Large Format Printers

What printer should I buy, and how can I minimize printing costs?

Essentially the same criteria apply to these printers as to any others. The short answer to which kind of printer to buy is that if you mainly print photos, you should go with a color inkjet, but if you mainly print web pages, documents, spec sheets, newsletters, brochures, and graphical charts, go with a color laser, but do not forget to have a monochrome (black and white) printer on hand for non-color jobs. This advice mainly has to do with the printer’s resolution. A good laser will operate at about 600 x 600 or 1,200 x 1,200 d.p.i. (dots per inch), while a good, and fairly inexpensive inkjet can exceed 1,440 d.p.i. or possibly much, much more – up to an interpolated resolution of 24,000 x 24,000 [but see p.s. note below].

Their superior resolution give the inkjets an edge in terms of photographic detail, crispness, and clarity. You can buy an inkjet printer for a very cheap price but beware of this as many of the manufacturers offer some very cheap inkjet printers but then charge a fortune for the ink cartridges so check the prices of the cartridges online before you buy an inkjet printer.

Lasers are best for printing words, figures, etc., as well as a combination of text and images, with sharply delineated clarity. Let's be as clear: if things mainly blend into each other in what you want to print, it's best to use an inkjet, but if instead your primary print jobs consist of things that are sharply defined in distinction with each other, it's best to use a laser.

If you do relatively little photo printing, probably it would make sense to use an online photo developing store for the little that you do print. Online photo lab costs have come down, and you can upload photos online and then pick them up at a local store or have them mailed to your home or office. Many people believe that photo lab processing produces the best quality images, and give you photographs that will not fade with time as much as those printed through either inkjet or laser processes. However, if you do have or buy a printer, chances are you will find yourself printing a lot more photos than would otherwise have been the case. This can certainly help you to become a much better photographer.

Recently, multifunction printers have made very considerable headway in the digital photo printing market, and, largely for this reason alone, multifunction color inkjets began during 2007 to outsell stand-along color inkjets, so if you print lots of pictures, check also our category of multifunction printers.

The relative costs are very hard to figure. They vary with equipment costs, paper type, what you are printing, etc. Overall, the inkjets may be just a small bit cheaper to operate, especially if you buy cartridges in bulk or do refills yourself. Laser drums last for about 40-50,000 pages, but after that a replacement drum will be quite expensive. In a way, we are comparing apples to oranges. For example, color toner cartridges usually last between 2500 and 5000 pages instead of a few hundred pages for an inkjet cartridge. A laser printer’s power consumption and heat generated are greater than occurs with an inkjet. The size and weight of the printer must be accommodated in your home or office. Still, the costs of color laser printers themselves have come down a lot in price lately, and their cost-per-print can be slightly lower, even for those using factory refills. All of this makes figuring out the overall cost factor a complicated and moving target. What you want to try to figure, of course, is the combined ongoing costs of operation and ownership, say on a yearly basis.

How can you lower your overall printing costs? Odd as it might sound at first hearing, the chances are excellent that the least expensive route to take is to have more than one printer. One size simply does not fit all. If you do a lot of both kinds of printing mentioned above, then you definitely do need both kinds of printers. If you already have a printer – again oddly enough – you can often save a lot of money just by buying a newer model. How, you might well ask, does this work? The answer is that printer manufacturers continually improve the products’ print quality and continually lower the per-page cost. Why? They simply must do this to keep their printers competitive with sending your photos or documents out to be printed. For the best color reproduction, select one of the new 6 color versions.

Now, please ask yourself a few questions:
.
1. How much total printing do I do?

2. How much of that total needs to be printed in color?

Please do not forget that black and white (monochrome) laser printers still constitute the cheapest current printing solution; the per-page cost is roughly one tenth of that of an inkjet color printer, and the black and white lasers' printing speeds are excellent. If you mostly print termpapers or recipes or business letters, lasers do all such jobs better and much more cheaply than inkjets do. Laser printouts are water-fast, which is not true with inkjet pictures. You must keep the latter dry, or the ink will run.

3. What kind of color printing do I do most?

Are these primarily photos or just general purpose printing? If you print a lot of documents, inkjet is not the most economical way to go because you will find yourself constantly buying and replacing ink cartridges, and paying a premium for special paper.

4. Of my photographs, are some truly important, and some just OK?

Consider sending the most important photos out to a professional online processing store, and printing the rest yourself. To see reviews and prices for online photo printing, visit http://www.printrates.com/.

5. Am I printing a lot of letters and other black and white documents with a color inkjet printer?

If so, stop doing that A.S.A.P! Instead, get yourself another printer for this purpose, because right now you are spendng too much for printing, and to boot are prematurely wearing out your inkjet. You should divide up your printing so that you use the most economical printer for each specific type of job. It is almost certain that, if you do so, you will in the long run save a small fortune.

Another important point in terms of cost savings is that especially if you regularly print more of one color than another, such as a color logo on every page, then to save money you should seriously consider buying a color printer with individual ink tanks for each color. Although they may initially cost just a bit more, the economy they offer is that you only need to replace the inks you have actually used up. This alone can save you a bundle.

No one printer is ideal for all types of printing. Some are very specialized, such as thermal label printers and solid ink printers or large format printers. In many cases, the most cost effective way to handle all your printing needs is to have multiple printers installed on your computer or network. Probably the most cost effective thing you can do is to purchase a new black and white laser printer, and plan to use it for all non-color printing. Don’t wear out your more expensive and costly-to-use-color printer on monochrome jobs.

P.S. A SHORT NON-TECHNICAL NOTE ON RESOLUTION

Some manufacturers identify their printers by resolutions available through interpolation. This has created a great deal of consumer confusion. Some claim that interpolation is basically just a fraud, because if the image were really captured at, say, 19,200 x 19,200 resolution the resulting file would end up being many gigabytes in size. This represents a misunderstanding of exactly what interpolation involves, but it does help point out that by far the most important element of resolution is optical resolution. Interpolation is just an effort to add a slight embellishment to the optical resolution. Base your buying decision on optical resolution, not interpolated resolution.

In certain very limited respects, resolution actually can be improved by means of software. This process, called interpolated or maximized or optimized resolution, only adds extra dots to the image, often designed to improve color transitions. To do so, software uses algorithms [mathematical formulae] to evaluate the dots surrounding each new dot. The objective is to add solidity and, more importantly, to help determine what each particular dot’s mix of colors should be. Please understand that interpolated resolution adds absolutely no new information whatever to the image, but just adds dots and thereby makes the file larger. Interpolated resolution can, nonetheless, slightly improve the printed result. Rather than being a fraud, it is an improvement, though a minor one.