A love/hate relationship with my printer
Written: Mar 21 '01
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Pros: Outstanding print quality, metallic and foil inks are like nothing else on the market.
Cons: cost, speed not a good primary printer.
The Bottom Line: If you can, I would use this printer to augment a laser or good inkjet printer.
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| dkaakd's Full Review: Alps MD-5000P Printer |
I have an ALPS MD5000 printer. I have not purchased the $100 dye-sub upgrade, but I do print scanned images on the photo quality paper from time to time. I have a love, hate relationship with this printer.
I have had this printer for about a year and a half now, it works perfectly about 99% of the time. Occasionally I have to remove a cartridge that has loaded onto the print head incorrectly or pull a piece of paper out that was “eaten” by the paper feed mechanism, but not very often. The color saturation and depth of the black tones are better than any printer I have ever seen from less than $3000. I would rate the black tones up there with the best laser printers on the market, and when you use the glossy overcoat in conjunction with the color control driver the output is outstanding in every way. However, all this comes at a cost. To create this deep tone the printer eats ink like a kid eats chocolate chip cookies. I can use one complete set of color and black cartridges on a 30-page report with graphics. If you are printing photographs you better have plenty of spare ink cassettes on hand.
The only problem I have noticed is that occasionally I see some banding on photographs I print. I think this may be due to a dirty print head, it is not consistent and I have not spent much time trying to fully diagnose the problem as it comes and goes depending on what I am printing.
The foil printing capability is the coolest thing on the planet! I printed about fifty party invitations on dark paper with gold and silver foils and blue, magenta and cyan metallic inks everyone asked me where I had them printed because they were so cool. Of course this came at a cost of about 3 hours of my time and $50 ($1 per invitation) but who’s counting. I am not sure why the ALPS driver will not allow the printing of foil, metallic and regular inks simultaneously. Metallic inks can be mixed and matched, but throw a foil cartridge in the mix and its foil only printing. Regular inks and metallics may be matched, but be careful, you may end up with some unexpected results as inks tend to overlap to create all the required colors.
Print speed is an issue. Since each color must be applied individually the paper must be passed through the printer multiple times by the paper feed mechanism. There has got to be a better way! A 5x7 photograph in high quality mode (2400dpi) can take 10 minutes to print. This is not only inefficient, but it is a repair nightmare in the making. There are way to many moving parts on this printer just waiting to break.
I purchased my MD5000 on Ebay and paid about $250 for it as a refurbished unit. I don’t think I would purchase it if it cost more than $300. As a printer for daily output it is slow and most of the time I don’t need the kind of quality that this printer is truly designed for, but on occasion when I need high quality output this is the printer for me. If you can, I would use this printer to augment a laser or good inkjet printer. It is kind of like having a two-seater convertible sitting in your garage, it is great for zipping around town on a sunny day, but you might not want to drive it every day to work.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 250
Operating System: Windows
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Epinions.com ID:
dkaakd
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Location: Frisco, Texas, USA
Reviews written: 41
Trusted by: 5 members
About Me:
I'm just a dude that lives in Texas.
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