Plotter or Printer?

A high speed color laser printer.

Any suggestions on brand, model or price would be helpful.

Hewlett Packard makes an inkjet printer in the 11" X 17" size for less than $500. Mine is an Officejet 7310 All-in-One. Inkjet ink and photographic paper ain't real cheap, but you can make a lot of prints before you pay for a large format plotter.

How long you figure it would take to make 300 11"x17" prints Bill? Any idea what total costs per print factoring in ink and paper? Seems like with my HP C6380, you make three little prints, and you're out of one cartridge color or another.

I might be exaggerating, but after a few experiments I returned to just going to CVS and making what few prints I might, as the cost for ink was right high.

I also had a problem that I haven't revisited with the scan function of the 6380. I scanned 22 pages of a manuscript, and then all went to hell between the computer and the scanner function.

Anyway I am grateful to clevis1 for posting the question, and to you Bill for responding, for it would be useful for me to know a bit more about these things.

Take a look here...
http://www.digitalphotopro.com/gear/printers.html

A local friend was into something similar, but with a twist.

He had a computer on site so that parents and all could review the pics he took and choose which ones they wanted, so only printed the actual copies needed in th esize that was desired.

He would also sell copies of the discs with pictures on (but at lower resolution) so that if the customer wanted photo quality they still had to contact (and pay) him for the professional look. (The pictures were inset with a caption of time and date so that he could exactly recover the correct reprint.)

He reported good sales on the day, but often the follow-up sales exceeded the initial demand. He only ever used printers, and had a selection of them to support the necessary speed of printing and reliability issues.

He was doing sports tournaments, and "Santa" pictures. Got tremendous follow up on the Santa stuff for grandparents and relatives.

He was a desing engineer, so had developed and used a good catalogue and recording method so that he could accurately recover the correct picture.

I currently do it where you can preview the shots on laptops and then order, and sales are ok at best. I also do individual and team photos onto a DVD. Residual sales are minimal. People like to spend money while they are in the moment. This way, with the 11x17's they are what they are and can be purchased on the spot without having to wait. I witnessed a guy who did this at one of our tournaments and I would say he made, on the low end, $3000. He shot most of his shots on Friday and brought back the prints on Saturday. By Saturday afternoon there were only a handful of prints left and he was getting orders for more. This heightened my curiosity of, if a laser printer or a plotter would be best as far as ink and paper cost. It is also an issue that if I get back to the hotel at 9p.m., I have to have these printed by the next day. Ive seen some Konica Minolta's and an H.P. that are relatively inexpensive, but they really don't tell you the ink yield for, say, 300 photos.

A plotter draws lines, a printer does a (very high rez ) dot matrix. A plotter is great for blue prints and other line drawings, but is NOT good for foto's you need a high dot per inch printer such as an epson pro ink jet. ( I have sold prints in an art gallery made on an epson Pro 5500 ink jet using archival inks ) there are many good printers that will do the job for UNDER 1000 dollars and will take paper up to 13 inches wide. If you would like to see samples of my fotografy go to www.fotografyplus.com ). You may contact me at livagain1@yahoo.com

HLG

A plotter would not work, but a large format ink jet printer or color laser printer would work. 2-3 11x17 prints per kid would cost quite a lot in ink jet ink, so a color laser printer would be more economical. Xerox, I think makes unit with "crayons" as ink which would be worth looking into, I think.

If I were doing this, I'd have one of the new high speed cameras that takes 30 frames or so in a burst, so you can pick the best action shot.

Shooting at 10 frames per second. One game on average I take 600-800 pix. Takes forever to pick through.

I dunno what kind of quality you are after, but if your after high quality prints I would go for Canon ipf 5100, I am not sure if it is quick enough for you, but you can find all the specs here: Printer link. My girlfriend, a photogropher herself, uses this one, and she's very happy with it! Top quality, and quick for an ink jet, it is however a beast of a printer, so it takes alot of space! You can also use paper-rolls, which is alot cheper than paper sheets.

Hello Thornpile,

Just viewed that IPF 5100 Canon Inkjet Printer.

Looks to be everything you said, very classy! But of course quality is subjective so a 'demo' print would be well worth the asking.

It is a pretty small 'form size' compared to a 'large format' Laser Printer as well.

As I said in my post above, the larger format down involve a whole lot of weight, at 117 Lbs.

To the OP (Original Poster) you should not be put off by this weight at all, a similar quality Laser, and I doubt that it would ever be as good a quality as this, and would be perhaps twice the weight? Lasers are very good at general office printing. But quite poor at photo printing. In general.

It is well worth spending half a day or so to completely understand how this is put together, and then perhaps to go on to some site I have listed which may have Laser printers to compare their output?........

