Got Kinko’s on speed dial? You need to look into today’s fast and flexible printers. A budget not far above what will buy a home-PC printer can get you photo-quality output, painless production of comps, or small press runs for clients. In this edition, Smart[Ware] checks out the technologies and terminologies you need to know to make your best printer buy. Detroit’s designers have world-class workstations and 3D rendering software, but what’s their final step before signing off on next year’s sedan? They make a clay model. As a graphic designer, you may work in two rather than three dimensions, but the same rule applies: There’s no substitute for seeing a tangible, physical version of what begins as pixels on a screen. And these days, whether you’re creating a mockup for your own review or comps for a client, there’s no need to pay for a print shop to do it.

For most users, monochrome laser printers are still first choice for high-speed, high-volume printing of black-and-white documents (slower models for homes and small offices have fallen to under $100). But they’re being pushed aside by business-class color printers using both laser and inkjet technology.

If you haven’t checked prices lately, get ready to smile: While jumbo printers for banners or signs are into five figures, yesterday’s $3,000 workgroup printer is today’s $1,000 bargain, and some excellent models cost less than $500 ... if you ignore the cost of ink and special papers (more on that later).

Two questions
The number of products and features facing printer shoppers can be overwhelming. Keep your head straight by focusing on two questions. The first is routine: How much do you have to spend? The second is fundamental: What are you going to print?

The latter question involves factors such as print volume—one printer may have a monthly duty cycle of 3,000 pages, while another may be rated for 45,000—and media type: glossy photo paper, transparencies, poster- or banner-ready rolls, and so on.

It also includes media size: A two-page spread typically spans 11 x 17 inches, a full-bleed spread with crop marks up to 13 x 19. Any of these choices rules out the majority of office printers, which are restricted to letter- and legal-sized media.

Then there’s the thicket of numbers and letters in printer nomenclature: Deluxe printers often differentiate themselves by adding letters to the model number. N and W usually indicate wired and wireless networking capability. D denotes duplex (doublesided) printing, and T usually stands for additional paper trays or other media-handling options.

The biggest part of your decision will be picking between laser and inkjet. The technologies have different strengths and weaknesses. At the risk of oversimplification, you can boil it down to three words: PowerPoint or Photoshop?

Corporate CMYK: Color lasers
Like their monochrome cousins, color laser printers excel at swift, sharp printing of text, particularly on plain paper (e.g., copier paper). Their bright, solid colors are ideal for charts, graphs, and headlines, and they’re by no means bad at printing photos—as long as you’re thinking photos in a report, flyer, or newsletter, not borderless prints on glossy paper.

These printers excel on solid color fields and line art. If you want to wow clients with snappy reproductions of PowerPoint slides, laser is a wise choice.

Color laser prices have also plunged in recent years: Models under $500–$600 are commonplace. Samsung has just introduced a compact desktop laser—the CLP-300—at $299. Unfortunately, just like coach-class seats on an airliner, economy-class lasers aren’t wide-format compatible.

Cousins of copy machines, laser printers work by projecting a page image onto a light-sensitive, rotating drum, whose electrostatic charge picks up particles of dry ink (toner) that are then fused onto paper. Xerox’s Phaser 8500 and 8550 are toner-free: They melt waxy, crayon-like chunks of solid ink to make vivid, glossy printouts.

Low-end color lasers are four-pass designs that loop color pages through the printer four times to apply cyan, magenta, yellow, and black toner. For this reason, the aforementioned Samsung is rated at 17 pages per minute (ppm) for black but a slow 4 ppm for color. Mid-range and deluxe lasers are rapidly moving to single-pass or tandem technology, with a row or carousel of rollers working together to print color pages at roughly the same speed as black.

Full-page exposure: Color inkjets
If laser printers are titans of text, inkjet printers are aces of images. Even inexpensive models can produce impressive photo prints (at least in slower or higher-quality modes; the back-and-forth movement of an inkjet printhead often leaves ugly banding in high-speed or draft modes). And medium- and high-priced inkjets’ output can be simply gorgeous. So if your intent is to produce accurate printouts of files from applications like Photoshop or page layout programs, inkjet is the way to go.

Output quality ultimately depends, though, on a combination of factors ranging from the number of nozzles in the printhead to the number and type of ink cartridges and your choice of media.

Inkjets create images by spraying ink dots onto a page. The trouble is that liquid ink tends to soak into paper before it dries—especially with plain paper, which may pass inspection at arm’s length but yields fuzzier results than a laser printer using the same paper. Solution? Leave the absorbent paper next to the copier and get coated, seep-resistant inkjet paper or glossy photo paper.

An inkjet’s resolution—the number of dots per inch—is a specification worth noting. While most of us can’t see much difference in laser resolution above 600 x 600 dpi, many inkjets sharpen their output to 4800 x 1200 or even 9600 x 2400 dpi.

