Alternatives to Inkjet printers?

[Computing_Now]

What are the alternatives to Inkjet printers for printing reasonable quality drawings and photos.

I have an inkjet but it's been very unreliable, I use it infrequently but it never works after not being used for a while, I'm trying to clean the heads now but if that doesn't work I'll need something new.

I really don't want another Inkjet.
Is colour laser the only other option, or is there something else for colour printing?

 

[herrwizo]

Well, yes. Dye-sub, solid ink and thermal. Depending on the model, some of them can be very, very expensive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dye-sublimation_printer

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_ink

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_printing

 

[Computing_Now]

It's for desktop usage printing a handful of photo glossy pages a month (drawings and some photos).

It has to be low cost to buy and to use but not something that just breaks when you leave it unused for a few months.

I'm guessing that inkjet or laser are the only options as the others sound like they are for high volume commercial use.
Do laser printers clog up if they are not used like inkjets seems to?

Also linux compatible out of the box would be good.

 

[Paperdoc]

I have both inkjet and colour laser printers, and have used monochrome laser before. Colour lasers do not clog up the way that inkjets can. Mine does a really nice job on photos and certainly can do the fine detail of drawings. For non-colour work it can be set to print only using the black colour.

HOWEVER, I don't know of any colour laser printer that can make high-gloss photo prints. The high-gloss photo paper for that type of print just does not work in a laser printing system. I've tried it, and the laser toner fails to adhere to the paper and just brushes off the finished print. So, to make high-gloss photos I use my inkjet printers. Now, as you have experienced, that printer type has a problem with jets clogging up with dried out ink when left unused for a while. I have been able to deal with that by soaking the printer head on a damp Kleenex and running the printer's Head Cleaning maintenance process. But even that has limits. Right now it appears that one of my inkjet units simply can't be fixed that way, and I think it is likely that the print head itself has failed components, not just blocked jets. So I'm waiting for delivery of a replacement print head. I have replaced this head once before some years ago and that worked.

My other inkjet unit has a design that the print head is the ink cartridge, so that when you replace the ink cartridge, the print head also is replaced. In that system, the print head does not get old and fail that way. But it still needs soaking with wet Kleenex sometimes. Right now, though, I can't use it. It is a bit old, and apparently the printer driver for it does not work properly. The printer can print its own test pattern perfectly, but anything printed from the computer comes out with colours all wrong.

Among inkjet printers, if you are going to use it for colour photo work, I recommend NOT getting one with only three colours of ink (Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow). Get at least a four-colour system (including Black) so that you can get a full range of light to dark. There are fancier ones that add two or three more ink colours, and these tend to be lighter-intensity inks of the main colours, used especially for light-coloured areas of a photo. As far as resolution goes, 300 dpi is quite suitable for most photo work, but 600 dpi is better, especially if you need fine detail work, too.

I prefer a print head design that has separate ink cartridges for each colour so you only replace the one that went empty. One of my inkjets has the three colours in one cartridge, and Black separately which is good because Black gets used up faster. The other has five separate cartridges. There are Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black using dye-based inks for colour prints, plus a Pigment Black larger cartridge for solid black lines and text printing.

Oh yes, one other small feature factor. One of my inkjet units can be fed with continuous long paper (usually Z-folded) to print long banners. You can't get that in a laser printer., and not even on many inkjet units.

By the way, for smaller snapshot-sized photo prints, I have a different dedicated Epson photo printer. It does only 4" x 6" prints on paper from Epson. (I do use non-Epson ink cartridges with it.) The paper and ink combination used does a great job of photo printing, and the prints are just about instantly dry when they come out so they don't smear. Colours and gloss are very good. Moreover, the prints are pretty much waterproof, so a few water drops or wet fingers do not damage them.

 

[Computing_Now]

Thanks with the laser printer, are there any other options for photos apart from plain office paper, for example can you use a non glossy photo paper?

The plain office paper seems to porous to print fine detail.

 

[Paperdoc]

I have not tried the matte-finish photo papers in either type of printer because I always wanted glossy photo prints. I am not sure whether they can work. You see, whether the finish is glossy or matte, photo papers still have a special coating on them and that is what the laser toner particles must adhere to. Whether that can work for the specific coatings used on matte papers I don't know.

