Glyphs guys and gals: I’m searching for recommendations on a high-quality monochrome (or color) laser printer to replace my dying Samsung. Would love a postscript 3 printer with 1200 dpi resolution. Looking to use this for font proofing and general use. It needs to be toner-based because I would also use it for gelli plate offset prints. Curious what everyone uses when hard-proofing their font designs… the goal being crisp, black type at all sizes. Do you have a printer you love? Cheers!
A number of years ago I did comparative tests on many printer models from many manufacturers. The best one by a very tiny margin was the OKI C844. It’s a 1200x1200 PPI CMYK printer. It was only barely sharper than my ancient HP P2015 monochrome 1200x1200 PPI printer so I didn’t purchase it.
Did I try the Xerox 2400x2400 PPI printers? Yes I did and they were less sharp than the OKI.
So. It almost doesn’t matter which one you get. I have no hopes that laser/LED printers will get any better in regard to the quality of the output of text. The quality has plateaued for decades.
The OKI C844 is an old design and feels ‘end of life’, and reading the tea leaves I’m not so sure there will ever be a replacement.
Yeah, a bit nervous about an EOL machine. I’m struggling to find something that is reasonably priced. I don’t need a multifunction printer with copying or scanning. Just a simple, high-quality monochrome printer. Preferably with postscript and preferably under 1K.
Maybe what I have done will be helpful. I used this site to print test pages using a file I set up to compare output from several laser printers before buying. TestDrive – they do not require that you buy the printer from them.
The results were surprising in that several allegedly “better” printers weren’t up to printing twelve point samples of fonts-in-progress in the quality I was looking for. The tests helped me to find one that did meet my requirements, a Ricoh Aficio CL4000DN, Adobe Postscript 3 – no longer available given that I bought it about fifteen years ago.
Like many, I am today faced with having to adapt to photopolymer plates. From the research I have done so far, lasers won’t print black enough on transparent films to make a decent negative regardless of the printer resolution. One option would be a pigment-ink based inkjet but the ink is very expensive compared to toner. I have not made a decision yet as to which way to go, for me.
Then there is the issue of Apple’s deprecation of Postscript in newer operating systems. I manually copied the old Ricoh driver to my Sonoma machine and it seems to work OK even though Apple only recognizes it as a Generic Postscript Printer. I don’t know if it uses the driver I installed.
I looked for my test file to post here but can’t find it.
That’s really helpful, thanks, George! There seems to be a serious lack of innovation in the printing industry when it comes to laser printers. I had an Epson 4800 Pro model and the inks clogged relentlessly. And yes, expensive! Epson claims to have solved those problems, but I’m not taking the risk.
I didn’t use a inkjet printer in 10 years but I saw advertisements for ink printers that claim to have costs per page that were comparable to laser. With actual bottles of ink instead of these tiny cartridges. Not sure what brand it was (might be Epson).