I have a problem. Okay, I have a lot of problems. But one of my problems is that I have a printer fetish. I like printers. Always have. I just like being able to print graphics and text and pictures onto a piece of paper. I acknowledge my problem.  Few individuals have purchased as many printers as I have. I've owned dozens of printers over my 30+ years of life.

If you're like me, you go on-line to try to find out how good different printers are. But usually, the reviews suck. Some places will get them quality ratings of like 8.7.  What the hell does that mean? Would it really be that hard to simply scan a picture in of your print out so we can look at it? That's what PC Magazine and PC World used to do (but don't seem to do it so much anymore).  At least then we could look at it.  Most of the "Reviews" I read on-line read like regurgitated media guides.

If your shopping for a printer on-line, the specs should matter. But they don't. Not really. Because DPI means nothing now. I have printers that claim 2400 dpi but look less impressive than 600dpi printers.  The other issue which is rarely talked about is color accuracy. I find this extraordinarily frustrating that my print outs on various "good" printers tend to not be very accurate. And few reviews bother to even talk about it. It's not a review unless there's some subjective talk in it. And most reviews these days are on injkets. No offense but with injkets costing $200 and available at a store, how much advice do I really need from a reviewer? I can go to the store and see a printout of any reasonably popular injket. Thanks. It's on those higher end printers that we tend to want to hear some advice on.  Okay, that's not really fair since most people are looking for injkets, but what about people who are looking for higher end printers?

And by higher end printers I'm talking about laser printers that do color.  The first question I've always wanted the answer to is how good can laser printing get? I mean, if you pay enough, where is the cut off? Can I basically get a laser printer that can print a photo about as well or better than an injket (except be able to print 10 of them a minute rather than 1 every 3 minutes?).

The answer is yes. But you get into diminishing returns. This little article is to share my experiences at buying printers. From $100 injkets to $20,000 industrial printers. I told you, I have a problem.

Injkets

My current Injket of choice is the Canon i9900. It's outdated now. But the quality it produces is fantastic. It's not a terribly fast printer but it produces incredibly good output. My main beef with Inkjets is that they've slowly morphed into being photo printers. I'd like to see more injkets being made that produce great photo output (doesn't have to be godly good, I have a Canon photo printer for that!) but can reasonably be used for printing email and other documents at home or casually at work without thinking I just spent a buck in ink to do it. But right now it seems I can either get an inkjet with sub-par graphics output but is a practical casual multi-purpose printer or I can get something that will show every zit on my face in a photo print out.

I tend to also like Epson injket printers. But they tend to lag a bit beyond Canon in quality in my experience. Still, the Epson Stylus printers are very nice. Lexmark makes decent printers but they tend to be run of the mill. I won't buy HP printers at all for personal reasons -- their driver support during the Windows 2000 era really ticked me off and so I've avoided them since. I buy lots of other HP stuff and they do make good printers, I'm just still sore about the scanners and printers from the Windows 2000 era that they refused to update the drivers to work on back then.

The Main Event

Okay, injkets aren't really my main interest.  Where I've gone on-line over the years is to find out just how good the high end printers really are. And that's where I've been disappointed. I get that injkets can produce photo quality output if you buy the right paper. Fine. Good. Understood. What about printers that can crank out 10 pages or more per minute?

Well...

Quality is a relative term. So I'm going to go with 3 different printers here.

Phaser 8500

The entry level Phaser 8500 (8400 shown but it's the same output). You can get these for starting at $500. Great printer at the price. Here's a sample of the output:

Xerox 8500 (8400)

Not bad but somewhat muted. It's a solid ink printer and that's one of the gotchas with them in my experience. The colors tend to be a bit washed.

Xerox Phaser 8400DX

Oye. It's a bit fuzzy. I printed out my Christmas letter on one of these and the photos, while pretty decent, were definitely fuzzy. I'm pretty picky on this kind of thing, most casual users would think it's fine. One thing that annoys me about most reviews is that they print out the test page where they're alreayd optimized.

Now, on-line on PrinterShowcase.com they rated the quality as 8.5 (good).  That's probably a reasonable rating.  But it doesn't really tell you much.  I do know that anything under the 8400 would be something I'd consider unacceptable for work use. At that point, it's just a casual printer for printing out "stuff" that just happens to be in color.

What I love about the Phaser 8x00 series is how easy they are to maintain. They're "solid ink" which means they're wax. You can eat the wax (not that you should but it's just kind of cool).  You just plop in the wax blocks and off you go. Virtually no maintenance required. A true install and forget. I can't say enough nice things about the solid ink Phasers other than their quality of print is not something you'd want to use if graphics quality is a major factor in your decision.

Phaser 6300DN

The Phaser 6300DN is a regular injket printer. Like the 8500, it's a great product and great for office environments.

Xerox 6300DN

Impressive results but not noticebly better than the Xerox 8500. Moreover, I have noticed a tendancy to streak on out put. I notice faint banding here and there on it. The test pages show fine but I see it. Look really closely on the zoom in on the colored checker board and you'll see it too. It's also got a red-ish tint to the whole thing.

Xerox Phaser 6300DN

It is definitely sharper than the Xerox 8500. You can read the text and the colors are more accurate (the Phaser 8400's colors tend to be just way too muted for serious image work)

That said, right now the Phaser 6300DN is my favorite daily printer. It's incredibly fast and reliable. The banding issue is something I'm still a bit concerned about. And it's not as sharp as the 2400dpi specs lead you to believe.  On Printer Show case it comes out with an 8.7 on quality. That is something I'd agree with. It's a tad better than the 8400/8500 in quality.

Now according to PrinterShowcase.com, the Ricoh C410 has the best quality output of any of the printers in their class with a 9.5 rating. But I don't have that printer so I can't really say. The 6300 is around $1300 . It's got marginally better quality than the 8500 which is significantly cheaper.

Canon CLC 1180

I do know the best printer I have is significantly better than these in quality and it's the Canon CLC 1180. But you pay a bundle. Anywhere from $15,000 to $20,000 depending on options. And you will need maintenance agreement because they are very temperamental and engineered like something out of a Dr. Seus cartoon. They are very VERY large. And it's technically listed as a photocopier but nowadays, it's all so blurred because of the multi-function nature of these things.

So how does it do on printing? Well, bear in mind its specs only claim 600dpi. That's important to remember because the lesson I've learned is the specs mean little. Number of colors matters a lot more and I suspect that is why this one is so much better. It's just got the ability to mix up a lot more colors.

Check out the results:

Canon CLC 1180

Canon CLC 1180

Even from the thumbnails you can tell it's significantly better in quality than the others. And those others are no slouches. But this is probably approaching the top end of what you're going to get with current (2006) printer technology. That isn't to say it's the best out there. The Xerox DocuColor 12 is in the same category as well and some have reported it being better. I can't say. I suspect I wouldn't have been able to get it new from Xerox at the price I got the CLC from Canon. In both cases, they're ancient ancient technology.  They're just slowly getting cheaper. But they're both were old technologies 5 years ago but the quality is obvious.

So as far as I can tell you, this is about as good as they get above. You can see the progression in quality as you go up. Where you stop is up to you.

Further reading.