WinCustomize.com is a website owned by Stardock. It was founded back in 2001 when the dot-com collapse took out most of the skin sites.  Stardock wanted to ensure that there was a stable home for people who wanted to create cool stuff to enhanced their Windows experience.

While 2006 was Stardock's best year from a traditional success point of view (doubled in size, more than doubled in revenue, helped produce stuff for Microsoft on Windows Vista, building partnerships with OEMs, and the game's division made one of the top PC games of last year), I believe Stardock failed the skinning community. It failed it utterly.

This is going to be long but I will try to identify the areas where Stardock blew it and what I think it needs to "make good".

The Failures

• Awful documentation
• Lack of support for skinners
• Lack of community support
• Lack of leadership

Awful Documentation

As bad as the documentation for making cool stuff for Stardock's apps appears, it's actually far far worse. And if you think it's really really bad, trust me, it's even worse than that.  It's not that we don't try. The problem is usually the only people who are good enough to make the documentation are the actual development teams who tend not to be very good at writing documentation. Ever looked at the actual text inside a WindowBlinds .UIS file?

Part of the problem stems from what Stardock really is as compared to "normal" companies.  We're a bunch of software developers.  Historically, almost pure coders.  Until 2002, Stardock had one artist in the entire company and he was assigned to do our games. In 2003, we brought in a second artist (also to work on games). That's insane.  But it didn't seem so.  Not to us anyway.

We've always been a tech company. We created technology for the sake of creating technology.  The fancy term for that these days are "thought leaders". That is, we think of stuff before other and try to crank it out. Those familiar with the misadventures of "TextBanners.net" may recall that we came up with text ads first. Yay. Neat technology but of course, Google owns that.  We came up with full GUI skinning. First on OS/2 back in the early 90s and then on Windows. And we even had user-created mini applications created via JavaScript back in 2000 (DesktopX).  But so what?

Without good documentation, tutorials, step by step guides, what is the point?  With WindowBlinds, we got lucky. So compelling was that program that users were willing to figure out the arcane format.  How arcane? This is from a WindowBlinds skin:

[Personality]
TextShiftNoIcon=-2
TextRightClipNoIcon=84
UsesTran=1
BUTTONCOUNT=26
TextAlignment=0
TextShift=-2
TextShiftVert=-3
TextRightClip=89
TextOnBottom=0
Menubar=YellowTab\YellowTabMainMenuBarImage.bmp
Top=YellowTab\YellowTabWindowFrameTopUis2.bmp
Left=YellowTab\YellowTabWindowFrameLeftUis2.bmp
Right=YellowTab\YellowTabWindowFrameRightUis2.bmp
Bottom=YellowTab\YellowTabWindowFrameBottomUis2.bmp
TopTopHeight=23
TopBotHeight=48
LeftTopHeight=37
LeftBotHeight=9
RightTopHeight=26
RightBotHeight=9
BottomTopHeight=2
BottomBotHeight=2

This isn't a joke. That's what the WindowBlinds "language" looks like underneath SkinStudio. My favorite is the BottomTopHeight line. But like I said, it was compelling enough that people were willing to reverse-engineer it to make cool stuff.

Our documentation elsewhere has been much more lacking. We put out documentation but it's pretty awful. Probably the best documentation we have is for DesktopX. And it's not anything I'd consider competitive in quality to Yahoo Widgets's 308 page developer manual.  In fact, compare the DesktopX page to the Yahoo Widgets page. 

The problem at Stardock is myopia. I'm not a politically correct type of guy as many of you know but I say without ego being involved that DesktopX is far far superior to Yahoo Widgets or any of the other platforms from a technological point of view. In capability (on Windows) is a complete superset and then some.  As technologists, we simply assumed that was enough. Build a better mousetrap, etc.  But people won't use the "Better" mousetrap if it requires a PhD. to manufacture.

Let me ask you this -- Where is a modern WindowBlinds tutorial? Let's say I want to create a WindowBlinds 5 skin. How do I do it? Where's the nice friendly example that walks me through it?  Heck, the user guide that's on WindowBlinds.net is awful and the only reason it's not worse is that I went and edited what was originally put up there (complete with Times Roman font and MS Word artifacts).

