PRACTICAL color printer

I'm a *very* infrequent printer, and I find my HP b9180 very good in this regard.

You leave it on all the time, and once daily or so it powers up and cycles a small amount of ink through all the nozzles. Plus, I believe each head has a myriad of nozzles, and only one or a few or used, the others are for redundancy. Plus it analyzes what actually gets to the paper, and adjusts flow accordingly.

I've had no problems with it in nearly a year. I might go weeks without touching it.

Color lasers are good for some things, but many do not handle transparancys correctly. Nor are they, in my opinion, as brilliant as ink/dye, but they're getting really close. Color lasers I don't like for photos include HP, I do like the Xerox Phaser series. Inkjets allow the use of more paper types I feel. You pay more upfront for the laser/toner combo, but printing is cheaper. Inkjets are cheap, but consumable inks can run pretty high depending on how often you print. Laser prints don't run if they get wet either.

There is no perfect printer, they all have their faults. Canon makes some fine printers too. Also, you do get what you pay for. If you pay $100 for a printer, it's pretty much a throw away. I paid $350 for my Epson 1160 about eight or nine years ago and I still use it. Now I've moved up to an Epson Stylus 1400, which also prints directly onto CD's. It's about $300 and does border free printing.

The Epsons seem to be prone to the problems you mention but I know many who use them who don't have those problems. HP and Canon are fine alternates to the Epson near monopoly of photo quality printers.

I've been using an Epson R2400 since October 2005. It has worked flawlessly, consistently, for producing thousands of B&W and color prints. I've had no problems at all with it.

Previous dye-ink Epsons were prone to clogging their nozzles if not used frequently, and even if they were sometimes. I've had no such problems with the R2400.

G

Same a Godfrey, i have a r200, a 2400, a 1400, a 7880..none have problems.

same as Godfrey, my Epson 2400 has had ONE clogged nozzle in 2+ years. And a simple cleaning cycle fixed that.

I'm certainly not a "follow the crowd" person. But there must be some reason that most people use Epson printers. FWIW, I dislike the company but still use their printers. I think the large infrastructure of users and 3rd party products is a good reason to consider a popular Epson model.

I think a photo on a non-profit newsletter would be just fine if done by a decent laser.

Printing newsletters on an ink-jet is going to be very slow, expensive and have numerous little cartridges going to the recyclers.

With that said, I've had an Epson 2200 since it was new and has had no problems. I don't use it much and the self-clean exercise works great when I need to.

Here my laser printer cost 19k last spring with the Fiery/Server; calibration targets; Color profiler to calibrate monitor and output. Its a little:) better than the bundled 1K color laser thrown in with the deal; that was priced at 200 bucks. The better laser printer has a service contact of about 800 per year; that includes the sorter/stacker finisher and stapler. Much of a print shops overhead with printing is weird formats; folks uncalibrated monitors. The chaper machine makes a decent image thats not as good with photos. The better photograde machine is used alot of photos; proofs. Today every chap has a color laser printer; ie churches; realtors; banks; schools. IF you farm out the print job and the job has alot of setup time; the cost will be higher. I cannot imagine ever trying to print volume newsletters for a nonprofit group with an inkjet; unless you get a source for free ink cartridges

A color brochure for a non-profit group makes me wonder where my donations is really going; the air conditioned dog houses; the jets. One can make a nice B&W brochure with color only used on some pages and radically drop ones costs. The whole world has gotten sloppy with color; bar graphs that use to have different hatch directions for each bar are now in color; then when a B&W copy is made the color coding is lost. With proper colors that tones can llok different in B&W; or if you are creative make with hatches too.

HOW MANY COPIES OF EACH HANDOUT are going to be produced? If its alot then farming it out wil,save you loads of cash; IF one can create a file thats easy to print.

In practice alot of folks want oddball paper sizes; colors out of gamut with normal printers; forget fonts and sizes; want instant turn-around; bring files in with weird programs; want to load their weird program on the print companys machines; what to use the print company to spellcheck; forget binding; forget leaving spaces for binding. /rant off:)
A mixture of inhouse printing and outsourcing is a REAL healthy mix. You will creat a better input for outsourcing when you actually print yourself; or have issues with the printer going wonky too:)