Color Printing: Wax vs Laser?

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(Pete Cresswell)

I just did a high school yearbook both ways.

HP's 4600 was awsome - both speed and colorwise.

But I also did some on a TechTronics wax printer.
Wax's quality was good enough for me, and I could live with the speed.
The granularity of color replacement was appealing too - not to mention the
simplicity of those little blobs of wax.

*Seems* like consumables SB less w/wax...but I can't find any studies to confirm
or deny.

Anybody else looked into this?
 
First,I am not a fan of wax type printers.Second,the HP4600 is a printer I
have had very bad luck with.It is also slow with color printing.Quality wise
it isn't bad,but my Minolta 3300 beats its quality by a large margin.It also
prints at 26 pages per minute for both b/w and color!If you found the HP4600
"awesome",try a real color printer,at about the same price!
 
(Pete Cresswell) said:
I just did a high school yearbook both ways.

HP's 4600 was awsome - both speed and colorwise.

But I also did some on a TechTronics wax printer.
Wax's quality was good enough for me, and I could live with the speed.
The granularity of color replacement was appealing too - not to mention the
simplicity of those little blobs of wax.
Click to expand...

Just a comment that if you were using a Tektronix wax printer
(personally, I call'em "crayon printers", but I suppose 'crayon'
is a trademark of somebody else :-), it may be an older model.
The printer division of Tektronix became Xerox at least several
years ago. Newer models may be improved.


Mike
 
RE/
It also
prints at 26 pages per minute for both b/w and color!If you found the HP4600
"awesome",try a real color printer,at about the same price!
Click to expand...

What about per-page consumable costs?
 
RE/
Just a comment that if you were using a Tektronix wax printer
(personally, I call'em "crayon printers", but I suppose 'crayon'
is a trademark of somebody else :-), it may be an older model.
The printer division of Tektronix became Xerox at least several
years ago. Newer models may be improved.
Click to expand...

When I Googled, some Xerox stuff came up that gave that impression too.

"Crayon"....I like it..... If Xerox has improved on TekTronix's
implementation, then I'd *really* be ok with it...bc TekTronix basically did
what I needed done.

$170 for a cartridge for the HP put me off...then I discovered that it needed
*several* of the things....

The crayon refills weren't cheap either - but I figured that with no housing and
no moving parts maybe they'd be cheaper on a per-copy basis than toner cartridge
systems.....but I have nothing to support that hope....
 
I just spent some time with a Xerox rep at a local trade show. He talked up
the 8400 (wax), 24ppm (upto). A three pack of blocks is suggested as $140
cdn, per colour. The big upside (for me) on these machines is a plastic
rapper is whats garbage. Colour laser machines generate a lot of plastic
and metal garbage, toner cartridges and/or bottles, imaging units and/or
image belts, fuser rollers etc. We have an old Tektronics 740 and Minolta
CF1501 with RIP and not one thing from those machines can be recycled.

As for scratching off the wax, the rep had me try. Using my thumb I
couldn't, I did score the paper though.

Best

David
 
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