{"id":86,"date":"2013-05-20T19:53:43","date_gmt":"2013-05-20T19:53:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.pyrobrit.co.uk\/wordpress\/?p=86"},"modified":"2013-06-16T09:10:54","modified_gmt":"2013-06-16T09:10:54","slug":"printers-colour-laser","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pyrobrit.co.uk\/wordpress\/2013\/05\/printers-colour-laser\/","title":{"rendered":"Printers &#8211; Colour Laser"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>As some of you may know, I operate a small fireworks business and to keep costs low we would print our own brochures and leaflets.\u00a0 At the beginning this was fine on an inkjet with quality brochure paper.\u00a0 The Canon Pixma with a full set of inks will give 50 A4 double sided prints before the carts run low.<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>When I first looked for a colour laser in 2006, I had one basic requirement.\u00a0 It must print good enough quality for leaflet printing.\u00a0 My expected page print would only be around 1000 pages per year so a toner cartridge would have a long life for me.<\/p>\n<p>Well after a few sample prints I stumped up the cash and purchased a Konica Minolta Magicolour 2550 <img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt=\"\" src=\"http:\/\/img.tomshardware.com\/us\/2007\/07\/27\/one_dozen_color_laser_printers\/km-2550.jpg\" width=\"298\" height=\"283\" \/><\/p>\n<p>I had several reasons:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>They offered cash-back so the printer only cost \u00a3130<\/li>\n<li>It came with\u00a0 3 year warranty<\/li>\n<li>It came with a full set of high capacity toner cartridges. That&#8217;s 4,400 pages<\/li>\n<li>Print quality in colour was more than acceptable<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The first upgrade was to take the memory from 128mb to 384mb using a Kingston memory stick.\u00a0 Much cheaper than the \u00a3450 that Konica was asking for.\u00a0 I regret not purchasing the double sided option as I did quite a few booklet prints with this printer requiring me to flip the paper after printing the first side.<\/p>\n<p>In the seven years that I owned this printer, it worked fautlessly.\u00a0 In that time it used 3 black and 1 cyan toner cartridge.\u00a0 The yellow and magenta were the orginals.\u00a0 One big mistake I made was to purchase an unbranded black toner.\u00a0 The toner was more grey than black and the transfer roller was marked forcing me to use the roller from the empty cartridge.\u00a0 Never again will I attempt to use unbranded toners or inks.\u00a0 I broke my own rule for the final time.<\/p>\n<p>In mid 2012 the printer had almost emptied all four toner carts and the transfer belt was less than 5% life left.\u00a0 To change all this would have cost me \u00a3630 +VAT.\u00a0 Well for that money I could buy a new laser with 7 years of improvements.<\/p>\n<p>It was with a heavy heart that the Konica was exchanged (\u00a3200 cashback) for a Xerox Colorqube 8570DN. Goodbye toner, hello hot wax!!!<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"Xerox ColorQube 8570N \" src=\"http:\/\/www.printerland.co.uk\/images\/Product_Images\/xerox-phaser-8570-front-med.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Again, there are good reasons why I chose this:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>only \u00a3189 after cashback (they collect your old printer)<\/li>\n<li>comes with 3000 pages of ink<\/li>\n<li>ink is really cheap if you know the tricks<\/li>\n<li>it has double sided printing<\/li>\n<li>it is fast to print<\/li>\n<li>gorgeous high contrast colour prints. Not quite picture quality but good enough.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>There are two negatives or maybe two and a bit negatives with this printer.\u00a0 It&#8217;s quite noisy and smells of hot wax after a long print run.\u00a0 That doesn&#8217;t really bother me as I shut the door and go do something else. You cannot hot laminate the colour prints as the colours blend during the laminating process.<\/p>\n<p>I can live with those small niggles as the most important thing to me apart from fast and accurate printing is really cheap consumables.<\/p>\n<p>Beating the greedy manufacturer&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As some of you may know, I operate a small fireworks business and to keep costs low we would print our own brochures and leaflets.\u00a0 At the beginning this was fine on an inkjet with quality brochure paper.\u00a0 The Canon Pixma with a full set of inks will give 50 A4 double sided prints before <a href='https:\/\/www.pyrobrit.co.uk\/wordpress\/2013\/05\/printers-colour-laser\/' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[15,16,18,17],"class_list":["post-86","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computers","tag-konica-minolta","tag-magicolor","tag-phaser","tag-xerox-colorqube","category-11-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pyrobrit.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pyrobrit.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pyrobrit.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pyrobrit.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pyrobrit.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=86"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.pyrobrit.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":99,"href":"https:\/\/www.pyrobrit.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86\/revisions\/99"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pyrobrit.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=86"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pyrobrit.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=86"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pyrobrit.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=86"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}