Xerography laser printers have they reached its plateau?

[Green Printer]

I have been using laser copier printers since 1989 and do believe that they have plateaued in cost effectiveness. The maintenance to maintain high end quality is getting out of hand. Over the years as the machines get more productive and higher quality imaging it takes weekly if not every 3 or 4 days for the tech to come in and do maintenance.
I think that they have reached a point of being mechanically and software wise too complicated to maintain consistent output. With inkjet heads guaranteed for over 8000 hours of use changes are a coming.
When and if inkjet ever gets to the point of using inks that can be recycled using the ink flotation method you will see toner and the laser printer disappear for production work that the toner base is doing now.

[Keith]

Inkjet will need to do a couple more things first, before it can replace electrophotographic printing: stock flexibility and quality. As for the quality, some argue it's there, but I think it needs to do it with speed and standard settings and any paper. Right now, you have to slow the machine down, use a special paper or a special coating and tweak some settings... My $199 desktop Epson prints beautiful photographs but it does about 3 a minute.

[lfelton]

There are so few commercial inkjets out there, it's pretty difficult for mere end-users like us to separate the hype from the real story.

Are there any that cost less than a million bucks yet? Real physical ones that work with a wide variety of substrates, all to a consistently high level of quality?

Having also run large format inkjets of different types for many years, I know they are pretty fragile and expensive to fix when they go wrong. That's really mature technology, so is new bleeding edge stuff going to be more reliable?

Maybe. I don't know the answers, but am watching with great interest!

[kdw75]

I feel that it will be 5-8 years before inkjets start replacing laser in a big way.