Color laserjet for photos?

It's well past time to replace the wife's ancient Epson 740 inkjet, which she uses for general purpose printing. She'd like to get one of the HP Color Laserjets. Although the main use would still be printing documents, it would be nice if we could also use the new printer for decent quality travel snaps from the Nikon digicam. Photo printing would be color only, I use the darkroom for B&W.

Is anyone familiar with these? How does the quality compare with dedicated photo inkjet printers? I assume one can tell the difference, but is it so bad that I could do better with crayons?

Do color laser printers use dry toner cartridges like B&W lasers? That would be a real plus. She doesn't use the printer very frequently and it's expensively annoying to realize that it's time for new ink cartridges after maybe 50-100 sheets. My LaserjetIII has had the same toner cartridge for 7 or 8 years now, and it was used when I got it :) Actually, this is her main motivation for considering the color laserjet.

Any other suggestions?

Steve, your biggest issue with color laserjet prints would be longevity concerns of the prints themselves. Consumer and pro-sumer inkjets have inks that have been tried and tested for long life spans. this is not the case with laserjet inks.

The comparison with crayons is apt--the color laser printers use wax-like dye blocks as a source of ink. The quality is very poor--even compared with the cheapest inkjet printers. I suggest you let your wife buy the color laserjet and you purchase a dedicated photo quality printer. The color laserjet will make your large format images look identical to something shot with a 1.5 megapixel Coolpix circa 1997.

The specs on the color cartridges for the HP CP1525nw claim 1,300 pages, 2,000 pages for the black cartridge. If all you want to print is some color snaps once in a while, then go and have a look at the printer, and print out a picture on it. From reading the reviews, the users have been satisfied with the HP picture printing performance. If you've been using the Epson 740 for your color printing, then I'm sure you'll be satisfied with a Laserjet, too.

Thanks guys. I have a frame of reference now that I know it's a wax-based system. A friend had one of these a few years ago, and it did strike me as a bit crayon-like, but I didn't realize it was a laserjet. The main use would be printing documents, the occasional photo would be a plus. I'll tell her to go ahead and buy it, at least the inks won't dry up and that's a big plus.

For the frequency we print out photos we'll stick with Shutterfly, the quality is sufficient for the purpose. My MF and LF stuff is wet-darkroom; I drive a computer all day for a living so have minimal interest in a digital workflow.