Printer for a school paper

[TK-421]

Hi all!

After due deliberation, we at our school have decided to print the school paper ourselves in order to cut down the cost. Raising the money each time we want to put out a paper has been an uphill struggle, and we desperately need a better solution than having it printed professionally.

To that end we've been looking over some printers, but without any real knowledge of the market it's horribly confusing. With that in mind, I rather hoped I might leech off of your superiour insight. Any suggestions, hints, advice that might come in handy?

The paper is fairly simple, 100g A4. We're considering printing the front and back on 170g paper to make a more sturdy cover, but this isn't necessarily a requirement. What is required is that it be able to print in good quality and colour, stack quite a few hundred pages and handle some 20000 prints a month. I'm not sure what sort of price range we're going for, but I'd rather look at quality than price at first.

I've no idea if you can help me, but if we do manage to scrape the money together I'd hate to just do a blind buy. If you know of anywhere I can read what types of printers would be suitable, I'd be very much interested in a link.

Hope you can help.

Regards,
Niels Jakob

 

[superxie]

Epson printer maybe the most suitable!

 

[Sam]

I would agree, Epson printers maybe the best for this.

 

[firefighter4443]

Hey! you're getting into my experience range! I'm printing triple that, but on three printers. I'd say look into an HP Color LaserJet 4700. The quality is pretty good, and we've printed 5x8 cardstock (Index cards without the lines, high gsm, not sure excatly what it was) through Tray 1 (flip down from front). I've never seen this thing jam, and it's quality is pretty darn nice. Also, it can print double sided, and does 30 color ppm. That 170 G paper might not go through the duplexer nicely, but this printer, (and the driver we're using) has a really nice manual duplex option, talks you through it real nice (even pops up a little window on your computer with a simple picture of the printer, and how to pull the half finished print job off and place it in the tray so it comes out properly), and we printed on both sides of those 5x8 cards using that function.

I'm quite satisifed with it. Cartridges cost a decent bit, but they last quite a while. I just printed a supplies status page off of mine:
the black's got 47%% of its estimated life left, after printing 4,552 pages (4036 estimated remaining) at 8.1% coverage;
yellow 's at 93% after 748 pages (9,252 pages left) at 4.9% coverage;
cyan's at 26% left after 12,085 (4,246 estimated remaining) at 1.6% coverage;
and magenta's at 64% left after 6,740 (9252 estimated remaning) at 0.9%.

Overall, it seems like our 4700 is giving us approximately:
9,600 pages per black cartridge
16,300 on cyan
18,700 for magenta
and 10,000 pages for yellow.

Find out what price you can get the printer for, and find the price for your cartridges and you can find yourself a real cost per page. Also, I suggest getting the real, brand new cartridges from HP. I've had some bad luck (quality wise) with remanufactured, although our remanufactured ones might have come from a really bad remanufacturer.

Good luck with your printer hunt, and I hope you get one that works for you.

 

[gatay]

we use HP Color LaserJet 4700. and sastify with it
it give 9,600 pages per black cartridge
16,300 on cyan
18,700 for magenta
and 10,000 pages for yellow.

 

[AnticGod]

I would recommend Canon for you. I think it is a lot better than Epson. Maybe it isn't so cheap but it worth it if you want a quality printer.

 

[updateme]

HP1010 relatively cost effective