Printing, pre-press, publishing and photography services – yesterday, today and tomorrow

Color in reports, promotional material and presentations can be a valuable tool to make them more readable, and to help focus the reader's attention. Color overhead transparencies make a dramatic impact on audiences accustomed to plain black and white. Having color printing done by a print shop or slide-making service bureau can be expensive and time consuming.

Color personal computer printers provide a cost-effective and convenient native. Color printers come in a range of print qualities and printing speeds, both of which are directly related to price. Thirty-page-per-minute color laser printers, which can cost from $30,000 to more than $100,000, can be used to publish customized, high-quality, glossy brochures and catalogues. At the other extreme are color dot matrix printers, priced under $500, but not suitable for most business uses because the images are very grainy and colors have minimal intensity. In between are ink jet and wax transfer printers which provide good quality output at a modest cost.

Color ink jet printers, such as those from Canon, Hewlett Packard and IBM, are available at prices between $500 and $2000, and print at a rate of one to three minutes per page. They produce text that is almost as crisp as laser printers, and work well for spots of color, as well as for images that have few large areas of solid,dark color. Most, however, leave noticeable streaks in large, solid color areas because the print head prints in one-quarter inch swaths which sometimes leave visible edges. These streaks are not noticeable in lighter colors, or in areas that have a patterned background. The lower cost printers from HP create black from a mixture of red, blue and yellow, which sometimes is not as dark as would be desired. Printers like the somewhat more expensive Canon BJC-600, that have a black ink cartridge as well as colored inks, produce better looking output when both color and black text are desired. Even $300 ink jet printers, designed to print only in black, can be used to print spot colors by installing colored ink cartridges and printing each color separately. This, however, can be a time-consuming task, and getting multiple colors aligned is next to impossible.

More expensive, but rapidly declining in price, are thermal wax transfer and dye sublimation printers priced at between $1000 and $5000. They use a multi-colored ribbon, somewhat like a huge dot matrix printer ribbon, that is saturated with special waxes or dyes that are applied to the paper with heat. They produce very brilliant colors, with less streaking or "banding" in solid color areas. While ink jet printers leave visible dots of ink, dye sublimation printers create images that almost look like photographs, with no visible dots of color.

All color printing looks better if special paper is used. This raises the cost, however, with prices of $0.10 to $1.25 per sheet. Specially treated overhead transparencies also reduce the possibility of smudges during handling.

Using color requires software that provides the user with the option to specify where color is to be used, and to send the proper control codes to the printer. Most color printers come with driver software that must be installed on the computer to work properly, and recent versions of Windows, OS/2 and Macintosh word processing, spreadsheet and presentation programs support the commonly available color printers. Older DOS, minicomputer and mainframe software can take advantage of limited color by imbedding appropriate control codes in the data to be printed, either by special keystrokes or by modifying the printing programs.

The relatively high cost of color printers can be spread over a number of users by connecting them to a local area network or a printer-sharing device.

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