Color laser printer suggestions

[Steve Rindsberg]

I may have a project for a non-profit (read: Steve’s donating T&M) that’ll involve printing what amounts to personalized/customized greeting cards, maybe letter-size folded in half or thereabouts, printed two sides with both text and photos of artwork.

I’ve got a little Canon inkjet that’d probably handle the job adequately, but I may need (well … want) a bit more speed, so I’m thinking of getting a laser color printer. What I’d need out of it would be:

- Good color quality; not necessarily photo quality, I’ll keep the squirtprinter for photos, but the closer the better.

- Decent drivers (for Win7/64; WinXP, Win8, Mac a plus. Vista? Printer drivers for a credit card? What?) I’ve yet to install drivers for Canon printers or scanners that I had any real complaints about. HP's drivers always seem to find some way of annoying me. Dunno anything about the Brother drivers and don’t think Epson sells a color laser. Others?

- Interface: Parallel, USB, Ethernet … any/all of the above. Would probably try Ethernet first and fall back to USB if the first try fails miserably.

- Paper handling: needs to be able to handle card/cover stock, duplex printed (human-assisted duplexing isn’t duplexing; it’s two simplex runs in my book, so need not apply)

- Durability. I’m not going to pound the thing but if it’s going to break before the first set of cartridges runs out of toner, I will not be a smilin’ camper.

- Cost of consumables: next to the inksquirter, anything will look cheap, so this isn’t critical, but it’d be lovely if it can print b/w decently and on the cheap; I might be able to use it for the main printer in that case.

- Speed? Not critical either. Any color laser will be an order of magnitude faster than the inksplasher, so as the man says, “What? Me worry?”

Other thoughts/considerations? Bring ‘em on, please!