Info on Tektronix printers?

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I received an ad in the mail today from Tektronix about their new Phaser 850 solid ink printers by Xerox. I like the principle and the sample photo they included on plain laser paper was nothing short of terrific. Does anyone know anything about these? Why don't we hear more about them? It is pricey, about $2400, but how fade-resistant are the prints? Any real world experience with this printer and how it might compare with the new Epsons? Thanks.

-- Brad Grant (bradandsteph@home.com), May 16, 2000

Answers

Hi Brad,

I've seen your question on the Imaging-resource website. Since I've had good value from my former questions on another topic, it's my pleasure to see if I can answer yours.

We bought an 850DP two months ago and we're very happy with its features and performance. With 100Mbs Ethernet and the faster CPU (compared with the Phaser 840) it spits out the first page in no time at all. The colours are wonderful but you'll need to experiment if you want colour fidelity. I've started to use Lab mode in Photoshop and find it's quite easy to tweek out colour casts from the scanner using the curves adjustment on the a & b channels.

A lot of our originals are cotton fabrics where the dyes used can cover a much wider colour spectrum than we can ever hope to reproduce with CYMK. I'm pleasantly surprised at how close we get to the original.

The printer is full of smarts about what you can and cannot do -- almost to the point of obsession -- eg if you run low on any ink stick then you cannot print anything at all - it won't let you! With a laser printer you can at least get a few more faded pages when your toner cart is running low.

We are printing a short run newsletter in house and got a bit of a fright over the rate of ink consumption for full colour prints - these were running at about 50% ink coverage of the page whereas all the spec sheets talk about 5% coverage. I have still to learn how we can cut back the ink consumption to the point where there is little loss of print quality. My only consolation was that bubble jet inks on a photograde of paper would have together been even more expensive. We've used Canon 100 gsm laser paper (its 25% heavier than the standard copier paper) for our full colour pages (double sided) and this give a very polished result at a reasonable price for the paper. I'm also trying out a high quality 80 gsm laser paper for the next newsletter.

You can query the printer's use of each ink colour on any of the last 36 jobs by setting up the network with TCP/IP protocols, directing your internet browser at the printer's IP address and dowloading a text file of the data -- very smart!

Don't let a printed page near the fuser roller of a laser printer as the wax melts and smears your image so it's no longer recognisable.

I'm told by the sales rep (who has been a Tektronix specialist for years) that none of the other printer companies has sufficient know how to catch up. Tektronix has been developing and refining the solid ink system for years now. Everyone else has laser technology which they are working on for colour. Because they are using 4 different printing engines (one for each process colour) they have to be almost 4x as fast as the single Tek solid ink engine to match the Tek in speed. The faster they go the more difficult is their registration task. With one engine registration is not an issue.

I've not tested fade resistance but I'd expect if you put a print out in bright sunlight it will eventually fade -- everything else does!

Let me know if you have more specific questions and I'll try to answer them.

Cheers,

John Wolff

-- John Wolff (dtopcomp@wave.co.nz), May 17, 2000.


Hi Brad: We have a Tektronix Solid Ink printer at work - it's an older model and slow as molasses - but I understand the newer ones are much faster. The quality is indeed excellent - it is not, however, comparable to say a Kodak Dye Sub printer for Photographs (sine you placed this question in an imaging forum I'll assume you plan to print pictures).
One oddity about the Tek solid inks - don't plan on placing anything you print with Solid Ink (it's wax) into a copy machine with an auto feeder. The dry ink binds to the glass and stops immediately. It will hang up the autofeed mechanism and crumple up any others in the path. What a mess. If you print a large manual and want to make a Xerox of it you have to-do-one-page-at-a-time.

Des

-- Dan Desjardins (dan.desjardins@viewpix.com), May 17, 2000.

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