Any recommendations for A3 colour printer for small studio?

Question

Need a printer to do A3 or A3+ printouts for client mockups in small studio.
Can anyone recommend one? Needs to be networked with 3 people using it.

Answer 1

Formally, your question belongs on the Apple ColorSync Users list and not here, but Pages is the place where photography and typography come together, so here goes.
1. Stay away from toner-based printing devices. They tend to have a tiny gamut, too small for the RGB colour space in which you capture and correct your photographs, and too small for proofing.
2. Stay away from printing devices intended for the office imaging market. These devices tend to have a small hardwired RGB colour space, that is, sRGB.
You may not be able to work around the cap on the colour gamut in an ICC characterisation of the colour device, so you can't get at its full colour gamut.
3. For presentation printing and proof printing, a graphic arts CcMmYK inkjet with bright and neutral white substrate produces a colour gamut you can use in two ways.
a. For presentation printing you can address the whole gamut of the inks+substrate, reproducing as much as possible of the colour space within which you capture and correct photographs. Use the smart 3D gamut comparison in the ColorSync Utility to see what you could be loosing.
b. For proof printing you can clip the large gamut to the size and shape of the gamut of the intended printing condition, adding paper white simulation for D50 visual matching and matching by colour measuring instrument for contract proofing using a control strip.
There are contract quality presentation-printing and proof-printing RIPs for Mac OS X Server. BEST/EFI Colorproof by a group of people in Germany is one such. They have a forum where you can work out questions on configuring rendering intents, or you can ask on the Apple ColorSync list.
/hh