Printer Advice?

[Sirlin]

I'm looking for a color laser printer that I'll use at home (so shouldn't be too physically huge) that has very good quality color and text. My main use will be prototyping a card game I'm developing, and I'd like the cards I print (which have text and illustrations) to look as close as possible to the final versions that Carta Mundi (a major card manufactuer) will print.

For prototypes, I print on normal paper, cut them out, put them in card sleeves with a Magic: The Gathering card behind them for stiffness, and it works fine. So the printer does not need to be able to print on thick card stock. Carta Mundi does use Postscript fonts, so I should probably have a Postscript printer as well to make the proofs more accurate.

The printer should be Mac-compatible, though hopefully my PC laptop can use it too. I know zero about printer networking, but it would be great if I could keep the printer off in a corner somewhere and connect wirelessly to it. Maybe a $99 airport express does this and the printer needs no special wireless networking feature?

For price, I don't really know what is reasonable for what I'm asking. I'd be willing to go up to around $1,000. Less if possible. More if absolutely necessary.

I've been reading macrumors for about a year and half now, and I just wanted to say it's a great site and I love how helpful people generally are here. Thanks in advance for your recommendations.

--Sirlin
www.sirlin.net

 

[Makosuke]

My experience is with larger-format (11X17) color lasers, but I'd suggest taking a look at what Ricoh offers.

At least at the 11x17 size (which is what I ended up buying--a CL7200--for work after comparing models from Konica Minolta and HP) the toner is incredibly cheap (so much so that I thought I'd done the math wrong at first), the quality is good, its quite fast, and unlike comparable models from HP and Konica, it has genuine Postscript, not emulation.

You're probably not going to get genuine postscript in the cheaper price bracket for letter-sized printers, but if their smaller models are as good as their big ones, they're very worth a look. Surprised me, since I hadn't even thought about Ricoh as a laser printer company before.

My second recommendation would be Konica Minolta--I've installed a couple of their large color lasers over the years, and their graphic/photo quality beats all other comers, albeit at the expense of pricier toner and generally more expensive hardware. Not really fond of HP's color lasers (mainly their toner system--at least their black and whites are reliable), and no experience with Samsung, since they don't make large lasers.