Home laser printer printing questions

Question

Hi,
I want to by a laser printer for home. Heed help from those who have experience:
I have local network, so I can either use USB with print server or network printer. I found that CUPS drivers are required for network printing (print server) in OS X. Is it true? Are there other caveats? Network ready printers are more expensive.
I need to print maps, like orienteering maps. Will 600x600 dpi be sufficient?
There is a photopaper for laser printers in the local computer store. However, people say that cheap laser printers will not produce smooth gradient of halftones. What quality can I expect from laser printer + photopaper (designed for laserprints)?
Does postscript support influence quality? There are OS X compatible printers (have OS X driver) that seem to use PCL or just emulate postscript, is it essential?
Thank you for any input.

Answer 1

Thank you for the input
I'd expect to pay anywhere from $300 to $400 to have a nice home laser printer
I have color and b/w printers at work and most of my reading can be fit into my duties as I am a researcher at the university. I need to print last minute materials, mostly schemes/maps or addresses when I am off to some trip. I think that with the infrequent load the ink will get dry in an ink printer and the price of ink scares me too. I expect $200
It may have USB, but Ethernet would be a must for may list.
Why? I have an older Mac with OS X, it can serve the printer to the outer world. What are the caveats? If it gets broken I can connect USB printer anywhere (iBook).
I wouldn't use it to print photo-grade images with.
Have you tried photopaper for laser printers??
All "applications" produce postscript output. Drivers, when required, convert
the postscript to the page language required for the specific printer model
(like PCL for many HP printers, or ESC P/2 for many Epsons, etc). Postscript
printers all have a postscript interpreter built into the hardware - to take
input and create an image of the printed page.
I was thinking if a printer has a postscript interpeter, and OSX is sending
data to it from the open application, doesn't that mean OSX is sending
postscript data to the printer since it touches the data last as it leaves the
Mac?
I think, that there are printers that understand PS and that means that you can send PS file to the printer in a raw mode (lpr -l) and it will be printed. In the same way there are PCL printers that you can send raw PCL file to. PCL file is a usual windows .prn file when you “print to file” on HP printer. The GDI printer understand no language, so that all should be passed through the driver (and GDI will work with OS X or Linux only if there is a driver for OS X).
Here I repeat my Q: I heard that PCL overoptimize PS data upon conversion and thus reduce the print quality. Is it true?
I recently bought a Brother HL-2040 to be shared at a lab at school. I got it
in part because it comes with CUPS drivers. I already had a very old and
cheap print server, and I'm able to print to it from PCs and OS X Macs in the
lab, via LPD or appletalk. It's 600x600 dpi and excellent quality - we only
use plain paper. I think it would be good for orienteering, too. Pretty darn
good for a $100 printer!
Thank you. I also though that 600x600 will be sufficient. Is this 1200x1200 a sort of marketing trick?