Recommendations on color laser printer

[Hokie]

I am starting to research color laser printers. I was wondering if any fellow DU'ers had any recommendations on a good color laser printer that would be a good balance between initial cost, cartridge capacity, quality, and toner costs.

[hobbit709]

1. What are you planning on using it for

Do you just want to print regular size paper or large format? Are you wanting to print just flyers, spreadsheeets and the like or do you want better quality than that.
For just regular printing there are several 600-1200 dpi printers around for $300 or less if you find a sale. Large format printing to print like posters and things like that are a bit more-you're looking at $2000 and up. Laser photo quality printers are not cheap at all.

[democracyindanger]

2. Why laser?

There are some high-quality inkjets out there.

[hobbit709]

3. Ink jets eat cartridges

like a shark in a feeding frenzy.

[Hokie]

4. I have not been satisfied with Inkjets

This is for home use. My wife does fliers and Print-shop work for Girl Scout activities. I have an older HP Desk jet 810. It is fuzzy on text in B&W. It also goes through ink. I only need to print letter size for the most part.

[trotsky]

5. Some of the higher-end inkjets are pretty damn good though.

Cartridge costs can be somewhat minimized by getting a model that has separate cartridges for each of the colors. They've come a long way in reducing the ink bleeding into paper and producing a really sharp image. Plus color laser toner cartridges are pretty expensive.

[democracyindanger]

6. That's where my head was at

when I was looking for a really good color printer. I needed to print out hard copies of my portfolio, and the price of a laser printer that could do a high-quality job was far beyond my budget (not to mention the size of my living room), so I got an archival-quality inkjet with the separate color cartridges for significantly less.

I suppose it all depends on how much somebody has to layout initially, and how they're going to be using it.