In the beginning, when Stardock was smaller and the community smaller, much of these problems could be masked because me or one of the other developers at Stardock could personally answer questions on a forum.  But as Stardock has grown and we've gotten a lot busier, these glaring holes in our documentation became critical.  The WindowBlinds skinning guide that is on the page is from 2002. I kid you not. FOUR YEARS AGO!  The only thing that saves WindowBlinds skinning remotely is that SkinStudio, while not an easy to use application, is pretty decent. But it's not enough and the learning curve has only gotten worse.

Lack of Support for Skinners

You'd think the terrible documentation situation would be enough to cover the lack of support for skinners. But no, it's worse than that. Even setting aside the documentation, lack of organized tutorials, lack of step-by-step guides, etc. there's the fact that Stardock should have someone who is dedicated to doing nothing else but helping people become skinners.

Think about it. Stardock benefits from people making skins and themes right? Shouldn't it have a dedicated [email protected] type email address? It doesn't. Why not? We should. Heck, we wouldn't even need a full-time person. Just someone to help point people to tutorials (that presumably would exist), answer questions, give advice, etc. 

Instead, we leave people to the tender mercies of the forums (which I'll get to next).

Stardock doesn't even put out hardly any good example content any more (that it doesn't charge for! ) for people to learn from.  Stardock released one ObjectBar theme into the ObjectBar 2 gallery.  When was the last time Stardock released some new DesktopX gadgets, themes, etc?  How about some new ObjectDock samples?  ObjectDock 1.5 supports .dockzips. Do you see any in the gallery? I don't. We released nothing that uses it.

Lack of Community Support

Being good in the community was something we used to be great at. Sure, there were always the perpetual "free beer" people who objected to our existence (i.e. people who didn't like the idea of paying for software but themselves didn't write any software or make skins or anything) but overall, we were much more interactive.

Now, on the plus side, the # of "Frogboy is evil" posts we get in various places has declined. But I think, as a community, we were better off with some of that when Stardock people were more interactive. And, more importantly, setting an example.

The WinCustomize forums largely disgust me. Sorry but it needs to be said. WinCustomize's forums wreak of elitism and intolerance. Why are the forums not as busy as a site that gets millions of visitor should be? Because people come on, ask a question, make a mild criticism and then get creamed by old guard people who wish "newbies" would go away. One of the reasons why we really got behind WinCustomize.com in a big way after it was launched was because we were so pissed off at some of the elitism we saw elsewhere (I'm sure some of you know what I'm talking about).  But while many of us old guys have been busy coding new stuff, the forums have become an increasingly hostile place.

And when they're not hostile, they're sterile and impersonal. I'd as much hang out on the WC forums as I'd hang out on the forums for my TV manufacturer.  Only because of the wondrous loyalty of many good-hearted folks are our forums even remotely capable of being rehabilitated.

Moreover, Stardock should have a community manager. Could even be the same guy who's helping skinners. Someone who's helping out on other sites. WinCustomize isn't the only skin site. What about SkinBase? They deserve more support from Stardock than they get.  Or tons of newer customization community sites too that I'm not even hanging out on.

Again, in the old days, Stardock's lack of infrastructure was masked.  I would get an email from someone ([email protected]) and quickly answer it.  But now, I get thousands of email a day. Hundreds of which request a response. As a result, I don't even see much of the email I get.  Realistically, I should ask someone to look through my email every day and flag anything that needs urgent attention.

Lack of leadership

We should be better at setting an example for how things should be done.  Stardock people should be in the forums. Stardock people should be making skins and releasing them. Should be making tutorials. Should be writing documentation. Should be answering questions. Should be commenting on skins. Should be hosting IRC chats. Should be making video demos. And so on and so on.  But we're not.

And so things tend to go to whomever is the loudest or has the deepest pockets.  I mean do skinners really envision a gadget future in which they're mucking with DHTML and Javascript to create a fixed size gadget for the Windows Vista Sidebar? Does that sound cool?  But what's the alternative? Making a PNG file that's tied up with some Javascript for a different multi-billion dollar company?

I've seen people on-line refer to us as "Those wizards at Stardock will think of something cool..."  Which is a very high complement. But if we want to be the thought leaders then we better bloody get back to leading on stuff.

Because I don't know about you guys but if my "skinning" options are either making another glass skin for the OS, making a weather gadget/widget for whatever or sitting it out, then forget it.

What needs to be done

It's easy for me to sit here and rip Stardock a new one. It's my company after all. Talk is cheap. What is Stardock going to actually do about this? And by do I mean realistically. Because if you read through my litany of complaints, the "solution" seems obvious -- in a perfect world. But it's not a perfect world.  We live in a world where I can't even hire a decent QA (Quality Assurance) person. We get people in for interviews who haven't even been to our webpage (first rule of thumb when interviewing for a job -- know something about the product or service that you are interested in being involved with).