Plain office paper is certainly rougher than photo papers, but porosity is not much of an issue with laser printers. It IS an issue for inkjet printers because those inks are very dilute solutions of dyes in water, and they penetrate easily into a slightly porous surface. But in fact, porosity is not the only issue for inkjet printers. For that reason, the papers used for inkjets have their own special surface coatings designed to keep the dyes of the inks trapped right at the surface even as the water part soaks down into the paper. Laser printing systems, on the other hand, lay down completely dry particles of dye on the top of the surface. The particles each have a minute amount of a thermal adhesive on them, and the fuser stage in the printer causes that to melt momentarily and bond the dye particle to the paper surface. There is almost no penetration of these particles into a porous surface. So there is no real problem in achieving a sharply detailed image on a laser printer. It is VERY common for laser printers to deliver resolutions of 600 dpi which is plenty detailed for sharp lines or smooth colour gradations. However, the surface of normal office papers is not as smooth as a glossy photo paper, so you'll never get a glossy photo from such paper in a laser printer, even though you do get good colour and plenty of fine detail.

Ask for a demonstration of some of the printers you might be considering, and see whether they meet your needs. As an aside, I'll tell you this. If I take a colour photo print made on my colour laser printer on office paper and mount that in a photo frame behind a glass front, the lack of gloss on the print itself becomes almost undetectable. But, if you want glossy photos without glass in front, a laser system probably cannot deliver that.

 

[Computing_Now]

Thanks, it's sounding like a colour laser might be the way to go.

Can many colour laser printers print borderless prints? To stick 2 or more together without having to cut.

 

[Paperdoc]

I should point out something important. Inkjet printers are pretty cheap to buy, and even the better designs with more ink tanks, etc. are not bad. They are often expensive to use because ink cartridges are expensive, unless you switch to generic substitutes. Colour Laser printers are much more expensive to buy, and not very cheap on ink toner cartridges, either. I have a Lexmark C543dn. I buy "equivalent" (not Lexmark brand) "High Yield" toner carts. It has three for colour (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow) and one Black. The Black is bigger (more toner). My printing involves lots of just-black text stuff and a fair amount of mixed colour things like signs. I do very few full-colour photos on it, and those things use up more toner. Each colour toner cart costs me about $65 Canadian, and the Black $60. The colour carts each last about 600 pages, so the color prints are costing about C$0.325 for the three colours only. Black carts last about 1,100 copies, so that's about C$0.055 per page. Thus a black-ink-only page averages C$0.055 for ink, and colour averages C$0.38 per page for ink only. That does not include paper, but the paper is basically the type you might use in an inkjet or laser printer, so costs for the two printer types there are the same. To convert those costs to US$, multiply by about 0.75 right now. So Black ink only is US$0.041 per page, and full colour inks is US$0.285 per page.

I have not kept good records for ink consumption on my inkjets. I can tell you that the small Epson 4" x 6" printer comes out to a similar cost of about C$0.35 per print, including ink and special paper.

 

[Computing_Now]

Thanks, so it costs a lot.
I just printed some drawings in black and white instead for now.

Is the cost of printing b&w with a mono laser printer less than printing b&w with a colour laser printer?

Since I haven't looked at printers for a long time when I started this thread I was kind of hoping there would be some new technology that doesn't use ink or something else, or much lower cost toners but it seems much the same situation as several years ago.

 

[Paperdoc]

Yes, the situation has not changed a lot. From my past experience, printing in black-and-white (which includes grey-scale printing, too, but no colours) on either type of laser printer costs just about the same for toner. As you see, that is much less than using three additional expensive toners. (Note that my toner cartridges all have similar prices, but the black ones hold more toner and print twice as many pages.) In some situations, though, a particular colour laser printer may require more expensive cartridges than some simple black-only lasers. The main difference right now, though, is that the colour laser printer itself is more expensive that a black-only model with similar print quality. At one time, that was MUCH more, but the colour lasers have come down somewhat.

 

[Computing_Now]

Is it possible to put a gloss water based varnish on a colour laser print out, or will it ruin it?

 

[Paperdoc]

I have no idea. Never tried it, nor have I read of other people's experience. One question I would have colour permanence. The varnish itself may yellow with age and change the photo appearance. How much, and how long it take, I do not know. MAYBE investigate spray varnishes marketed for use by artists and crafts people that claim long stability.