I think you might just be right! An Inkjet is prob the way forward, for photo quality and also because rapid and high quality black and white printing isn't really a priority, and I'm not sure it will be used enough to justify getting a laser printer.Originally Posted by Saracen
Might need to investigate a bit further... Thanks for your help though- informative as ever!
I wouldn't go for a laser. AFAIK their photo printing doesn't match a reasonable inkjet yet.
I have had several HP printers. All have been good, but raw resolution has always been a little behind what Epson has to offer.
My in-laws tried getting a Lexmark when their HP ran out of ink, the Lexmark went wrong after a week, based on that I have since avoided Lexmark, and Which? recently found that Lexmark is really expensive for ink costs.
I've never forgiven Canon for the Bubblejet that we had at school *cough* years ago. Stupid thing wasn't properly compatable with its own sheet feeder.
You're welcome, Emz..... and I'm not sure it will be used enough to justify getting a laser printer.
Might need to investigate a bit further... Thanks for your help though- informative as ever!
But re: the laser being worthwhile, it might be interesting to compare the £100 or so you can now get colour lasers for, with a cartridge life of about 1500 pages included, with the cost of buying an inkjet and then buying enough cartridges to give 1500 pages.
If you buy a laser and it costs £100 and does 1500 pages over two years, it's about £1 per week for about 15 pages per week. How does an inkjet stack up?
If you're doing a lot more than that, then the £100 laser would be the wrong choice, because generally the cost per page goes down on the more expensive machines ... as it does for inkjets, though often at a different price point.
Obviously, only you know if it'll be used enough to justify. Up until fairly recently, when the cheapest colour lasers cost several hundred pounds, I'd have agreed with you for low volume usage. But with the advent of the £100 price point, I'm not so sure. You do have to be careful with the maths on these machines though, because the cost of a replacement set of cartridges can come eerily close to the cost of a new machine, though careful selection of the source of replacement cartridges can drive that down a fair bit. But .... even if you ditch the machine and buy a replacement, it would still make sense if the cost of doing that undercut the cost of doing the same amount of printing on an inkjet .... and it might well do so.
Oh, I agree. But the gap has narrowed a fair bit.
One place where inkjets still have a huge margin over lasers is on media choice. The range of gloss, matt, lustre, "art" and other papers, not to mention transfers etc, is still vast. But .... that depends on what the expectations of the user are.
For photographic purposes by an enthusiast or a pro, then laser is the wrong technology. It may always be. But for photos in promotional material, reports, etc, it may actually be better because the implication of an inkjet is that text is also inkjet, and typically, that's better handled by lasers.
As a photographer, I would not buy a laser for photo printing. Instead, I've got A4 and A3 photo inkjets, and an A4 dye-sub. I've also still got three Alps micro-dry machines which are great for cards, etc, and for printing gold and silver using special cartridges.
But for (low volume) leaflets, reports, etc, I'd now go laser.
It's all about horses for courses, the right tool for a given job. The tricky bit is deciding on priorities when you want it to do several jobs with different implications. Then, something has to be compromised.
Wow, colour laser for £100? It wasn't that long ago that I thought £500 was 'cheap' given that I still remember when they were the size of photocopier machines and costed 10 times the £500! I thought that the reason for not going laser is largely due to costs (and size). Isn't that what they use for magazines and such? So what makes inkjet better for photographic purpose? And are laser colours fairly immune to printing head clogging up?
Indeed. When HP introduced the first Colour LaserJet, I had one of the pre-production models here for a couple of weeks, at a time when (according to HP) there were two of them in the UK.
IIRC, and I'd have to check to be sure, it was about £7000, and the cartridges (four of them) were about £200 each to replace. And now, one of those £100 machines I referred to is an HP.
As for what makes an inkjet better ..... well, the results they produce, I guess. The ability of many inkjets to vary the size of the printed droplet rather than just placing a blob in a grid, as lasers do, gives them an ability to produce very fine detail.
Also, the use of light toners. If you have to produce the whole colour gamut by dots of just four colour inks/toners, then when you try to reproduce lighter tones, you have to do it with white space, and in very light areas, that leads to the dots being visible unless they are very small. That leads to the next point .... droplet size can be much smaller than laser pixel size. So photos, especially of light skin tones, are less grainy. And in addition to smaller droplet size, the use of light magenta and light cyan gives extra control over those fine tones.
Then, you have the ability of the media to be varied hugely, because of the way that ink and the paper it's printed on react together. It's not just the fairly crude process of plopping a blob of plastic on a paper and melting it to lock it in place, but the way an ink is absorbed onto and even into the paper, which gives far more versatility in what the surface of the paper can be. You need a pretty smooth surface for accurate laser dot positioning, which means some of the paper types used with inkjets just wouldn't work, like the textured "art" papers, because the toner wouldn't adhere consistently.
Unless you want to pay for a premium printer, the cheaper models are always a compromise. I have favoured HP recently but my current HP photsmart multifunction has developed a feed problem after a couple of years of light use. Maybe a solution is to buy at the lower end of price scale and replace at first sign of trouble, having photos printed online or on high street.
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