Here are the things I think Stardock must do in 2007:

• Make is easier to create stuff for our software
• Organize support for skinners
• Get more involved in the community
• Lead by example

Make it easier...

Updating documentation is an obvious thing that needs to be done.  But it needs to go beyond that.  Stardock needs to develop visually easy to understand tutorials that walk a user through how to create something.

It also needs to update its software (particularly SkinStudio) in such a way to make it easier to create skins.  More specifically, there should be beginner, intermediate, and advanced ways to create stuff both from a tools point of view and a tutorial/documentation point of view.

It should be consistent across the board. Everywhere on all Stardock's products there should be guides focused on beginners, intermediate, and advanced users.

Organize Support for Skinners

Stardock should create an off-shoot of the next WinCustomize.com (like skinners.wincustomize.com) that is dedicated purely to learning the art of skinning. Everything should show up there and it should be reasonably well organized.

Moreover, Stardock should have a person who is officially responsible for helping people get into this. Have a question on how to create an alpha blended title bar for WindowBlinds?  Need help creating an animated wallpaper (well, not yet but soon...), How do I make a new boot screen for Windows Vista? How do I make a docklet for ObjectDock? And so on.

Part of this also comes in the form of trying to support other people's standards.  For example, DesktopX 3.5 will export content to the Windows Sidebar. So people who don't think it particularly joyful to muck around with DHTML and Javascript can instead use a proven environment with updated documentation and tutorials to create new stuff.

But more to the point, someone at Stardock should always be on-hand to help out on this. It should be someone specific too. Not a "skinner support department" but literally someone who is part of the community that works at Stardock that you know and feel you can talk to individually.

Get more involved in the community

This is like the above example but it has more to do with non-skinners.  Stardock needs to be more involved on a day to day basis in the community. That means hanging out on forums.  I recognize that the days of me participating in some lengthy discussion on Neowin.net or deviantART or Customize.org are long gone. There's just not the time anymore.  But someone needs to be doing it. 

We're working on that already.  IslandDog is working on this already and I imagine you'll be seeing him in a lot of other areas as we develop this new strategy.

But there's going to be some pain on WinCustomize 2007.  We're going to bring down the hammer on elitism. Any user who comes across as a bully or "anti-newbie" won't be welcome.  WinCustomize.com's forums should be thought of as a lounge to hang out with friends. The forums will be modified to support a more "community" like atmosphere.

People email me and I just don't see the emails -- literally. One user on a blog said that "Stardock's success has gone to Brad's head".  My egomania aside, the reason I don't answer emails isn't that I don't care about folks anymore but rather a simple matter of logistics. Heck, I missed Microsoft's invitation to go to CES (luckily I found out via other channels).  I just don't see the emails. Most of my time is spent doing other things. I'm actually better known in the game industry these days than in the skinning world.

But it is still the company's responsibility to replace my presence with someone else's. Otherwise, Stardock might as well just be yet another Internet business out there to squeeze money from people. People who know us know that we're in this because it's fun to do.  But to a newcomer, if we don't behave any differently than any other "business" why should we expect to be seen as any different?

So we absolutely have to rectify that in a big way.

Lead by example

Picture this: The year is 2001. DesktopX objects are starting to become popular. WindowBlinds vs. msstyles have heated up. And the sky seems unlimited in terms of new cool stuff from not just Stardock but shareware and freeware people from around the world. Great eh?

But then the ghost of Christmas future shows up and tells you that by the end of 2006 that widgets have become various ways to skin clocks, weather readers and RSS feeds (there's nothing wrong with that but then a specialized app could/should have been made for those 3 things that is MUCH easier to create skins for and that skins could be shared). And Hoverdesk and Litestep were either dead or on life support and that the ObjectBar 2 gallery had one theme in it.  Who would have believed it?

Without leadership, you have inertia.

I wrote recently how the most damaging thing to skinning has been the length of time it took Microsoft to do Windows Vista.  This is true. That is, one can legitimately argue that the skinning community shouldn't expect Stardock to come up with all the new stuff. But on the other hand, if Stardock wants to be perceived as a "leader" in this growing trend, it needs to do stuff.

