OT Printer

[The Natural Philosopher]

Found similar with 'refills'

In my case it was magenta...UKIP magenta ;-)

BUt that's why you have things like the Gimp - to adjust color balance for printing.

Inkjets fade in sunlight too

[whisky-dave]

I'd say not too good. Ask some photogrpahers or why there's not more laser printers that can take A1 & A0 or banner paper those injets are £3k+

[whisky-dave]

My old 10+ year old espon was 20 years I;m sure there are some that claim 100+ years for colour retention but it does denpend where they are. Plenty of kebab shops have very pale pictures of their range in windows.

[Clive Page]

But that could be a problem. Many years ago we got an HP-1000 laser printer which was "Windows only". That meant in practice Windows-XP only as neither HP nor Microsoft wanted to release updated drivers for any more recent version of their operating system. The printer is still going strong and cheap to run, but we've had to keep an old PC going with Win-XP on it just to run the printer. When the next release of Windows-10 comes out, will it still work?

The other thing to check is whether you can use 3rd-party toner cartridges, as cheap printers tend to come very expensive toner, and also with elaborate schemes to prevent use using anything other than those made by the original manufacturer.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Something very radical has changed lately, then.

[Martin Brown]

It is a bit pot luck. Find a decent supplier and stick with them.

Surprisingly quickly if in strong sunlight and the wrong sort of paper. I reckon posters last a month before fading is obvious with the Canon magenta dye fading the fastest (when on outdoor noticeboards in full sun). These days I use cheap third party inks as the printer is old.

Pigment based inks are more stable and last considerably longer but seem to be more inclined to jam the print head and require a based coat clear lacquer if you want a true gloss finish on a home made print.

[The Natural Philosopher]

THat why prpo photo shops use lasers then?

Or just learn about color profiles

[dennis]

8<

They are quite good, but make sure you buy one that is more than windows compatible if you want to print from linux.

My £45 (used to sell for £400+) single pass colour ricoh is a DDS printer and there are no linux drivers despite what TNP claimed.

It came with 1000 page toners and the normal ones are 2000 pages and cost four time what I paid for the machine.

I will try a refill from ebay when they run out and buy a new machine if it doesn't.

One warning.. they are bloody heavy, over 30kg without the optional 2000 sheet paper tray.

[spuorgelgoog]

Mine was worth £3000, discounted to a thousand by Morgan. But that was with the extra postscript card, the extra fonts card, and the IBM logo on the front.

Owain

[GB]

But why wouldn't colour laser manufacturers have done that for the consumer?

[spuorgelgoog]

They're pretty close though. Once the photo is framed behind glass many people wouldn't be able to tell the difference between laser, inkjet or a 'proper' photo.

Owain

[The Natural Philosopher]

That's more about software than the printer.,

There is no 'true color' rendition. Cameras, LCD screens 4 color printers - CRTS all have different optical characteristics. Even what paper you use makes a difference

Consumers cant bother their pretty little heads with that though, so what you get is pot luck.

[Chris Green]

Not ones priced in the sort of range we're talking about!

Might help I guess, but the reality is that a £100 inkjet is likely to get things pretty close to correct 'out of the box'. A colour laser printer, probably rather more expensive, is unlikely to be anywhere near as good without 'tuning'.

That's certainly my experience anyway. The two or three HP inkjets I have owned over the years have always made a pretty good job of colour printing my photographs without any attempt at adjusting the colour profiles. My (more expensive) OKI doesn't do nearly as well printing colour images though it's absolutely fine for non-photo colour printing.

From what I have read about relatively cheap colour printers this tends to be what most people find.

[dennis]

ITYM they don't like being turned off. I had a brother 4 in 1 and it was 100% reliable. It was on all the time and would automatically clean the heads occasionally. If you turn them off then they can't clean themselves and then they dry up.

[dennis]

Should have gone to specsavers.

[Huge]

Wasn't worth £3000, then, was it?

[Huge]

Well, the first time, anyway.

[dennis]

They use dyesub printers, they look like lasers but aren't.

You can get excellent photos from a 300dpi dyesub as each dot can have

16M colours. A laser might get four shades from each dot but probably not. Inkjets get about the same but usually have more dots to play with.

[PeterC]

I've a rather nice picture of a glorious c*ck pheasant that was printed as a demo from a Xerox photocopier at work and it's been exposed to daylight, but not direct sunshine, since the mid-70s. The running costs of that machine must have been v. high, but in those days Plessey could afford them.

[JoeJoe]

Are you sure?

I am using an HP 1010 laser printer, bought in 2001, and still going strong. Printing happily from Win7 using a compatible driver I found online.