OT: solid ink printers

[Bill]

The company I work for participated in a "Free Color Printer" offer
([url]http://www.freecolorprinters.com[/url]) and used a Phaser 8200 for about a year
before returning it. The deal sounded too good to be true: Free Xerox
color printer, you just have to order the supplies from them, meet a
minimum usage quota (2000-4000 pages per month, depending on the size of
your business) and send them usage reports every month. As with most deals
that sound too good to be true, it was. They dock you $100 each month you
don't reach your quota, and $125 if you don't send the report. The printer
is yours if you last three years in the program.

Okay, so the program sucked, what about the printer?

The color accuracy is very poor, due in part to a rather greenish cyan
toner. I could not trust it for proofing at all. In fact, I gave a verbal
disclaimer and apology to each customer who received a printed proof "for
layout purposes only". Also, the prints are not durable at all since the
wax toner scratches off very easily, and the cost of the toner and
maintenance kits were quite a bit above what we were expecting. Solid
toner blocks run about $40 per color ($20 for black) that they report as
lasting 1400 pages at 5% coverage. Even if that is accurate, you'd be
obliged to spend at least $280 in toner a month (two blocks of each color)
to stay in the program. And that's if your prints are averaging 5% or less
coverage per color, which mine typically do not.

Worst of all, though, was the tendency of the wax toner to clog the
print-head, causing chronic streaks in the printed material. The
head-cleaning function operates by running an ungodly amount of black
toner through the printhead, which is cool since it gives you a nice big
black crayon to play with afterwards, but it can run you out of supplies a
lot quicker than you'd expect otherwise. And it doesn't fix the streaks
3/4 of the time.

In short, I'd recommend steering clear of the printer, "free" or not.

--
Bill
FHMX/Win98/Athlon2100+/512M

On Sat, 10 Jan 2004 9:14:40 +0000, Michael H. Phillips <mhp@odtaa.invalid>
wrote:

> I've been window shopping for a colour laser printer and came across the
> Xerox 8200. This 1,000 euro machine has genuine Adobe PostScript 3 - very
> enticing. But it's not a laser printer, it's solid ink. Does anyone here
> have
> experience of this technology? Is colour fidelity good enough for
> proofing
> purposes?
>

[darrel]

As Bill points out, these printers are not meant for casual printing. The
program is designed for firms that are printing constantly. The wax printers
need to remain constantly on and in use to prevent clogs and such (this
tends to be true of ink jets as well, for that matter).

As for postscript, you don't really need it. You can either pre-process your
files into PDFs, or use something like GhostScript to act as the Postscript
RIP on your own computer. I'd suggest putting the money towards a better
printer rather than hardware postscript.

-Darrel