Need an IPS screen printer!

So I'm an Industrial Design student and I'm starting to get swamped with many projects, presentations and reports due. There's quite a bit of graphics work involved(renderings and such) with concept design presentations so I figured I'm planning on purchasing an IPS display to properly work on my presentations.

Now having a nifty IPS screen is wonderful and all for the color accuracy, but it's useless to me without a printer that can properly reproduce those colors onto a physical medium.

Now so far I've been using an outside printing service to properly print my documents, but it's not exactly cheap per se and I'm dependent on the place, so I'd rather spend a sizeable amount once and be more flexible than to constantly spend for a service.

Does anyone know of any printers that can properly reproduce the colors of an IPS screen? I've tried Pixmas, Officejets and Stylus' and those consumer printers just oversaturate all the colors >.>

 

Try the printer forum in the DPReview camera forums.

You might find something for proofs but for final output you may go back to outside printing services depending on supply costs. You could peek to see what equipment and calibration is used if your outside service is local?

 

Yeah the issue is that I can't afford the outside service >_>

Anyone have any opinion on Xerox's "solid ink" printers?

 

Lol. This is why you set up your monitor to display how it would print out, not the other way around. This is how people print their own photographs.

 

Well the rendering program is color calibrated, but the colors are still oversaturated when printed >_> Not to mention the burning effect of some laser printers on certain types of paper.

Or is there a way to calibrate my monitor down to compensate for oversatured colors the printer chucks out? If play with the RGB settings I'm afraid I might "deneutralize" my neutral hues.

 

There has to be a way to make the screen match the printed output. For example my dad gets all his photos printed by Costco because they are cheap and have top end photo printers. I don't remember exactly what they sent him, but it allowed to to calibrate his pictures displayed on the monitor to the pictures they print out. If he prints something at home he does the same thing.

You say your rendering program is calibrated to the printer already, but that doesn't do a whole lot of good because you can't keep the display out of the mix. There is no overarching neutral baseline display output. You must adjust the output, whether it be through settings on the monitor itself or in software.

You should search google or some photgraphy websites or forums for calibrating your monitor.

 

You probably need to get the ICC profile for your monitor and your printer and need to match those. Or something. I haven't done any of that work myself, but this link may point you in the right direction: Printer Calibration - Calibrate Your Printer and Get the Color You Want

Basically, find appropriate ICC profiles for both your monitor and printer, and things should start working better.

 

So basically any run of the mill printer will do the job?

Well I'm a bit disappointed at the amount of money I've spent on outside printing then >_>

 

I have put down my photography hobby for quite a while but my understanding back then is that only photo printer may/can match the wide gamut of on screen display and you would need to calibrate the whole chain of things. So if your outside printer can produce photo quality prints, it should be ok.

 

Oh they can, just that they charged me an arm to do so lol

Now that people are telling me any run of the mill calibrated printer can do the job I spend more than 1.50$/page, I am a bit frustrated at having spent that money(other than on fancy paper).

Speaking of which, anyone have any recommendations for papers? I know photo paper wouldn't really do the job with full page documents so should I aim for thursty paper or something where the ink doesn't stick as much?

Sorry for sounding so new I just started my graphics impressions class this semester.

 

No, actually you calibrate all devices to a theoretical color space (LAB), not to each other. All devices' color reproduction changes over time, so calibrating once device to another is not a good idea. To do this, you either need a spectrophotometer and a software suite, or a service that will do this for you. You'll need to calibrate the printer for each media you print on, and batches of media will vary. I suggest Real World Color Management if this is truly a big deal for you.

You're looking for an inkjet. Xerox solid ink printers are ok for business graphics, but the closest I'd let them near production is prepress proofing for spot colors. You probably want something like an Epson Stylus Pro 3880, but your budget will probably limit you to something like an R1900, R2880, or R3000. If you just need accuracy and not so much a huge gamut, you'll probably be ok with those. The regular calibration is the big thing here.

You don't want a laser printer. The only laser I've seen with truly nice color was a Canon C1, though some higher end digital presses can be pretty nice. You will not get consistent results with a laser, there are too many variables that fluctuate throughout a run, and between runs.