Ultra-high resolution slows printing to a crawl, and often makes photo images look no better than a mix of lower resolution with finer dot or droplet placement. HP has championed this concept with its PhotoRET (Resolution Enhancement Technology), but other manufacturers achieve comparable precision via a high number of printhead nozzles— Canon’s FINE (Full-photolithography Inkjet Nozzle Engineering) printers boast up to 6,144—meaning a tiny droplet size. The latter has shrunk from 15 or 20 picoliters (still common for printing text), and now for some inkjets a microscopic 1 picoliter.

Space forbids us from going into detail about super-wide (usually 24, 36, 42, or 60 inches), roll- fed inkjets used by print shops or specialized offices for technical printing and signage. These printers are often called plotters, though they no longer use a pen-maneuvering apparatus. Their speeds are measured in square feet per hour, and their print media range from paper to canvas and laminated vinyl.

Two, four, or more?
Your kids’ home printer probably has two ink cartridges—one black and one tricolor with cyan, magenta, and yellow. The color cartridge must be replaced as soon as one of its reservoirs is empty, even if the other two still contain ink.

Professionals will want an inkjet with at least four cartridges—the classic CMYK quartet—but will be tempted by models with five or more cartridges for a wider color gamut. Light cyan and light magenta are popular additions, as is a gray, “photo black,” or pigment black cartridge—the last using pigment-based instead of the usual dye-based ink.

Dye has more vivid colors, but pigment-based ink sticks to a page better, making it more resistant to smudges. It also rsists fading longer.

Epson’s eight-color UltraChrome K3 system boasts pigment-based ink in black, light black, and very light black cartridges; cyan, light cyan, magenta, light magenta, and yellow round out the palette. Canon’s ChromaPlus teams CMYK with what is called “photo cyan” and “photo magenta” plus red and green. HP’s Photosmart 8750 packs regular and light cyan and magenta, yellow, blue, light gray, dark gray, and black for a total of nine inks.

A few grains of salt
Today’s printers are so capable there’s no need for manufacturers to exaggerate ... but they do. You’ll never match advertised speeds in real-world printing. Laser printers come close, but inkjets’ claimed speeds are as accurate as EPA mileage estimates— the old rule of thumb was to divide by two, but now you only need to multiply by two-thirds or so.

A worse fault is printer makers’ greed for fat profits on replacement ink and toner cartridges. A British magazine study in 2003 found that, ounce for ounce, inkjet ink costs seven times as much as Dom Perignon. Both inkjets and laser printers will warn you too early that they’re running out of ink or toner—you can finish the job you’re printing and then some before replacing. Both inkjets and lasers come with half-full starter cartridges, too.

This has led to something printer makers are fighting tooth and nail: a booming aftermarket for refilled or cloned cartridges. Should you use them?

Firms like Lexmark and HP put considerable effort into formulating inks with colors that pop and color gamuts that stretch, so house-brand cartridges do produce better results. But the difference is often small enough that you can use cheaper cartridges for in-house work and save the good stuff for color matching and client views.

Think color management
Color-management-ready features are well worth seeking. Only a fifth of the price difference between Epson’s Stylus Pro 4800 ($1,995) and Stylus Pro 4800 Professional Edition ($2,495) is due to its built-in Ethernet; the rest is for its PostScript 3 RIP (Raster Image Processor) from ColorBurst.

Some HP inkjets come with driver software that supports Adobe RGB as well as ColorSmart/ sRGB color space, or lets you disable the printer’s color management to apply ICC profiles. The HP Designjet 30 can print and then scan its own colortarget sheet to automatically adjust its output, or use optional PostScript 3 RIPs for Pantone calibration or offset lithography emulation for a CMYK workflow.

If your printer’s driver and Photoshop aren’t enough, consider investing in a RIP such as ErgoSoft’s StudioPrint, ColorByte Software’s ImagePrint, or the full version of ColorBurst.

SIDEBAR: Very Versatile
Many printers do more than print. Multifunctional printers (MFPs)—also known as all-in-ones (AIOs)—offer scanning, copying, and often fax capabilities as well as printing. They’re no match for dedicated scanners or copiers, but they can be appealing space savers, not to mention costing less than a set of discrete devices.

Most MFPs combine an inkjet or laser printer with a flatbed scanner, which turns photos or pages into image files and imports documents into an optical character recognition program for editing or archiving. The scanner also serves as a fair photocopier, often with a choice of black-and-white or color copies with various resolution, zoom, and scale-to-fit options.

From there, it’s a short hop to sending faxes, using either a built-in fax machine or, less capably, a PC fax modem. (So-called walk-up fax and copier models can do their thing even when there’s no computer.) Inkjet models are usually desktop size, while many laser MFPs have features such as multiple public or passwordprotected mailboxes, output bins for different job types, and finishing options such as automatic collating and stapling.

Again, you shouldn’t expect scan or fax quality equal to the best stand-alone products (and, except for some Brother AIO models, you shouldn’t expect a phone handset with the fax). But you can be pleasantly surprised.

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