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Guide to Color Laser Printers for Sublimation
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(Click here for Monochrome Laser Printers)
HP Color LaserJet 4500 & 4550 - This printer
has been discontinued for over five years, but it remains the
best choice for color laser sublimation. Please click here for
the volume of information about the HP 4500 & 4550. It's big,
heavy, clunky and sometimes cantankerous, but for putting brilliant
colors on metal it is spectacular.
Overall - ****Four Stars
Konica-Minolta 2300 Series (includes 2300, 2320 and 2350)
-This printer had a number of printer problems which caused Minolta
to end its production pretty rapidly after its initial release.
The worst problem was that the cartridges would seize up and stop
the whole printer, making some amazing noises at the same time.
This was true of regular cartridges and of sublimation cartridges.
we had to ship cartridges and toner separately and ask the user
to put the toner in the cartridges, because if a filled cartridge
got stood on end it would certainly bind up. Before we started
that, we would test a set of cartridges in our shop and - even
though they all tested OK here - none of them would arrive working.
100% failure rate. Even with pour-it-yourself shipping, cartridges
would bind up in mid-run after working successfully for weeks.
There were other printer problems, but needless to say we discontinued
selling SubToner for this printer. We continued to support the
systems we sold, and in some cases we helped the users switch
over to the HP 4500.
No Stars
Konica-Minolta 2400/2500 Series (includes 2400, 2430,
2500, 2530, 2550) - It looks just like the 2300 series,
but it's really entirely different. And the set of printer problems
is quite different also. When this printer was first released
I bought one and ran a dozen test prints before deciding it was
a terrible design for a printer. I took it back to the store.
But within a few months sublimation toners were being introduced
which seemed ideal for this printer, and we gave it another look
and actually did release SubToner for this series of printers.
The first problem we noticed was the cartridges leak, and they
leak directly onto a lens, causing a white streak down the page.
So the lens needs to be cleaned frequently. The printer however,
is totally incapable of printing a large yellow solid without
putting black halftone dots into it. When we discovered that we
discontinued SubToner for those printers. Currently, there are
a handful of users who love the machine and live with its quirks,
We continue to support them with cartridges, refill kits, and
tech support. Factually, the output was very very good, except
for the problem with large yellow solids. Leaky cartridges is
the biggest problem.
*One Star
Dell 1320C - We are currently experimenting with
this machine to see if it can be adapted for sublimation use.
It is a great little printer and we're using one of them to print
our newsletters and invoices. The toner cartrides are tiny, with
a stated yield of 1000 pages. Good news is they are extremely
easy to refill, even in an office environment. We've also got
another 1320C we're using to try formulating SubToners. We have
a lot of work to do on that. The printer would have to be dedicated
to sublimation, and most likely we would have to provide the printer
itself when selling the system since there would have to be some
modification of the developer units to accept sublimation toners.
Stay tuned for more news on this.
Printers we have tested and found to be unsuitable for
sublimation: HP Color LaserJet 1500, 1600, 2500, 2600,
3600, and 4600. Samsung 300, Oki 5600. Incidentally, the current
batch of HP Color LaserJets (2600, 3600 and 4600) are not good
printers, in my opinion. The higher-end HPs are hopefully better,
but I was really disappointed in the current low to midrange HPs.
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Hilton Images, Inc. Finest Quality Laser Sublimation Products