Laser Printing

[Justinr]

I'm planning a small print run book which I want to get out in time for Christmas. It will be 50 images of local people and events that I have taken during the past year all in B&W desaturated from colour.

The images look as I want them to printed on to Permajet Gloss via inkjet but this is obviously far too slow and expensive. I approached a company that does digital printing of small orders but to be honest the mono print sample they sent was abysmal and I later found out that they use an LED printer thinking it's Gods gift.

This leaves me with laser printing and I read that printing at 1200 x 1200 dpi onto 160g gloss can produce excellent results. Has anyone else had experience of this method and were they happy with what could be obtained? I should point out that that I am not producing a weighty art book for the coffee table but I am looking for a better finish than the average village news letter.

[Dick Roadnight]

Do you want A4 folded to A5, or A3 folded to A4, or what size?

Are the pictures portrait or landscape?

Are you contemplating simple staples (like the village newsletter) or what?

There is a firm in Chipping Norton/Oxfordshire/UK that would do it for you from a CD (it has, unfortunately changed hands recently).

Ask your local Canon rep who has A3 printers (with fold and stitch) in you area.

Where are you? (I see you spell Colour with  a "u", so you might be on the right side of the pond.

You could also ask them for a colour sample/quote... if colour matching is not important colour laser prints might be OK.

[Justinr]

Well I used to live just down the road from you (Witney then Woodford Halse) but now resident in Tipperary so right on the edge of the pond.  

The company I originally intended to use were these guys - http://www.printondemand-worldwide.com who have one of the better, more helpful websites and attitudes that I've come across but going by the sample they sent through they cannot print mono to an acceptable quality although the colour images were a lot better. Perhaps they just chose a bad file but if they were unaware of this then what else will be overlooked? It made me wonder just how good is Laser printing? I'm not expecting it to match web offset or even my Epson and Canon inkjets, just be clean and presentable with a good graduation of tone.

I'm off to see a company in Limerick on Monday that has an all singing all dancing Ricoch machine who are willing to trial print some images on various papers. If we can come to a deal then I'll be printing A4 and having them bound separately which I also need to organise but am not sure whether to go spiral or perfect bound. The former is dearer but at least the book can be opened up completely without damaging the spine.

This book lark ain't easy!

[Dick Roadnight]

It made me wonder just how good is Laser printing? I'm not expecting it to match web offset or even my Epson and Canon inkjets, just be clean and presentable with a good graduation of tone.

I'm off to see a company in Limerick on Monday that has an all singing all dancing Ricoch machine who are willing to trial print some images on various papers.

I think Canon make the best laser printers.

You need to tailor the file to the printer/paper... like doing a profile for colour.
It might be that a competent operator could adjust brightness/contrast for a single image, but for a book you need to get the file optimized for each picture, so take a laptop with you and be prepared to filter and re-frig each colour picture, and re-desaturated each picture to optimize it for a particular laser printer.

All most people know about Tipperary is that it is a long way... but that might depend where you start.

[Justinr]

Desaturation was almost the first part of the job, after channel cleaning and cropping. They have been worked on as B&W images rather than simple conversions of colour so it's a question of finding a paper and printer settings that best represent what I have. Still, the guy sounded willing to try so that's a good start.

Four miles to Tipperary town (as opposed to Co Tipperary) in my case but did you know that Piccadilly and Leicester Square referred to in the song were notorious red light districts at the time of the song's writing? Puts a whole new meaning on the lyrics!

[Sven W]

When you talk about Laser here, it should mean "digital presses" (compared to offset presses).
Systems like HP Indigo or Xerox Nuvera. Very sophisticated laser-printers for low-volume, high-quality printing.
Not desktop/office laserprinters. And I've seldom seen any of these desktop-printers produce descent B&W.
On the other hand, it's rare even for the bigger digital press-systems.

Maybe someone on this forum had deeper knowledge about why inkjet and offset can produce far better B&W than digital presses.

/Sven

[Geoff Wittig]

When you talk about Laser here, it should mean "digital presses" (compared to offset presses).
Systems like HP Indigo or Xerox Nuvera. Very sophisticated laser-printers for low-volume, high-quality printing.
Not desktop/office laserprinters. And I've seldom seen any of these desktop-printers produce descent B&W.
On the other hand, it's rare even for the bigger digital press-systems.

Maybe someone on this forum had deeper knowledge about why inkjet and offset can produce far better B&W than digital presses.

