Laser Printer Questions

[osprey76]

I am thinking of buying a laser printer soon. I will be used at home with fairly light duty. I like the crisp output from a laser versus an inkjet and will mainly be printing black and white, so I don't need expensive color inks sitting around drying up.

A couple of questions/thoughts.

One, I've been looking at the hp printers and the bottom end prints at 600x600 dpi, while the next step up prints at 1200x1200. Is the difference tangible? Four times the resolution is quite a jump. Something I see myself printing, at times, are webpages whose graphics would probably benefit from the higher resolution.

Two, I also looked at the all-in-one devices from hp with scanning, copying, printing, and faxing. One of these would certainly be handy, but the printing mechanism is 600x600 dpi on all of the consumer level machines. So, the resolution question applies to this one, too. Does anyone have experience with one of these (esp. from hp)? I have a very old color scanner from UMAX and replacing that with a higher resolution one would be nice.

Thanks.

 

[mkrishnan]

Can you get any store to print out 1200 dpi samples for you? If you mean printing HTML web pages, these webpages hardly ever have high resolution graphics on them. Your screen resolution is 70-150 DPI -- and that's about all you're going to get on paper. Even if you print half size pages (like 4up on a sheet) you're only going to approach 300 DPI.... If you print something with scalable graphics, like some PDFs, that might be a different matter....

OTOH, with the jump from 300 to 600, you could definitely notice that text, in particular large or complex fonts, looked subtly better. I guess the same is true for the big commercial HPs I've used and the desktop lasers. But probably at that point, DPI might not be the best indicator, vs. either finding samples or reviews.

 

[LeeTom]

I have the HP Laserjet 1300, and it's been really good. No problems, everything looks great, works with Airport's printer sharing.

Lee Tom

 

[patrick0brien]

I am thinking of buying a laser printer soon.

-osprey76

I went with an HP 1300, simple and does it's work well, the contrasts are good and fits my needs prettey well.

I got this after an HP all-in-one, can't remember the model right now, peeved me for the last time.

The trick is this: AIO's have their own driver and all of the components of the AIO can work better than others at certain times. If you can swallow the cost IMHO printing, Scanning, and Faxing should not be converged (aside from a $15,000 Xerox machine) - never had a good experience with it.

 

[Daveman Deluxe]

I wouldn't go with the all-in-one model. That said, I don't think that there will be all that great of a difference between 600dpi and 1200dpi. I have a 600dpi laser printer and I can only make out the jaggies from the toner blobs if I look REALLY closely at it. I don't think there's much point in spending that much extra money for your purposes.

 

[rainman::|:|]

I join in recommending against the all-in-one units. I know some people that have them and love them, but i know a lot of people that the fax or the scanner craps out... all-in-one is a recipe for failure. As to resolution, I can tell the difference between 1200x1200 and 600x600, but i run a print shop, and i'm very anal. I doubt you'd miss it if you went with 600, as has been said it only really gets those resolution on some things, and frankly, most paper will do such a poor job of toner transfer that you would lose it anyway. I rarely find that people with laser printers spend the money on quality, smooth paper.

paul

 

[osprey76]

Thanks

I had some doubts about all-in-ones, but was wondering what people had seen with them. So, I'll just get a printer. On that note, the 1300 has a $100 rebate going right now.

Thanks for the advice.

 

[osprey76]

Can you get any store to print out 1200 dpi samples for you? If you mean printing HTML web pages, these webpages hardly ever have high resolution graphics on them. Your screen resolution is 70-150 DPI -- and that's about all you're going to get on paper. Even if you print half size pages (like 4up on a sheet) you're only going to approach 300 DPI.... If you print something with scalable graphics, like some PDFs, that might be a different matter....

OTOH, with the jump from 300 to 600, you could definitely notice that text, in particular large or complex fonts, looked subtly better. I guess the same is true for the big commercial HPs I've used and the desktop lasers. But probably at that point, DPI might not be the best indicator, vs. either finding samples or reviews.

Yeah, good point. I might attempt to print the envelopes for my upcoming wedding, too. Crisper would definitely be good there. With the feedback given here, I'm strongly leaning toward a HP LaserJet 1300.