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Comment by bolotye | Hacker News Reader

Color laser has actually pretty terrible color, especially for photos, prints or any output that requires any sort of vibrancy or color accuracy.

Epson makes some excellent inkjet printers. The cartridge based ones are expensive to run, but their eco tank offerings have pretty good output and are cheap enough to run - still no eco tank model is photo print grade, but the 5 ink version isn’t bad and not too expensive.

Ink is a messy, nasty media, but is almost unavoidable if you want good to great color quality.

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If you want great color you should get a dye sublimination photo printer instead, nothing beats the finish on those, and they're colorfast in water.

Only trick is they recently tend to run small for producing 4x6s for frames or scrapbooking. Letter or A4 sizes are less common and more expensive. I'd check eBay to be honest, for used stuff like the Sony UP75D.

My color laser provided significantly better color than any of the inkjet I have used. It provided nice even color. Whereas the inkjet color was often banded.

Yeah most inkjet printers still suck. The Epson mid range to high end tend to be decent to great. The photo printers also have archival grade inks, some of which are rated for 80 years.

I wouldn't buy a general consumer inkjet though.

High-end art/photo printers have the same ink cost problem as consumer inkjets, but on an industrial scale.

I used to have an Epson A2 printer and a full set of inks cost more than £500.

You can get ink reservoir systems but they're messy and rather fragile. Although they do pay for themselves if you're printing at scale.

I have had a couple of Epson “pro-level” inkjets.

The photos they print are awesome.

But I won’t buy another one. I would tend to print in “batches”; sometimes, months apart.

Epsons don’t sit well. Each printing session would start with a whole bunch of “throat-clearing.” I’d waste a ton of ink, just cleaning the heads.

Also, the printers required a significant amount of desk space.

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