Can anyone tell me what the quality is like on the cheap colour lasers, i.e £300 and under, and would the price/performence be better than inkjets?? Cheers in advance Jon

In my expirience - colour lasers will print quicker but not so good as inkjets in quality for photos.

Lasers good for diagrams.

No doubt other ppl will tell you otherwise...

If you plan to do lots of photo printing go for an inkjet, if volume printing, but not masses of photos then go for laser.

Lasers will work out cheaper per page, but when toner (ink) runs out toner is more expensive to replace (but last ages) than in inkjets.

We have an Epson CL900 and the quality, whether colour or B&W beats inkjets into the ground for daily use, including photos.

Being a 3 pass printer, it's quite noisy, so I wouldn't put it in a study, but in a bustling office its not too bad.

Like all printers - the toner supplied on day 1 is about 20% of a normal cartridge. However, once you get over the first £300 pounds worth of new toner it's great and they last forever.

All in all - cheap to buy, expensive to buy toner, but once you have bitten the bullet initially they are well worth it and the ruunning costs are far smaller than inkjet. We should have also gone for the networked version, but the new wireless print server that is on order should solve that nicely.

Don't buy an Epson colour laser, they are absolutely rubbish.

Besides purchasing toners, you need other components which need replacing over time.

The dreaded Epson uses a 'fuser oil roller'. Whether you use the printer often or not, this part needs replacing quite often and costs about £40.

This site...
http://www.inksupply.com/cobra.cfm

...has info on something called Continuous Flow (CFM) for Epson inkjets and I have one of these myself using a C84 Epson printer.

I put this together with 2 other similar printers for a school I do tech support and IT budget planning with and they've found it to be absolutely invaluable and saving around a £600 to a £1,000 by the estimates we came up with on their previous expenditure.


I can vouch for the company and the ink is very good quality (water proof too as I found out by mistake)...


Compared to a laser it's well worth the investment...

I have an inkjet (lexmark) printer, which I use ink refills for. Very easy to refill.

Hoever, the trouble I have is that the print head on the ink cartridges seems to get worn after time, and my printed pages are eventually coming out stripey!

Why is this?

Is there any way to clean the cartridge print head?

How?

Think I'm gonna bin the lexmark and get one of these babies (http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/products/index.html?rb=6433371805&action=c2hvd19wcm9kdWN0X292ZXJ2aWV3&product_uid=73085).

Considering the reviews, it's the best inkjet in that price range (70£).

As I am sure you already understand, inkjets are now capable of very good levels of resolution/printing and the real reason for a laser would be volume and speed.

A relation bought a snazzy laser which paid its way for a major brochure printing job (double side, etc.) but has sat in the corner ever since.

That's exactly why we got one!

We have now binned printed letterheads as they just roll off with the letter in glorious Technicolour.

When we got the Epson CL 900, it was the only one available at a realistic price point, so there may well be others in the market now that compare favorably.

I can only reiterate though, it saves fortunes and it's fast, and the quality is superb.