Solid Ink Colour Printers

[tech_guy]

We're looking to purchase some colour printers for use in our art & D&T departments.

 

Does anyone use or have experience of the solid ink laser type printers? Are they cheaper to run than colour toner laser printers?

 

We've heard that they can be faster than toner lasers.

 

We're looking at the Xerox Phaser 8560N as a possible purchase.

 

Many thanks!

[crt404]

We have six of the Xeroxs ourselves.

 

Beautiful print quality, fast printing, no cartridges to get rid of, cheap, but beware of a few hidden things:

 

- They take over half an hour to switch off, and half hour to warm up from a complete shutdown. They do however have a power save mode for overnight/weekends, which allows a 3 minute warm up

 

- The maintenance kit has to be replaced every 10,000 pages or every 30,000 for the extended life kit. This costs about £75/£130 respectivley, and you have to change it when it says as it has a chip inside that will refuse to work after it has done its duty cycle. As a side note, staff will ignore the reminder to order a maintenance kit and expect you to have one in stock.

 

All this said however, beacuse of the speed, quality of print, and the fact I never have to get rid of cartridges again, I would happily buy them again.

 

Charlie

[tommej]

We have used a couple of xerox 8560ns and they are nice printers. The wax blocks last a long time, cost wise you'll be looking at about the same really. I was hesitant to use remanufactured wax blocks with these printers but saying that we have been testing them in one printer and its going ok.

 

You can also claim a pack of 3 cyan, 3 magenta and 3 yellow blocks when you buy until the 31st december, worth £200~ which is definately a bonus!

 

Bare in mind you can't use these to print letter heads and run them through another printer!!!

 

As above the print quality is really good!

Edited July 21, 2010 by tommej

[dhicks]

Does anyone use or have experience of the solid ink laser type printers?

 

We had one - it produced good-quality colour prints, nice and glossy-looking. As pointed out, don't run prints through another laser printer or laminator after printing on the wax printer, the wax will re-melt and cause a mess (although I'm sure I remember someone saying they used theirs with a laminator and it worked fine - your mileage may vary...). The half-hour startup/shutdown bit is important - we shunted our printer around a fair bit, and it got switched off and on at random sometimes, all of which didn't do it any good and we got a couple of clogged nozzles. After that, the colour quality dropped right down and it was useless. Sat in a permanant location and left to itself with no-one tinkering with it I'm sure they work just fine.

 

--

David Hicks

[crt404]

We bought ours as BTEC coursework printers, so they have not been moved at all.

 

From personal experience, I wouldn't use non-branded ink as I have had the ink blocks split in the printer, and fishing them out is a pain in the ***.