Yes, Laser quality looks great and all, but there is also the factor of ongoing toner costs. For my HP2600n, each colour toner costs $80 US each. For any give project I will consume a good amount of toner so I am looking at $240 cost in just the 3 colour toners every quarter to six months.

However, using an ink jet printer with CISS is far, far, FAR more economical in the long term.

In regards to the quality of print, I find that even on Fast mode, I am getting enough quality to be very satisfied with the way the terrain looks. And if the response from my players is any indication, they could care less if it is printed on high quality or not. The terrain is just too cool for them to care.

Ultimately though it is a decision that only you can make Lotus. If you want to make some cool terrain then the Workforce 30 with CISS sounds like a great way to get started. Epson make good printers and the outlay of $116 seems quite reasonable to me as long as you can easily get the ink bottles to refill the reservoirs.

Alternatively, if quality is your key concern over cost, then go for a laser.

The choice, as always is yours.

I am just curious to whether anyone has used the Workforce 30, reviews are very hit and miss it seems, largely due to the cost of the, so that part is irrellevant, I also wonder if the CISS systems really work for it. Chipped ink always has me worried. For example, my Lexmark z2420 cannot be refilled as Lexmark monitors your ink use over the interwebs, hence why I am getting rid of it. So even if you could get a way to alter the ink levels, the serial number doesn't work and I've heard Lexmark can disable that cartidge!?!?

I gotta agree with Pelthar.

My laser printer has been sitting idle for over a year now. At first, I was all excited about it and swore I was never going to go back to inkjet. However, I went back to using my Canon Pixma iP6600D inkjet for the following reasons:

1. Inkjet prints work better with Craft ROBOs. There are no separate color drums or anything, so the colors are never out of register. I discovered this after the 600th print--on anything thicker than office paper, my Craft ROBO was consistently off by a noticeable amount because the black drum was out of register. Calibration didn't help either. When I set the printer to treat all incoming documents as images, the problem went away, but that brings us to the next item:

2. Laser printers are awesome for text and vector data. Raster data? Not so much, unless it's extremely high resolution. Inkjets deal with raster data far better than laser printers do. It's true--when you need to print photos, a photo printer like the iP6600D is a much better tool for the job. And card models? Closer to photos than spreadsheets or charts.

3. When my inkjet misbehaves, I only need to remove the ink cartridges and clean the head. When my laser printer misbehaves, I have to practically disassemble the whole thing.

4. My inkjet doesn't take 8 minutes to warm up, and it doesn't make my office smell like someone microwaving a box of crayons.

5. I think it was the toner leak that was the straw that broke the camel's back. It took forever to get a clean print after taking care of that...

6. I also can't be arsed to spend $300 on a new set of CMYK toner cartridges. I keep thinking about all of the problems I mentioned above, and it just doesn't seem worth it. Laser printers are still semi-stuck in the days when it costs more to replace the consumables than to buy a new printer. My Pixma iP6600D, on the other hand, cost us something around $300 a few years ago, and a full set of 6 C/PC/M/PM/Y/K carts only sets me back $90--and I usually only have to replace 1-2 carts at a time.

Yeah, I do miss the water-resistance and the ability to get some pretty good images on cheap cardstock, but I don't miss any of the other problems that started to plague our HL-4070CDW within 8 months of purchase. If I want protection from Greasy McCheetofingers for my inkjet prints, there's always a can of Krylon Crystal Clear.

-Mel

Well, I got my printer, and got it all hooked up, but it prints rather dark, so I am messing with my setting to get it to print nice, I am slowly getting there.