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General discussion

Printer Recommendations for doing some In-House Advertising

Apr 13, 2006 7:11AM PDT

We've recently started doing advertising for the services we offer in our company. We making the ads mostly in Adobe Photoshop or Microsoft Publisher... there are text and images on the ads. The Photoshop ads we do are typically 600 DPI and look very good at that resolution, so I don't think we need anything that is printing substantially higher than that.

We will print mostly on 8.5"x11" sheets w/ 40 lbs stock paper but may also have the need to do smaller postcards.

We should not be doing more than 5,000 pages a month. We we do print, we will likely do 500 pages at a time and would like to do minimul babysitting (which is a problem now with our current printers, we are constantly monitoring for paper jams or having to feed in more paper).

In a nutshell, we need something with good print quality, moderate speed, and that doesn't require a lot of user intervention. It must also have a network interface, but I figure just about all of them do nowadays. We are limited to $7,000 to spend on printer and accessorries, but realistically I think we can do this for under $4,000 and still get something very good.

Some of the offerings from HP look good (such as the 4600 or 3800) but I have no idea how they compare qualitywise to offerings by other manufactuers.

Discussion is locked

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Care, feeding of such a printer.
Apr 13, 2006 7:20AM PDT
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Check into...
Apr 13, 2006 12:07PM PDT

Visit any decent sized office outlet and compare there. Take even a test page or whatnot via a flash drive, memory card, or floppy, etc. and see what the results are. Depending on your area, business that cater to business may offer a demo or such and any service offering, etc. on the contract or plain sale. Further, I suggest you continue to look at HP, Canon and Minotla of thier laser models. Anything inkjet maybe just too costly when using the amounts you plan to do.

FYI - I've yet to see a decent printer sit idle when its resources become available so beware. It maybe doing more than your advertising tasks, unless you got a lock on it. Sad Anyways, be sure to check for any 500paper trays as an option and the basic tray usually is 250. Last, for heavy media stock, check for ease of movement, the less curves the better, thus a "straight-through" path is better. Instead of a printer doing all the work, a copier(color?) can be a time saver once the orginal is made, so keep that in mind if repeative outputs.

tada -----Willy Happy