A couple of years ago, I got obsessed with finding a large-format laser printer for our home office, and I bought a used HP ColorJet the size of my Jeep off Craigslist. A few months earlier I had the opportunity to horsetrade a Xerox Phaser 790 from a consulting client, so for a short while, we wound up with two huge printers at the house. I couldn’t get the HP to print reliably with fluctuations in humidity and temperature (whenever we opened the office windows), so I decided to bring it into work where it sits in a dry, A/C-regulated office. It’s been a workhorse ever since, printing design flats on 11×17″ paper every week. The 790 was also sensitive to humidity, although the prints we got were richer in color, and after I brought it to the office and cleaned the fuser drum myself, the output cleared up.

Last week my client emailed me to ask if I would be interested in his Phaser 7300, a circa 2004 large-format unit he was storing in his basement. I remembered the quality of output it was capable of, so I quickly agreed to come and pick it up. It’s a big SOB, weighing in at about 160 pounds, so it’ll be tricky to get in the house, but not as hard as the HP was. And it’ll be a great replacement for the B/W unit we’ve got which is refusing to load paper correctly (and which requires a print server to be available to OS X machines). Perhaps the biggest problem will be where to fit the damn thing.

Big New Honkin Printer

Date posted: September 23, 2013 | Filed under art/design, geek | Leave a Comment »

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