[X4U] Re: Looking For A Good Black-and-white Laser Printer

[Anne-Marie Concepcion]

At 10:15 AM -0800 3/10/05, Randy B.Singer wrote:
>  But that was over a decade ago.  Postscript
>clones are fine now, and apparently they help to keep the price of a
>laser printer down substantially over licensing real Adobe Postscript.
>
>I haven't heard a complaint about a Postscript clone in ages.

If you post about a printing problem to any designer listserv, one of 
the first questions they'll come back with is, "are you using an 
emulated RIP or a "real" Adobe RIP"?

It's a big issue in design circles ... many of whom use Macs ;-) . 
You know, that whole publishing/advertising/creative pro market you 
may have heard about... heh.  Adobe people on forums/listservs almost 
always recommend designers (of any platform) spec actual Adobe 
PostScript 3 RIPs in their laser printers.

However I agree up to a point with Randy, that at least *some* Adobe 
PostScript clones/emulators do perfectly fine with the latest 
fancy-schmancy PS3-only effects like in-RIP transparency flattening. 
I couldn't say if Brother's emulator does well, and would love to 
hear any feedback from any Brother PS RIP-using designers here.

I personallly am in love with OkiData's line of PostScript printers 
which are quite affordable partly because they use their own 
emulator, as Randy said. I saw them at Macworld in SF a couple years 
ago with a cute little C5300 color LED PS-3 (emulated) laser writer. 
The sales guy told me that OkiData was the top-selling line of color 
laser writers for designers in Europe and they were just starting to 
market in the U.S.

They had Illy 10 loaded on a Mac hooked up to the printer so I tried 
"breaking" its output with all sorts of bleeding edge Illustrator 
partially transparent overlays, raster drop shadows on Pantone 
colors, and tiny type rotated and outlined and filled with a pattern 
etc. It output like a champ.

And it's doing great now in my studio with the latest Creative Suite 
and 10.3.8 etc.  BTW I think the street price for the C5300n ("n" for 
network-ready, it has an ethernet port) is about $800... not bad for 
a 4-color (4 toner carts) PostScript 3 laser printer ... letter size. 
I think it's replaced now by the 5400n:
http://www.okidata.com/mkt/html/nf/C5200n-C5400Home.html
  ... shows the same MSRP as the 5300n when I bought it.

I do duplex manually but it has an auto duplexer add-on you can buy. 
It's letter size ... the tabloid extra version is I think around 2K 
but it's a big machine... this one has a nice small footprint.

Oki still hasn't figured out how to get their message to designers or 
Mac users. But they have a few PostScript black and white printers, 
some with Ethernet, duplexing options etc. Here's one:
http://www.okidata.com/mkt/html/nf/B6200Home.html

... shows a suggested price of about $525.00, usually street is 
around 25% less.

Here's their list of all printers that support Mac OS X:
http://www.okidata.com/mkt/html/nf/MacSupport.html

AM
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Anne-Marie "HerGeekness" Concepcion, Fearless Leader
Seneca Design & Training  |  http://www.senecadesign.com/

DesignGeek Central: Tips and Tricks for the Digital Designer
http://www.senecadesign.com/designgeek/
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