Advantages of Postscript in colour Laser printers

[mote_design]

Hi there

I am looking at getting a Colour Laser printer for office admin stuff but also using it for preliminary proofing of printed material. As my business is quite new I am on a very tight busget and am lokoing between The Fuji Xerox C525A (http://www.fxprinters.com.au/displayLocalProduct.do?SELECTED_LOCALIZED_PRODUCT_ ID=87&cid=2&langid=en)and the Lexmark C510 (http://www.lexmark.com/uncomplicate/product/home/41/0,7044,239544855_240326806_245132905_en_0_1,00.htm l). The reason I have introduced the Lexmark into my equation is that it has Postscript, however at the loss of ethernet.

My question is how important Postscript to achieve a reasonable level of colour accuracy and font accuracy. It is my understanding that postscript assists the scalability of fonts as well as colour accuracy? At this kind of price point would I expect to see much difference.

Am I missing some advantages of Postscript?

Thanks in advance for your help.

mote

[PrintDriver]

What is your primary operating system?
What programs do you do your doc layouts in?
What will the workload of the printer be?

The Lexmark is faster and has better image resolution. You can get the network card as an option for the Lexmark.

If you use InDesign or Quark you could possibly need postscript capability to print images correctly. Printing from either of these programs to a non-postscript printer will sometimes give you pixellated images (depending on what you placed for images). You can get around this by printing pdfs.

As for color management...unless you can get and use ICC profiles (and even then) most desktop printers will not print out all PMS colors exactly. As long as you aren't using the proofs as match prints you should be fine with either.

Check specs side by side to see which offers you the paper sizes/thicknesses you want, speed, duty cycle, etc, ad naseum.

Someone may be along at the beginning of the week who has actually used one or the other.

[rickself]

There are a lot of desktop printers today that are both affordable and accurate. And I feel postscript is very important to have. The extra money you put in for postscript now is well worth the aggrevation and grief you will have if you don't.

Do not count out the Epson printers and the HP printers. Both makes have very affordable models and have very true colors. Many commercial printers have either or both of these makes and when you take your proof to the printer, it may make the "color shock" less shocking..."color shock" being the fact that your proof may not look anything like your commercial printers' color proof.