Xerox Solid Ink Printers...Any opinions??

[Silencio]

Good post, Kwill. Your experience with Xerox's color printers pretty much mirrors my own. I've used the Phaser 860 and Phaser 8550 solid ink printers and a couple of the Phaser 7300 tabloid color laser printers at various clients, and they've all been pretty reliable and done the job well.

The Phaser 860 lasted over four years with some seriously heavy workloads. I did most of the maintenance myself on that printer even though I am by no means a printer hardware expert; it required one trip to a third party repair shop after the warranty expired, and that repair didn't end up being so bad cost-wise.

The Phaser 8550 is 3+ years old now and needs some repairs itself. It has probably printed in the hundreds of thousands of pages by now! It will be replaced next week by a Phaser 6360DN one-pass color laser.

Xerox tech support has generally been good when I've needed it.

All of their printer models use fairly standard SODIMMs for memory, so maxing them out is pretty straightforward and inexpensive.

I would select pretty much any Xerox color or monochrome laser with the utmost confidence.

 

[gazfocus]

Can anyone comment on whether I will get satisfactory results printing flyers (sometimes full colour) and CD Booklets/case inserts?

Thanks

 

[IJ Reilly]

Define "satisfactory." I think it's a given that a laser printer, no matter how good, isn't going to give you the same results as a high-quality inkjet, or possibly even a mediocre inkjet.

 

[Silencio]

I think for most persons' definition of "satisfactory", you can definitely achieve that with any of Xerox's color line, either solid ink or conventional laser.

For higher quality jobs, it's important to set the printer to Enhanced mode. Photos in Standard mode can look kind of grainy, at least on the solid ink Phasers. For most clients, I set the color rendering mode to SWOP Press for colors that will more accurately approximate what they would get on a standard printing press.

 

[gazfocus]

Define "satisfactory." I think it's a given that a laser printer, no matter how good, isn't going to give you the same results as a high-quality inkjet, or possibly even a mediocre inkjet.

It's the solid ink printer I've gone for. The Dell laser I already have gave me 'ok' results, but took some tweaking. 'Satisfactory' would be semi professional results.

Obviously, I know I'm not going to get print quality on par with an ink jet printer, but then an inkjet printer won't print on silk paper used for CD Booklets (and is unrealistic for doing 2 sided full colour printing).

 

[IJ Reilly]

I understand, I just didn't want to presume to know what you regard as "satisfactory."

I've been playing around with the "standard" vs. "enhanced" settings, but haven't seen much real difference even with a magnifier. I presume the latter is a tighter halftone screen, but I don't know.