design office. Note that type designers will push the output resolution/quality of a machine, but graphic designers may be more interested in the speed of printing complex layouts.

That said, I've mostly used mine for looking at type, which it has done an adequate job at thus far. Of course, I haven't seen 2400dpi side by side. It had better be step down from James' machine for the price. I didn't do any memory upgrades or anything so photoshop outputs at high-res are pretty slow (surprise, surprise) but pdfs of design layouts spit out nicely. Support has been good (shipped with tweeked toner cartridge, got the new one fed-ex next morning). No trouble since.

Randy

Hey Randy, whatever happened to that laser-vs-lino comparison we were going to do?

hhp

Si, don't think I have not considered getting my own imagesetter. If I had a separate workshop in which to set it up, I'd be very tempted. I even did a search for 'imagesetter' on eBay.

Stout fellow! Well I don't have a lino handy. What I do have is PagePro 9100 vs Offset. What follows is a scan from a business card done on supersmooth uncoated stock with the same text out of my laser right below. You can see there is gain and loss of crisp corners. That said, we are looking at 7 point Myriad. For what I do, and what I can afford, this has been acceptable (thus far). If designing text faces was a full time job, this wouldn't be my choice. I should add, I'm due for a new toner cartridge, so the quality represented is perhaps a little off.



Cheers, Randy

Well, in some ways this is actually better than a lino comparison*. Thanks! Like you say there's weight gain (a fair amount, although it is only 7pt) and some loss of definition (look at that comma). One thing I don't get though is why the offset has so much more artefacting, and why it's all so gray. How did you scan this stuff?

* But didn't they give you the film of the card?

James, do you have a similar comparison from the Xante?

hhp

Crumbs, if someone set up a type-proofing service i would pay for it! Just like I like to buy type books from foundries. (plus whoever did would be able to keep tabs on the latest type developments

The artefacting and grayness is coming from the fact that the card is printed in a blue grey pms. I grayed back the laser to match while trying to keep the gain the same. The grayness of the paper color, well that is laziness on my part in the scan setup. But I was equally lazy in both cases!

R

Thanks for all of your responses. At this point it looks like I'll be getting a Xante printer. I'll drop a note later with early reviews on the machine.

Don H