Tabloid Printer Recommendation Help

I’m working with an architectural client who has closed down their office for daily work for the duration. People only go in if they have to be there. Everyone has been set up to work from home.

In house just now they have a 3’ ink jet plotter., several HP B&W letter sized lasers, and a couple of Konica Minolta BizHub units that can handle up to 12x18 color prints/scans/copies.

The KM BizHubs are going off lease. They are looking for an interim solution to 11x17 color printing at a quality good enough for fine line drawings plus proposals on “plain” paper but with color photos embedded.

The point of interim is that the volumes are down to the point that a new lease on a KM BizHub or similar just makes no sense. At least not until the office is re-opened for more normal operations. Dealing with a PDF onscreen from home, while at times is a pain,it beats driving into the office to print a page or few.

We are looking at 1 or 3 letter/legal Brother all in ones for B&W letter printing and copying. Plus it will scan in color, do multi-page scans, and costs under $200.

Any suggestions? for the 12x18 or maybe 11x17.

This is a market I’ve not looked at for a long time as it falls in the middle of what my clients normally want.

Thanks

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I forgot to mention a strong preference for laser/toner based printers. Printing out 3 copies of a 40 page color proposal in ink can make you want to start investing in ink companies.

HP makes several printers that support 11x17:

https://store.hp.com/us/en/dlp/11x17-color-laser-printers

Prices for B&W start at $110. Prices for color start at $430.

As much as anything I’m asking for ones that people have experience with. My last HP AIO inkjet I took to the dump after a couple of years of frustration. And yes, I know the lasers are very different but people who used one for similar work and are happy with it would be great to know.

Thank you for your help.

Unfortunately, my experience with large-format HP laserjet printers is at least 5 years old. It was a very large all-in-one device (including 5 paper trays and a sorter/stacker/stapler), leased and centrally managed by my employer. They don’t make that model anymore, but it appears that this series is what they’re currently selling to that market:

https://www8.hp.com/us/en/printers/a3-multifunction/pagewidepro-mfp.html

They don’t list prices for these models. You need to contact your sales rep to negotiate terms for purchase or lease. If you can justify a device like this, then you probably don’t need to solicit advice from us - you’d just call your HP rep and arrange for an on-site demo or trial period.

I’d recommend asking in the MacAdmins Slack, if you’re on there. Or maybe the MacEnterprise list.

I use a Canon Pixma ix6500 in my home graphic design office. Pros: up to 12x18 size, very fast, sharp, good color, inexpensive. Cons: thirsty, tiny ink cartridges. I would say it would not be ideal for high volume printing, but if you just need a small number of color plan prints for personal use, you might consider it or a successor unit.

I gave up on HP printers because they have terrible Mac support, incredibly slow and cumbersome software, and a horrible policy of not supporting new OS releases with driver updates. Canons just seem to work.

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I’m looking for the same sort of printer, but it must handle 12"x18" minimum and not use ink.

I currently have an ancient HP LaserJet 5200 (I believe it’s from around 2003), but I can’t get it to work under Big Sur and it may finally be too old.

Does anyone have a recommendation for this? Thanks!

Looking at the spec sheet for the LJ5200 series, it appears that this printer supports PCL5e, PCL6 and PostScript.

Can you use a generic PCL or PS driver with this printer? For example (from my Catalina system):

Screen Shot 2021-08-31 at 17.11.08

If you need more capabilities than the generic driver, then maybe you can get a compatible PPD file. PostScript drivers (and other kinds of drivers for use with CUPS, which macOS uses internally) typically consist of a PPD that describes the printer’s capabilities. If you can’t find a place to download the PPD from HP, maybe you can locate and copy it from another computer where the PostScript driver was successfully installed.

You might also have luck (I haven’t actually tried it) by downloading HP’s open source Linux driver package. If you go to its SourceForge site and look for the latest release, you can download the tar-file package for it.

The installer clearly won’t work, since you’re not running Linux, but if you unpack the archive, you can find a directory full of compressed PPD files:

> ls
hplip-3.21.6.tar.gz

> tar xzf hplip-3.21.6.tar.gz 
> ls
hplip-3.21.6		hplip-3.21.6.tar.gz

> cd hplip-3.21.6
> ls
...
config.sub				plugins
config_usb_printer.py	ppd
configure				pqdiag.py
...

> cd ppd
> ls
classppd	hpcups

> cd hpcups
> ls *5200*
hp-deskjet_5200_series.ppd.gz		hp-laserjet_5200lx.ppd.gz
hp-laserjet_5200-pcl3.ppd.gz		hp-officejet_5200_series.ppd.gz
hp-laserjet_5200l-pcl3.ppd.gz		hp-photosmart_c5200_series.ppd.gz

These files are all compressed (the .gz extension), but the gunzip command will uncompress them:

> gunzip hp-laserjet_5200-pcl3.ppd.gz
> ls *5200*
hp-deskjet_5200_series.ppd.gz		hp-laserjet_5200lx.ppd.gz
hp-laserjet_5200-pcl3.ppd			hp-officejet_5200_series.ppd.gz
hp-laserjet_5200l-pcl3.ppd.gz		hp-photosmart_c5200_series.ppd.gz

Note that the uncompressed file no longer has the .gz extension. You can then try and install the PPD file via the Add printer dialog. I haven’t actually tried it, but the worst that can happen is that it won’t work, in which case you can just delete the broken printer object and try something else.

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We have also been longtime HP users, and we have had our LaserJet for at least 20 years. At my jobs and my husband’s jobs, we’ve used HPs of different sizes and with varying capabilities. But we both have worked in publishing and media for decades. Though I can’t vouch for particular models, I’m confidently recommending the HP brand.

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Thanks for this very detailed response! I’ll try these things and report back. I don’t really need any of the printer features, so a generic driver should work well if it works at all.

Even if I can get the old printer to work though, I’m still interested in replacing it with something more modern. The HP LaserJet 5200 has no automatic duplex (at the largest sizes), and obviously no wifi — two features that would be great to have, if there’s some modern printer that can do all of this. I’ve searched on the various printer company websites but haven’t found the perfect printer. Does anyone know of one?

Thanks!

I did some web searching, but unfortunately, laser printers that can support 12x18 paper are very expensive models, costing several thousand dollars.

It appears that HP’s “tabloid” laser printers all top out at 11x17 paper. At least I couldn’t find one on their web site that mentioned 12x18.

I did find a Xerox model - the VersaLink C9000, but that’s a very expensive enterprise printer. It starts at over $4500 and still needs to have the “two tray module” add on to get a tray that can hold 12x18 paper.

Amazon finds its (discontinued) predecessor, the Phaser 7800, but doesn’t list any sellers. Its comparison chart says that it costs $2500.

Best of luck on your search.

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I’m still searching, because there has to be a less expensive option.

So far, I’m still only seeing Xerox models with 12x18 capacity, but looking more closely at the VersaLink C8000/C9000 brochure, it appears that both of these support 12x18 in one of the two built-in trays, and the C8000 starts at $2700. Still very expensive, but better than $4500+.

Unfortunately, the less expensive C7000 ($1660) only accepts paper up to 11.69x17.

On the plus side, two employers ago, we had a (different series) Xerox office printer. It was very reliable and worked both with generic PS/PCL drivers (how I printed from Linux) in addition to Xerox’s own software drivers (I used the Windows drivers).

It looks like their Mac drivers support macOS 10.14 (Mojave) through 11 (Big Sur).