HP SitePrint

HP gets a lot of crap for home printer quality and ink DRM, but does still have some neat products like this.

The industrial printers for example, especially the PageWide Web Press line are impressive. The T1100 is a huge beast.

Then there are the life science products that can do precision dispensing of fluids for life sciences and drug discovery. Some of them also do individual single live cell dispensing.

(1) As much as people complain, home inkjet printers do a remarkable job of printing high quality art reproductions and photos at low cost relative to alternatives, (Sure offset litho is cheaper… if you are running 10,000 prints)

(2) The key to this using quality materials. You’ve got to use good coated paper (which is relatively expensive.). You can mostly trust OEM ink although I found low-end EcoTank printers use ink that fades in six months although the higher end models like the ET-8550 are better. Look at forums and you will find many versions of “I was trying to print borderless and all I got was this inksplosion” and the common denominator is third party inks. There could be testing of third party inks that proves they are comparable to or even superior too the OEM links but as it is there is no testing because… they target a consumer who doesn’t care.