I'm looking for a printer for a client of mine, but I'm finding it difficult to search with the particular criteria I need.

The biggest priority is color accuracy (it's a small interior design company with about 3-4 people total). After that, I'm hearing that they don't really care, although I have some things I'd say they need. So here's the wishlist:

- color accuracy
- networkable (wired or wireless - I'd prefer wired)
- scanner

Those are the must-haves as I see it. I would add the following preferences:

- laser
- not HP

I can't stand HP, but I'll go with them if they really have the best product. I know their office lasers are usually good.

Any suggestions?

I'd say that laser is diametrically opposed to color accuracy. Laser printers generally do four-color (CMYK) prints fast, and are tolerable for printing PowerPoint presentations and Google Maps but are laughable for photo prints. Inkjet printers, on the other hand, use many more than four inks and can apply variable amounts of ink to the same spot, assuming you're using a good paper that can absorb the ink. Then there's the sensitive issue of having the printer and paper calibrated properly with your software driver, the phase of the moon, and the betting lines in Las Vegas.

My advice: Brother and others make some lovely and cheap multifunction devices with b&w laser printers and Ethernet jacks. I've got one in my office and I love it. I'd then add a second color printer, inkjet, specifically for tasks where color accuracy matters. They'll probably also want something that can handle larger sheets than US Letter, which is easy to do with inkjet and hard to do with laser.

Which brand? I dunno. Epson seems to be the top dog for photographers on unlimited budgets. I suspect that you should interrogate your clients in more detail about their needs, particularly for print speed, ink and media cost, and then look into whether the drivers are merely a world of crazy, or are in fact a burning pit of despair.

I was automatically going to reply with the same kind of thing, that "good color" and "laser" are contradictions. But then I realized that I hadn't tried color lasers in several years and that it's possible they've improved the color laser technology lately. Googling tells me that there are some color lasers out there that are getting quite good.

I'm sure that no laser could ever get quite as good as a really nice inkjet on glossy photo paper, but maybe with careful calibration, the client might be happy with one of the better color lasers.

Depends on what they need it for. If they only occasionally need something that really truly looks like a color photograph, then they might consider getting both an inkjet for the glossy photo printing, and a laser for the day to day stuff. That's usually my approach.

On the inkjet side, I recently got a Canon Pixma iX6520 which I liked very much, will print full-bleed (borderless) at 11x17 tabloid sizes, if you can find photo paper that big. I like its output.

And never forget paper orientation!

Tom: I like the Wirecutter for home user recommendations, but I think my client needs something that's a little more of a workhorse.

This printer would be replacing an HP laserjet all in one printer. They wouldn't replace it at all because it's working just fine, but annoyingly the scanning functions aren't supported in Windows 7 (typical HP).

I get that laser isn't going to always have the same quality as inkjet, but I'm not really talking about printing on photo paper. I'm mostly talking about printing out a hundred 20 page presentation packets and stuff like that. I just want the color to be as good quality as possible.

Good context to know.

I've had good result with Xerox Phaser solid ink printers. Fast and good color. Not cheap to run, though.

-jk

What's the budget and monthly print volume?

I've got an Oki c5500 color laser that I print presentation material on. Photos look fine. Cheap to run, and reliable.

The budget is fair. I'd say they would spend up to $550 or something like that. I don't, unfortunately, know the volume. It's not low, they do a good amount of printing. I think they'd like the ability to print a heavy amount from it. They do enough black and white printing/copying that they have a full copier in their office.

In our office, we have some clever HP "Digital Senders" which are like scanners but they just generate a PDF and email it to you. Something like this might be useful for your clients, and then you can separate out their printing and scanning needs.

I would really try and find out how many pages they are going to print a month. How old is the office copier maybe they could upgrade that to one that does color?

So keep using that HP printer as a printer and use the saved money to move to a solution using separate scanners?

Scanners and scanner software come in a multitude of forms and capabilities. Find one that does what they need.

Are there a decent number of networked scanners? I've always wondered why those aren't more common. And the Fujitsu kind won't work for them...

High end, but swanky. 60 pages per minute. Plugs into the network.
http://www8.hp.com/us/en/products/scanners/product-detail.html?oid=5409947#!tab=features

Woah! Neat, but yeah, that is almost certainly out of their price range. I've always thought it was odd that there are so few networkable scanners. It seems weird to buy an AIO printer just for the scanning functions. And as much as I like the Scansnap products, they're only good for sheets of paper. Sometimes you need a flatbed.

You can plug a normal, cheap scanner into a Raspberry Pi, and use it as a scanner server. Might be a bit too complex for you and your clients to set up and maintain, but it's always an option.

If the scanner part is the only issue due to win7, might a different scanner application like Vuescan work out for them? It supports loads of scanners, MFPs etc, and (depending on the brand/model) also networked scanning. I've been using it for several years with an very old HP PSC printer. The have trial versions.

I use the pay-for VueScan iOS app on my iPad and it works very well with my networked all-in-one device (Canon MP-990).

Quite happy with the calibre of the VueScan software and the simple clean user interface. I cannot comment on the PC software versions.

Good suggestion. I've used VueScan for ages. I'll have to see if it supports the printer in question. I seem to recall that back in the day it didn't have great support for AIO models...

List of supported scanners
http://www.hamrick.com/vuescan/supported-scanners.html

Matt, I don't know if you still need this advice or if I'm too late, but here's my 2 cents worth:

Last year I've bought a Xerox 6505 network color laser printer. Very happy with it, scans plenty fast too. It's got a sheet feeder and also a duplex printing option. It's one of the best purchases I've ever made and only cost me 350 euro or so. I would buy it again in a heartbeat.