/Sven

That's easy. Inkjets nowadays generally use at least 2 strengths of grey plus black ink for black & white prints, which permits lots of depth and nuance. High quality offset printing does something analogous with duotones/tritones, using multiple plates and passes to provide a rich and subtle black & white reproduction. (Just look at black & white reproductions in any photo book circa 1950 to see how dreadful offset printing with a single black plate can be).

Laser printers by comparison are handicapped. Most of them have 3 color cartridges and a single black cartridge. Black & white prints will be made using only the black cartridge, which yields the same problems with poor d-max, coarse dot structure and overall crudity that you get with an inkjet using only a single black ink. I imagine it's possible to get some color toner onto the page, but then you'll get metameric failure and color crossovers analogous to those bedeviling black & white inkjet prints made with mixtures of color inks.

I've had calendars printed on a high-end laser printer. The only images that work are relatively 'busy' photographs that hide the printer's limitations (relatively coarse dithering algorithms, serious problems with banding in smooth gradients).

[Sven W]

Yes that´s all true Geoff, but how come that you can print B&W quite ok as cmyk on an offsetpress (not duo- or tritone)
but not on a digital press (highend laser) ?

/Sven

[Geoff Wittig]

Define "quite okay".

Really good web offset printing with stochastic screening and an extremely fine line-screen can indeed look pretty darned good nowadays, mostly because of the extremely high resolution and the sophisticated digital/stochastic dithering algorithms of high-end presses like the megabux Heidelberg units. Of course, they'll look that much better as duotones or tritones....

[Jeremy Roussak]

I'm planning a small print run book which I want to get out in time for Christmas. It will be 50 images of local people and events that I have taken during the past year all in B&W desaturated from colour.

The images look as I want them to printed on to Permajet Gloss via inkjet but this is obviously far too slow and expensive. I approached a company that does digital printing of small orders but to be honest the mono print sample they sent was abysmal and I later found out that they use an LED printer thinking it's Gods gift.

This leaves me with laser printing and I read that printing at 1200 x 1200 dpi onto 160g gloss can produce excellent results. Has anyone else had experience of this method and were they happy with what could be obtained? I should point out that that I am not producing a weighty art book for the coffee table but I am looking for a better finish than the average village news letter.

What kind of price were you thinking about? You might find that one of the online book printers (Blurb, Photobox etc) would fit the bill. They're worth a look, anyway.

Jeremy

[Sven W]

Define "quite okay".

Really good web offset printing with stochastic screening and an extremely fine line-screen can indeed look pretty darned good nowadays, mostly because of the extremely high resolution and the sophisticated digital/stochastic dithering algorithms of high-end presses like the megabux Heidelberg units. Of course, they'll look that much better as duotones or tritones....

Well, I meant this sort of classification for monochrome images by printing presses (not inkjet or digital c-prints):
1. As duo- or tritone web offset
2. As cmyk web offset
3. As cmyk laser/digital press

I just wondered why there is a difference in quality between 2 and 3.
That's all....

/Sven

[Justinr]

Some interesting information coming out here and I'll be in a better position to judge tomorrows session with the Rioch so thanks all and I'll let you know how I get on.

BTW. I think it worth noting that there is a difference between laser printing and LED printing although they are usually spoken of as being the same.

Jeremy, I looked up one such company and they came back at around €12 per book. Printondemand wanted around €2.  Basically I'll need to make a decent return retailing at the €10-12 mark, which may, after all, not be possible.

[Justinr]

All quite depressing.

The Ricoh machine demonstrated was only 1200 x 600 dpi and displayed various banding and one or two other artefacts. Any noise in the original file seemed to be greatly exaggerated and nothing was crisp. But the biggest let down was the lack of impact, all the images were mushy and uninteresting whatever the subject and even though several paper types were tried there was no WOW! factor in any of them. They were all plain Janes rather than pouting beauties. To be fair to the company I think they realised that what passed for 'photo quality' in the minds of the machine makers marketing department was nothing of the sort in real life.

Well that's me off back to the drawing board.

[neile]

Have you considered doing this through Blurb.com? This type of small run book is exactly their target.

Neil

[John Nollendorfs]

1200x600 is not going to get you the kind of quality you are after! I've been using KonicaMinolta Magic Color series printers with 9600, and getting pretty darn good results for note cards printed at 7x10 size. (image of 4x6 inches)

I've  had their latest iteration of their low end machine 4650EN, for several months, and find it's quality is the best of the three machines I've owned in the past 10 years. You should be able to find it for sale in the $400 range, complete with toner carts. It's a monster of a machine, compared to ink jets though!

Paper choice is obviously critical. And you will find the toner on the paper has a "matte" look.

John Nollendorfs