Need colour laserjet printer advice

[Castellen]

Hi all,
I'm totally *****ed off with inkjet printers, and I don't mind paying a small fortune for a decent colour laser printer.

I was looking at the (now obsolete) HP Laserjet 5 as it's ideal for what I want, and it's supported by Turboprint 7.  However a laser printer expert told me to go for a 4500 or 4550 instead.

These models are not in the Turboprint compatibility list:
http://www.irseesoft.de/tp_drive7.htm

But will they work 100% using a different HP driver??
There is a Laserjet 4000 driver in OS3.9, but I want to avoid Workbench printer drivers for obvious reasons.

Any advice/suggestions welcome.

[motrucker]

Why so against ink jets? I get great color prints from the HP and Canon printers I use, and they are way cheaper to use than color lasers!
BTW - I use the printer drivers from the first edition of OS 3.5 - don't know why they work better, but they sure do on the printers I use. You might want to try these drivers.....

[Roj]

If you're willing to part with a small fortune, I'd highly recommend one of these: Minolta Magicolor 2350. It supports postscript and has built-in networking via ftp (among other options). To print straight from PageStream I set up postscript output, print to device tcp:192.168.0.50/9100. In TurboPrint, I used the HP Color LaserJet 5 driver and set print to file with the same ip address. It's about as simple as it gets. It also allows configuration options to be set through a browser, and it works very well with IBrowse.

As far as the quality of the output, I don't think color laser gets any better right now. The printouts are absolutely top notch. Glossy printouts look as good as magazine covers. I've had mine for almost a year now and printed over 2 reams of paper with the original "low-capacity" toners. My black toner is still at 52% remaining, and the color toners are all at 74% remaining.


It's an expensive printer, but if you can afford it you can junk your inkjet and never look back.

[Roj]

Why so against ink jets? I get great color prints from the HP and Canon printers I use, and they are way cheaper to use than color lasers!

I used to believe that too. But having had a laser for almost a year, and done enough full-page color prints on my laser to run through at least ten black/color inkjet cartridges (@$50 a set), there's no way an inkjet can match a laser over just a few years time. In three years, I'd spend $1500 on ink cartridges easy. Heck, just ten full-page prints can do one color cartridge in! With the MagiColor I've printed over 2 full reams (that's 1,000 sheets) including at least 100 full-page color prints so far and look where my toner supplies are. It's not even close.

[Castellen]

Woah, that post of mine is old   :-)

Thanks for the advice guys, though I've since ordered a HP 2550L.

As for inkjets, I can't really say many good things about them.
My pet hate is I probably spend more time fixing my inkjet than I do printing with it.

Secondly is the price of ink cartridges, one cartrige alone is about half the price of the entire printer!

And dare I even mention the build quality?  They're obviously designed to be as cheap and crappy as possible, so people buy them because of the low price, then spend an insane amount of cash on cartridges (and a new printer after it dies after printing 100 pages).

Then if you get 3rd party cartridges and refills, the print quality isn't always as good, there's a chance of the ink leaking all into the printer, and it invalidates the warranty.

OK, I could carry on all night, but I'll save you the pain...





iamaboringperson was asking a similar question to mine on A.org the other day, but unfortunately all the recent posts have been lost.

Luckily IBrowse's cache browser has a copy:




I've just ordered myself a Hewlett Packard Colour Laserjet HP2550L.
Has a Centronics (parallel) interface as standard, but you can buy an ethernet kit. Alternatively the HP2550Ln has network built in as standard, otherwise its the same printer.

It's a Postscript printer, so you can print directly from the likes of Pagestream, FinalWriter, etc, without any drivers required.

Turboprint 7.6 has a "LaserJet2xxx" driver. I asked Ireesoft about it and they said:

"only the black&white laser printers of the LaserJet 2xxx series are supported. The Color LaserJet 2550 can be used with our HP Color Laserjet driver, but only up to 300dpi."


So if you don't care about colour printing at 600dpi, then it'll be sweet. Email me in a few weeks and I'll tell you how it goes.


As for alternatives, Canon and Epson have pretty good TurboPrint support.
Check out   http://www.irseesoft.de/default.htm

You should definately avoid "win printers".

Other brands such as Brother, Oki, etc, seem to have limited or no Turboprint support, particularly for laser printers. I'm not sure why this is, possibly because manufacturers were not willing to supply driver protocols to 3rd party developers?? I'm sure Ireesoft would develop drivers for more brands of printers if they had information to do so.
If that's the case, then it's probably best to avoid those brands and not support them either.    

[Hyperspeed]

Good grief, what's happening to my text layout!

Anyway let me guess, you bought the 30 USD Lexmark!

:-D

That thing was lighter than the notes you pay for it and would screw
the paper up when it was feeding.

Epson are a fantastic brand although I find them a bit noisier than
the rest.

I had a Canon BJC600 before and liked the individual cartridges, build
quality but didn't have Turboprint at the time to fully appreciate
print quality.

Right now I have an Epson Stylus Color 740 and it's pretty good. As
I've written in another thread about Turboprint 7.x it doesn't put the
Epsons into Microweave properly so 720dpi is the maximum. Nowadays
with the 1440dpi and 2880dpi us Amiga owners are losing out.

For lasers TP7 seems to support the HP Color Laserjet 5 and the
Laserjet 3 which are nice.

I still don't know how to print with a Postscript output though. What
program can load and print Postscript files? Where is the Postscript
device supposed to go, DEVS:Printers or DEVS:DosDrivers?

I ask this as it's a port and not a printer right?

Anyway, the best settings I have for Epson inks and TurboPrint 7
required you to alter Contrast=110%, Gamma=120% and
Settings->ColourGamma->Yellow=110%.

That gives the best tones available and don't know why this isn't
default or mentioned elsewhere. TurboPrint has never used Microweave
and so you get heavy black dots without lightening the gamma and
putting a dampener on that ever dazzling yellow!

:-D

Did anyone ever try a Citizen Printiva? They were solid thermal
printers that took blocks of wax. You could print in metallic gold and
even print white on black paper!

Hope Erseesoft sort out the Epson drivers soon as the difference
between Epson on Amiga@720dpi and Epson on PC@2880dpi is quite
embarassing!

[whabang]

I would of course recomend Epson-printers, but I'm a bit biased! ;-)

I can say as much as that most newer ink-jet printers will not work with Amigas, as the ESC/P2-support has been dropped by the printer manufacturers.
Laser printers mostly support it, but even here the support has been dropped for the cheaper models.

Sad...