Or perhaps do your own search with the name of this printer......... You could then choose a place near to your home rather than on the other side of the Country?

Hear is some search results to be going on with for this machine.

You have to bare in mind it is a 'professional' printer when you see the price of around $1650.00.

Unless you plan on leaving it in a van or large car, in a garage, the weight could become a problem. and (entirely my own opinion).> > > > >......I am not sure how much bumping around this machine will take and still produce good pictures?

But a brilliant machine by what I have seen.

My advice is not to rush in to buying a printer. Though this Canon printer does seem to be very well specified and personally I would choose this without doubt!

Thank you Thornpile for the link to this printer

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Nowadays there are no such things as "plotters", they are all large format printers (usually inkjet based). but back in the day a plotter actually was an X-Y servo table with an actual ink pen that drew a vector image onto paper a line at a time, and they were totally unsuitable for photographic (bitmapped) images.

Are you asking if you should chose between a color laser, or a wax/dye sublimation or an inkjet based printer? Now that is an entirely different question. It will depend on the quality and the life of the image that you want vs how much you want to spend. Color laser printers have EXCELLENT image quality and lifespan, but they are quite slow and expensive both to buy and to fill with toner. Wax/dye sublimation systems are equal to laser printers in image quality and longevity, and are at least as expensive and at least as slow as color lasers, if not moreso. I am not sure if any are still sold for that reason.

Inkjet quality won't QUITE be as good as a laser depending on the ink and paper chosen, but it can be pretty darn good, and depending on the ink the manufacturer uses it might stand up to UV exposure without fading, or it might not. Generally dye based inks have the best initial quality but they tend to fade. pigment based inks don't look as good initially, at least on photo paper because photo paper is designed to absorb the ink, but pigment based inks tend to sit on top of the paper.

Inkjets will be much cheaper to buy and to operate and will generally be much faster than laser printers. Epson printers have very good image quality and resolution but they have a fixed printhead which means that if the printer is allowed to sit for long periods without use, ink residue will dry on the printhead and clog it up and removing it to clean it is not really an option unless you like performing brain surgery on the printer. Canon's printers are at least as good as Epson and do not suffer from the same problems of printhead clogging.

If you go the inkjet route, there are two things to look for. look for a printer that has separate ink tanks for each color so you can replace one color at a time. And look for one that does not have a small PCB/chip in the ink tank. Those chips are eproms that the printer records the number of print cycles that have been used on the cartridge, they also have a cryptographic key that designates them as being OEM cartridges vs remanufactured or off brand cartridges. Often the printer "estimates" (usually on the low side) how much ink is in the cartridge based on how many ink passes that have been made and will record "empty" into the eprom, regardless if there is still ink in the cartridge or not.

HP has been real bad about selling very small cartridges and then deciding they are empty early, forcing you to go buy yet more cartridges, and since they all have chips in them, you can't buy generic brand cartridges for them you HAVE to buy HP's, and you can't refill them either. Other brands have followed suit. I've gotten real sour on HP of late. They used to be the gold standard for printers and plotters, but that has gone the way of the dinosaur or the dodo. Now it is all about the "Gillette" business model, where they give the printer away for basically below cost then they bend you over and rape you brutally when it comes time to buy supplies for it.

BTW, large format (ANSI B size/tabloid/11"x17") laser printers are pretty expensive and not exactly "thick on the ground", but large format ink jets can be had fairly inexpensively.

While I do agree with Baby Bear's assessments on printers, there potentially a simpler option. You could let somebody like Kinkos or Staples handle the high volume printing. This way they handle the machine maintenance, too.

when you do it yourself you have more control over your work

and staples or kinkos is OK for simple stuff but for high quality art work you need to go to a photo quality printer

Quite true, doing it yourself has many advantages, quality control being a large part of it. But the OP stated a fairly large volume of 100-300 pictures for just one event. The OP was also concerned with the speed of production. While Kinko's and Staple's may be a bad choice in his area for his quality standards, finding a suitable local merchant still has advantages.

Hello redfred,

I appreciate the mention my friend.

As has been said, that form factor is not exactly 'flowing off the shelves, least ways not for the average Joe'?

Regards.

Plotters are normally used for Graphs & are very slow & not to print pictures.

Printers are very fast & are for printing images to the best of resolution.

I don't think if anybody can print a picture with plotter.

May be ; I have never tried to

Hello to all,

Just a quick "thank you" for the GA's. Many thanks again!

Plotters are able to meet the need of many companies to produce large print jobs on a regular basis. Plotters with you get what you pay, and because the range of plotters is wide, you must be sure your business needs and requirements in the comparison and selection Plotters.