There is currently a variety of A3 printers in the market. Similar to desktop printers, there are a lot of combinations of features for an A3 printer which makes them suitable for different kinds of purposes. There are A3 printers that are designed for printing photo quality outputs. This makes it suitable for printing brochures and presentations. However, there are also A3 printers that are designed to do heavy printing.
For purposes of comparison, let’s take a look at the Xerox Docuprint 3055 and the Epson Stylus Pro 4880 to see if they have what it takes to do heavy printing tasks. Both are A3 printers that are currently available in the market.
Speed
In terms of speed, the Xerox Docuprint 3055 produces 35 pages per minute. That’s a page in under 2 seconds. In short, you could have five 7-page newsletters in 1 minute. However, the Epson Stylus Pro 4880 produces a borderless picture the size of 11” x 14” in 6 minutes. That’s more than 200 times less the printing speed of the Xerox Docuprint 3055.
Capacity
The Xerox Docuprint 3055 has a standard capacity of 700 sheets. It is also extendable up to 2,350 pages. From capacity alone, it is obvious that it is designed to take on heavy duty printing. The Epson Stylus Pro 4880 has a standard tray of 250 sheets. Aside from that, it holds a roll of 17” wide paper as long 132” at most. This is roughly equivalent to an additional of 135 A3 size sheets. This capacity is obviously not designed for mass production of documents.
Print Quality
The Xerox Docuprint 3055 is a monochrome printer and it doesn’t have color-printing features. It is able to print at a resolution 1200 x 1200 dots per inch. Being a laser printer, crisper black is expected from it. While it doesn’t produce great portraits, it is well suited for printing articles on newsletters. The Epson Stylus Pro 4880 however leads in this aspect by providing resolutions as high as 2880 x 1440dpi. This is very suitable when printing posters or portraits.
Connectivity
Both the Xerox Docuprint 3055 and Epson Stylus Pro 4880 allow USB and Ethernet connectivity. This means that both printers are not designed as personal printers only, they are designed to be network printers as well.
The Verdict
The Xerox Docuprint 3055 makes a good printer for heavier printing needs. The Epson Stylus Pro 4880 is good for making high quality colored outputs. This brings us to a conclusion that there are some A3 printers that can take on heavy printing tasks and there are some that cannot. Top printer manufacturers like HP, Canon and Brother have their own line of A3 printers as well.
To answer the question, “Can A3 printers do heavy printing tasks?” The answer is some can and some can’t. If you have a lot of printing needs, enough to call it “heavy”, then look for A3 printer that is designed exactly for that purpose, like the Xerox Docuprint 3055.