Hi. Can anyone tell me if there are any laser printers that give you offest quality prints. Quality is the major and deciding factor in the purchase.

quitamar

In general, no.

Offset presses provide much better consistency and uniformity, especially for large solids. They allow spot colors, metallics, and other specialty inks that can set pieces apart. And offset presses often have coaters inline to apply aq or uv coatings or varnishes for perfectly uniform and gorgeous "wet" gloss, satin, or matte finishes on a variety of stocks. Inks allow you to obtain a wide variety of beautiful finish qualities from uncoated to a variety of coated stocks, with or without a finish coating. (And for really high end you can have more than CMYK to expand the color gamut, in addition to adding spot colors.)

Now if the need is really strong for a laser (e.g. a huge volume of short runs, or ???) possibly a NexPress with glossing unit or maybe an iGen can produce magazine quality that the typical user can't tell from run-of-the-mill offset press output, but these lasers are high end and expensive, so the need to go laser vs. offset has to be there IMHO.

Thank you for your response and advice. I cant afford those big boys as alternatives either. I do need something at entry-level because Im determined to get into printing. I have 3 desktop printers; 2 inkjet and 1 laser and the laser cannot even print on card which is what I wanted it to do (none of the other 2 either). I need a printer with several notches above these so I can start to market my printing services with a quality product that looks like offset.

Hi, how are you? Because of difference in base technology, there are no offset like Laser printers. Just think of size of molecule of ink and size of a particals of Toner. There will long time till they figure how to mill toner materials to the size of molecule But there is a good news. I am a Business Equipment service engineer went printing- Machines like Xerox Phaser 6250 or 7750 will give you really really good quality of a print, if you can figure out how to coat the jobs like Aqveous, UV or varnish that could be a killer. There some new Ricoh machines that designed to handle thick stock and most likely cheaper to run than Xerox. Forget about canon if majority of the jobs are on 12pt cover. If shopping for a new machine make sure that manufacturer's specs say that it can handle stock of desired thickness. DO NOT BUY salesperson's "don't worry about it - this machine can do it" Because in the event that you will have problems (believe me - you will have problems with coverstock especially coated) service department of that company will bring you very same "manufacturer's spec sheet" and say that machine not designed for it so you can't demand over performance. Also 2 more problems that you should be ready for: 1>>>> Double side printing- because feed mechanism is rubber feed rollers, clutches etc. It will never be perfect backing of the jobs plus with glossy stock some skew is also unavoidable. 2>>> after passing through the fuser paper and any stock will curl up, some stocks more some less that will create more problems printing on other side and in bindary.