Discussion: What kind of printer?

Our club is hosting the Western Canadian Champs this year. In the past we have used offset printed maps and a plotter to competition courses. Unfortunately, that is not an option this year so we will have to use a printer of some sort. Any recommendations? Laser vs inkjet?
Brands? Costs? What have people found works well? We need it to print 11x17 at least.

Luke....use offset printing....Beware the temptations of the dark side.

Talk to the Alberta people and see if you can contract to have the maps done on their laser printer. 11x17 is doable, anything beyond that gets somewhat unlikely.

I use an HP cp1700 inkjet to overprint courses on offset maps. Works OK and handles 14" wide by however long you want. You do have to chuck a few that don't register right. Definitely make sure you check EVERY SINGLE ONE. The one person that gets a bad one will be really pissed.

One thing I've found out is that if you put the registration marks way off on the corners of the offset map, the overprint registration marks may not print right, even though the sheet is properly registered. Better to stick them an inch or so in so the paper is firmly held in the roller when they print.

For the US Champs, we tested many printers and found that the Epson 1280 inkjet (it might have been the R1800) gave us decent print quality. Also the ink is water resistant, it does not flake at the folds, and it will print on 11x17 paper. Stock up on a lot of ink and paper supplies, because they are not readily available. Finally, give yourselves lots of time to print because they are not fast.

Something that helped our print quality was to print directly from OCAD. We created PDFs to use at some printshops, but found that they were not as sharp.

The printer with the most potential was a digital offset Indigo printer, which was available at a higher end printer in town. The blacks were super crisp, but the dithering algorithm was bad which made the contour lines look fuzzy when they passed through the light green areas on our map. If we had more time to work with the technician, I think we could have fixed this problem.

My US Champs map flaked at the folds. PDFs will never be as sharp because they are rasterized and compressed, rather than true vector. Thats why they are smaller files than say Postscript. Writing eps files (Postscript) from OCAD will result in fine quality, especially if you write the color separations out separately and send them to an offset printer.

My US Champs map flaked at the folds.

Dang. I'll have to look at this again. All the printshops around here use Photoshop which can read in EPS files. So Eddie what kind of printing do you recommend? :)

Actually if I was going to do it again (and I'm not), I would do the offset printing here on the Heidelberg press that the guy with the Indigo has. His quote for one set of plates for a 1:10000 scale map, a plate for each course, and the printing was very roughly $1 per map. This was all last minute so we couldn't take advantage of it.

In the UK we're certainly tending to err towards digital printing for a lot of events, which is cheap and of good quality. There's a small set-up cost and then it's less than 50 pence per A3 map on top of that. There's a slight tendency for detail to come off if the map is folded tightly but I think that's true of most processes. Also, I don't think the purple overprint uses a transparent ink unlike the offset/spot colour printing that is still used for the major events over here. Edit: This prints the map AND course in the same process so there's no worry about the "overprint" being in the wrong place, unless the alignment between colours is wrong...

For the lower end district events many clubs have invested in a cheap(ish) colour laser printer and print off the maps on demand. Quality is still pretty good.

Inkjet printing can be pretty expensive because of the cost of the consumables, and is slow!

If you use laser printer never print scales above 1:10000. 1:5000 and 1:10000 is acceptable.

Best inkjets provide much better quality compared with true 600 DPI that most of the laser print engines perform. Until the next laser printer generation with true 1200 DPI engines, of course.

Laser printing is unacceptable for night orienteering maps due to the dies used.

All maps will "flake" even offset printed unless you use proper paper. For laser printed maps it is more true though.

In any case you need to play with color palette and color overprinting to get necessary quality.

IMHO. Using direct printing of courses together with map from OCAD to inkjet or laser printer is much better than overprinting courses on offset maps due to the superior centering of the control circles :)

And for got sake, please, invest in good paper and map cases!

Just 2c from the guy who regularly plays with printers on a daily basis :)

That is "for god sake"! Sorry for the typo...

It was my understanding that most offset shops are digital-to-drum these days. Very few still print to film, then film to drum. The last SVO offset map we printed (2003 King's Gap) was done this way. I sent Paperhouse (MA) postscript separations from OCAD. The quality is as good or better than any film-to-drum I have seen, and of course its cheaper without the film step. The registration is probably better too, since there's one less degree of freedom.

A good press operator makes more of a difference than whether film is involved. All of the offset work I've handled over the last five years or so has been done by Oxbow Press in Hatfield, MA. I send them negatives, and they do exquisite work.

I just found that Pantone has some inkjet inks that they claim will better match their Pantone color system. Maybe we can now get a proper open-field yellow on an inkjet.

Pantone Colorvantage inks

Thanks for all the info. I will take this to the planning committee and I am sure I will be back with more detailed technical questions...