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Buying Guide: Be Your Own Print Shop
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The central concept of desktop publishing—that you can print material yourself rather than go to a print shop—has been around since the earliest monochrome laser desktop printers. Today, just about any printer can do the job, if you don't care much about output quality. For flyers advertising your lawn-mowing business, for example, most potential customers won't care if the page was obviously printed on a cheap ink jet printer, with ink that smears when it gets wet. But if you need high-quality output with a professional look, and particularly if you want to include color, graphics, and photos, you need to be pickier.
When you're looking for a printer for desktop publishing, keep in mind that high quality for one kind of output doesn't necessarily translate to high quality for other kinds.
Top quality text and line graphics require sharp, well-formed edges. Simple graphics (without gradients) also need vibrant colors and smooth fills for solid areas. More complex graphics need to handle gradients well, so colors change smoothly. Photos, finally, need even better gradient handling and the ability to maintain the subtle differences in shading that show the structure in a cloud, for example. But photos won't suffer much if they can't print sharp edges.
Given these different kinds of output, give some thought to what you need to print. Keep in mind too that for most desktop publishing materials, you don't need true photo quality. Depending on what you're printing, you'll probably want photo quality that would at least match a newspaper photo (for a client newsletter or a trifold brochure on matte paper, for example), or a typical slick magazine (for a one-page handout on glossy paper, for example).
The good news is that a growing number of printers are good enough at all kinds of output—text, graphics, and photos—to print professional-looking materials. Even better, if you tend to print in batches of just two or three hundred copies at a time, the cost per page will be less than you'd pay at your local copy shop.
In most cases, the most important type of output for this kind of application is text quality. All four of the printers included here handle text particularly well, with at least half of the fonts in our text tests qualifying as both easily readable and well formed at 5 points. All four are laser printers, because text printed on an ink jet on most papers is almost always visibly inferior to laser-printed text, and the ink tends to smear when it gets wet. (Some ink jet inks resist smearing better than others, but smear-resistant isn't the same as smear-proof).
Two of the printers—the HP Color LaserJet CP1518ni Printer and Xerox Phaser 6280DN—are in the top tier for color laser graphics quality. Both are also single-function printers. If you prefer an all-in-one (AIO), also known as a multi-function printer (MFP), the other two included here—the HP Color LaserJet CM1312nfi MFP and Xerox Phaser 6180MFP/N—are close to that level for graphics, but a touch below it. Both HP printers are in the top tier for color laser photo quality, with both Xerox printers just below that level. All offer photos that qualify as near photo quality.
If you want to be your own print shop, you need to be selective in selecting a printer. Any of these four printers is a good choice for printing your own marketing materials and other desktop publishing output.
Featured in this Roundup:
HP Color LaserJet CM1312nfi MFP ($499.99 direct)
Squarely aimed at a small office or busy home office, the HP Color LaserJet CM1312nfi MFP combines a low price with high-quality output and a full set of functions. It works as a standalone fax machine and color copier; it includes a network connector and an automatic document feeder (ADF); and it can both scan to a PC and fax from a PC over a network.
HP Color LaserJet CP1518ni Printer ($399.99 direct)
The HP Color LaserJet CP1518ni Printer takes up less space than many ink jets, which makes it small enough to fit comfortably on a desktop to use as a personal printer. Even so, it includes a network connector, so you can share it easily in a small office or on a home network. It can also print directly from PictBridge Cameras and memory cards.
Xerox Phaser 6180MFP/N ($999 direct)
The most expensive printer in this group, the Xerox Phaser 6180MFP/N is also the faster of the two AIOs—essentially tied with the Xerox Phaser 6280 for print speed. In addition to printing high-quality output, it can scan and fax over a network and work as a standalone copier, fax machine, and e-mail sender, complete with a 50-page automatic document feeder (ADF) for multi-page documents.
Xerox Phaser 6280DN ($649 direct)
The Xerox Phaser 6280DN is meant as a color laser workhorse for small offices and workgroups. Along with its high-quality output, it offers reasonably fast speed and excellent paper handling, with a built-in duplexer for printing on both sides of a page plus a 400-sheet input capacity divided into a 250-sheet drawer and a 150-sheet multi-purpose tray.