My old laser printer does not like Win X or Ubuntu.
I have found a quite cheap “LED” colour printer (using
toners, not ink), which sounds promising.
Does anyone have anything good/bad to say about a
LED printer?
Last time I looked at printers (must be a few years ago) the answer was that they are the preferred solution if you want to print a lot and can deal with the lower color quality. If you need high quality photo prints then inkjets are still the way to go.
I decided on going with a b&w laser printer (mostly because LED printers weren’t commonly available then, if I’d buy one now I would go for LED). It’s enough for the things we need to print at home (mostly official documents like tax forms) and if I want higher quality prints I just order them.
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Your printer type will depend on what you’re printing, which you haven’t specified.
If you’re printing photos and want quality, I think inkjet is your only choice.
For “office” types of documents, I am very happy with my colour LED printer. It’s even capable of printing photos in medium quality, e.g. for leaflets, invitations and flyers or scientific papers. For photos I own an inkjet printer, but I guess the question was just about laser vs led. I see no benefits of laser printers in this comparison.
I would like to see a fragment of a photo printout from a LED printer, scanned at the highest resolution possible.
I could take a photograph of an older print with my OKI tomorrow, if I find it (I just moved to a new home last week so I cannot guarantee I will find something soon, that’s as well the reason I can not print or scan at the moment, since everything is still in boxes and not connected – this will happen after my holiday). Would that help? What’s the reason, it will not at all differ from a laser printer result of the same quality and wearout. E.g., our big machine in the office always causes stripes in areas of similar colour, which does not happen with my tremendously cheaper OKI 362DN.
That would be nice, but I am interested in seeing the printout up close - to see the actual pattern on the paper. If you can shoot a macro or scan it, that would be great.
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I have a brand new LED printer, a good macro lens, extension rings, and some free time. Bug me on a regular basis until I send something 
Bang on the dot, Morgan
[in Swedish: du är klok som en pudel.]
That is the main reason for my asking about
LED/Laser printers. After all, a Laser is supposed to
produce a nearly parallel, nearly monochromatic,
and coherent beam of light, while LED light beams
are more scattered.
Those beams of light place a dot onto the printer drum,
from where the dot is transferred onto the paper. Would the
two different light source qualities be noticeable on the
final print?
Thank you! (And we didn’t even have to bug you!?!)
I’m always curious. Actually I spent my afternoon trying to find which combination of lens, extension rings, and close-up add-on lens gives the best result(*). It appears that I can about double the “power” of my 100m macro lens with my close-up lenses, but the output isn’t as sharp and to recovering the sharpness more or less gets le the same resolution as the naked lens, so why bother.
(*) Rule 34: I even tried the 100mm macro lens + 65mm of extension rings on one end and two stacked close-up lenses on the other (2D+4D). The surprise was that you could still distinguish something
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I have got about the same results… But since I’m using el-cheapo extension rings, when I stack several the lens alignment isn’t too good and the picture isn’t as sharp as it could. And stacking several doesn’t get you much more power than just one on a 100mm. I get better results with my close-up lenses (that are very-good achrormatic lenses from Canon). Maybe I should try the rings with the cheapo 50mm f1.8.
[quote=“Ofnuts, post:13, topic:1832”]
I’m always curious. Actually I spent my afternoon trying to find which combination of lens, extension rings, and close-up add-on lens gives the best result(*). It appears that I can about double the “power” of my 100m macro lens with my close-up lenses, but the output isn’t as sharp and to recovering the sharpness more or less gets le the same resolution as the naked lens, so why bother.
[/quote]Interesting. I got the best results using both a diopter (dcr250) & extension tubes.
If you have a macro lens, once you hit 1:1 you need to reverse it with extension tubes to maintain sharpness.
I received a sample print from a color “LED laser” printer in today’s mail. I am very disappointed 
, since my hopes were set much higher.
@Morgan_Hardwood is this fraction sufficient? (50mm lens plus a Raynox MSN.202)
Oh, it is not the dots that made me disappointed; what I did not like were streaks all over areas that were supposed to be even.
Our big and expensive machine (laser) does such stripes as well recently. My home printer (led) doesn’t do it. I guess it’s not a laser vs led question.
Thank you for the samples!