Question on type of printer and method for consistent printing.

[pedz]

My wife is starting up a business designing and printing address labels and other products. She is very good with photoshop and has designed many items already and has a couple of online retailers selling her products.

We need to print address label sheets at very high quality and with perfect alignment. She currently uses an Epson R2400 and the print quality is great but the alignment is very inconsistent. She has it laid out in photoshop perfectly and it sometimes prints perfectly, but many times the paper is slightly off line or gets caught and the output is off by a hair. Unfortunately, for printing label sheets a hair matters.

Any advice people have on how to ensure alignment or if there are printers that handle this type of thing much better I would truly appreciate it. As it is she sometimes has to print an order several times before delivering it and that is not going to work long term.

We are very new to anything beyond the prosumer level so would greatly appreciate any advice we can get.

Thank you,
Peter

 

[Prepress_Parasite]

What kind of label paper is she printing on? Sounds like you are running into an issue with a design that needs to bleed off the label. Try onlinelabels.com for a wide variety of label stocks with gutters for allowing bleed on a design. We use several different types on our digital press and have great results.

 

[pedz]

Thanks for the reply.

Haven't looked at addresslabels.com, but it appears to have an excellent variety, will look at what they have. When printing labels that bleed to edge we usually print the entire color across the sheet (between the labels), to do this we limit our designs to solid colors on the edges or patters we can easily repeat.

We are using an epson stylus R2400, it is one of epsons high end ink jet printers. We are printing on mostly 8.5x11 label sheets. We have looked at printers made for label printing but everything we see appears too small and typicall prints on rolls that product one label at a time instead of handling large pages.

What type of label printer are you using? Do you have one that can handle 8.5x11 sheets? Would love to hear what you are using and your experience. Would consider changing equipment if necessary. We already had our current printer for high quality photo printing and were trying to make it work for this purpose.

Thanks again for the reply, really appreciate it.
Peter

 

[Gerhard]

Hi,
I am printing on a HP Color Laserjet 1515 and it works perfect.
Sometimes I need to calibrate but this is OK and it doesn't take too much time.
Regards,
Gerhard

 

[pedz]

Thanks Gerhard, I may look at the HP printers. Do you find that color lasers do as good a job as ink jets (or at least good enough that you would not notice)? Are you printing color address labels with graphics (or something similar)? It may be that we just don't have a very good color laser (konica-minolta magicolor 2430dl).
I guess the question comes down to, will a color laser (in the price range we are talking about here) give sufficiently high quality results to print color labels and sell to customers? It sounds like your experience is yes.

Thanks again,
Peter

 

[Gerhard]

Hp1515

Hp1515

I have both: Inkjet and Laser but presently I prefer the Laser. The quality is good, printing is fast and it looks kind of Offset printing.
I am working in the prepress field. Next to my job I am using my private environment for prepress work as a freelancer for a publishing house and I need to provide proofs for the magazines I layout. So there is also a quite important reliability for color matching involved.
Regards,
Gerhard