Buying your first commercial color printers can be a nerve wracking process. Everyone says to base your decision on what you need, but maybe you’re not quite sure what you need. It’s important to figure that out first, however. Anyone choosing among commercial color printers is faced with a vast array of choices and price ranges. Even a small business needs to rely on being able to make multiple copies of color documents, and to rely on the last one printed out being as high quality as the first.
Like your regular business printer, the two main kinds of commercial color printers are laser and inkjet.
Decide the type of printer
An inkjet printer works just like it sounds: by firing tiny dots of ink onto paper. Laser printers on the other hand are more complicated and more expensive. Once you narrow your search for commercial color printers down to e ither laser or inkjet, scope out the market. What are the latest models, what are their features, and how much do they cost?
If you require high-end commercial color printing, you can spend thousands of dollars, but if that’s what it takes to do the job you need, then your decision is made. Do not automatically rule out used high-end commercial color printers. Graphic design companies that upgrade regularly may be a good source of last year’s top commercial color business printer that will do your work just fine. Just make sure that you can easily buy the right ink for it and parts if it should need repair.
An online or personal visit to a commercial printing store is in order. You need to discuss your requirements and ask for advice. Write down your deal-breaker features and stick to them. Of course salesmen will try to get you to buy more than you need, but extra $100 gadgets add up fast. If you’re going for a commercial inkjet business printer, thoroughly check out the cost of ink cartridges because they vary quite a bit between manufacturers. It may be worth it in the long run to buy a more expensive printer if the replacement ink cartridges last longer or are less expensive on a per print basis.
Photographs
If you need 1200 dpi and up print resolution for photographs or if you’re printing color on regular stock paper, you might consider an offset duplicator, which is a mini version of an offset lithographic press that can print at sizes up to 11 x 17 inches. If you need to print larger than 11 x 17, or in quantities over 10,000, you should consider an offset press that is sheet-fed. The general rule of thumb is rather obvious: buy the smallest press that can readily handle the printing you need done.
Be aware that the skill of those involved in the actual printing is a prerequisite to a decent print job on commercial color printers. An awesome business printer operated by people who don’t have the skills necessary to operate the printer properly will produce mediocre results. Printing is still complex enough that someone at your business needs to put his or her heart and soul into learning how to best operate the commercial color printers you choose. When you are evaluating the output of some of your candidate printers, look for clean, bright colors, focused and clear text, smooth, densely colored solid areas, and images that are focused.
There is still some truth to the old saying, that of quality, speed, and price, you can have only two, so you need to determine which of these two are of highest priority for your business. If you visit a business that sells commercial color printers, take with you an example of a piece of printing with quality you want to be able to achieve.
Tips and tricks
Clearly, choosing among commercial color printers takes some time and some research. But your business isn’t going to stop until you have your commercial color printers in place. There are a number of tips and tricks you can use to get the best possible printing out of the business printers you already have.
Color printers print several printer dots for each pixel. (This is not true for dye sublimation printers, which can make any dot any color.) Inkjet business printers usually have four to six colors of ink, and that’s all they can print. To create a pixel in a color that is not one of the four or six colors of ink the printer has, it uses a process called dithering, in which it takes several ink dots to create each pixel.
Since multiple dots of ink simulate the color of only one image pixel, the printer’s “real” image resolution is actually only some fraction of the dpi number claimed by the printer. Ink dots and pixels are different things, and that’s why you need a 1200 (dots of ink) dpi to print a 250 (pixel) dpi image. If you attempt higher resolution, you’re limiting the pixel size, which allows fewer ink dots, and hence fewer possible colors.
Inkjet
With inkjet business printers, there is no need to create CMYK images, since inkjet printers are designed to work with RGB images. The printer driver software “calculates” CMYK values from the RGB image, and uses dithering to get the requisite combinations from the available ink colors. With an inkjet business printer, “photo quality” means 250 dpi or so. Instead of more spatial resolution, inkjet printers need a superior way of reproducing the color of a pixel on a very small bit of paper. Using more pixels that are smaller won’t work, because it will just limit the number of ink dots that can be used to represent one pixel, and this degrades color quality.
The bottom line for getting the most from your inkjet business printers while you’re waiting for your commercial color printers is scaling images to print at 240 pixels per inch to 300 pixels per inch. Use the high quality mode on high quality paper. When it comes to line art in two color black and white (no gray, dithering, or halftones), however, the printer really can use its full resolution because pixels and ink dots can be made to correspond 1:1. These images can be printed at 600 dpi, and you’ll get very good results this way. Text will need 300 dpi resolution for commercial quality work to maintain the necessary line sharpness.
The image being printed needs to be of high enough quality as well. If you send your business printer enormous images, it will slow down printing considerably because the printer has to receive all those pixels and perform the dithering operation. It is important that if you are printing an image that is bigger than the original photo, yo u should increase the scanning resolution accordingly, in the same ratio the image is scaled up. So if you scale up your photo by a factor of two, scale up the scanning resolution by a factor of two.
Photo quality
Today, photo quality is a reality even with non commercial color printers like inkjet printers. There is often quite a bit you can do to get the most out of your existing printers while you wait for your commercial color printers to arrive. And of course, you have the option of contracting out the printing altogether, but that will involve another round of evaluating, discussing, and choosing.
Switching to commercial color printers is a big step and a big investment, but if you take the time necessary to precisely define your needs and determine the best machines to meet them, you can be confident that you’ll make a choice that will showcase your work to its best advantage.