That means:

1. Create state of the art content to give away to show what is possible.
2. Show, in as many ways and places as possible, how that state of the art stuff was created
3. Find new and cool things for people to do on their computers
4. Create programs and tools (and make as many of them free as possible) to do those cool things.
5. Present what you do with respect to others. Skinning should be fun. Skinning is fun.
6. Interact with skinners and help them proactively.

To do these things, we are trying to build up the manpower to do this.  It has been slow going though.  The problems described in this article are things we've seen and been aware of. But solving them means bringing on talented people to help us. And that has been a real challenge. We want to hire people. But the # of people who can really do the job is amazingly small.

Conclusions

So there you have it. How Stardock failed the skinning community in 2006. I hope I do not have to write something similar next year.  The pieces are starting to come together now. But we have a lot of work ahead of ourselves. 

It mostly boils down to too much work for too few people. We've got projects going on with major PC OEMs, Microsoft, Take 2, and beyond which, for a company of around 50 people total is just immense. Especially when the ones who have traditionally "done" the stuff that made Stardock what it is today are now stretched between so many things.  But that's our problem and it is something we have to resolve.

I would appreciate any comments, suggestions, criticism you have to offer. There's a LOT to look forward to next year. And this year has been a great year. But it was definitely not a shining beacon for Stardock's support of the skinning community.  We'll do better.

We have a big deficit and some people think the only way to reduce it is to raise taxes.

The linked website below lets you play emperor with the budget. If given total power over the budget, could you reduce the deficit?

It's been a busy year for the so-called "Religion of Peace".  It started with violent protests and attacks on Danish embassies over the publication of cartoons depicting the prophet Mohamed and ended with 6 Imams crying foul for getting kicked off a plane after behaving in ways that would have gotten anyone else booted. And in betwee, a big fat sandwich of violence.

Islam, the violence-inducing ideology masqerading as a religion, managed to keep itself in the headlines with its followers publicly, loudy, and regularly demanding death to those who "insult" Islam. And from the same religion that produces people who behead people on a regular basis, accuse Jews of drinking the blood of innocents, behead Christian girls for trophies, or pee on a Christian bible, their threshold of what constitutes an insult is amazingly low.

Muslims come in every size, color and creed but no matter where you go, where there's Islam, there's violence. As polls show alarming percentages of British Muslims supported the subway attacks in Britain to the seemingly constant riots of Muslims in France, even when in relatively small minority, for whatever reason, the Muslim population seems much more prone to violence.

Blogger Michelle Malkin has a year in review that helps the casual reader get caught up on the busy schedule of this year's Jihadists. Click below to see.

If you have a Geforce 7950 in SLI mode and experience a lockup in GalCiv II, turn ON the hardware mouse cursor.

We are working with nVidia to figure out the cause.

A website I check out pretty regularly -- Tacticular Cancer -- has an interesting article on the 3 major 4X strategy games released this past year: GalCiv II vs. Sword of the Stars vs. Space Empires V.

I don't necessarily (and in fact definitely don't) agree with all the observations, but it is worth a look at as it is well reasoned and well written and makes some astute observations along the way.

Check it out.

Hour 29:

By 3pm on Friday, I was definitely starting to feel some fatigue.  Part of that was that my eating schedule had been messed up. I didn't really have a normal breakfast and lunch I walked over to McDonalds and had a burger and coke.

I had a ton of meetings late afternoon on Friday and was able to function at relative full capacity.

Hour 33:

By 7pm I was ready to come home. Having gotten home and had dinner, I found myself abruptly starting to nod off. It came pretty suddenly and before 8pm had rolled around, I had walked upstairs to our bedroom and gone to bed. I was out probably within 10 minutes.

12AM Saturday:

With almost 5 hours of sleep, I woke up and actually felt pretty refreshed. This is when I probably should have gotten up but didn't have the discipline to just get up.  So I went back to sleep.

4AM Saturday:

With 8 hours of sleep, I woke up and felt ready to get up. In fact, I had that feeling of having had too much sleep. So I decided to just get up.  I feel a bit groggy -- not tired but that feeling of having slept too much.  So my hours are officially a bit messed up.

And so here I am now at 5am blogging about it.

Results:

I definitely got a lot done. I had a list that ended up with 43 things on it.  I got around 35 of the things done. 4 of the things on the list became obsolete before I got to them and the only things I didn't get to was contacting a couple people I wanted to contact and doing some pretty tedious busy work things that I've been putting off (and continued to put off).

My ability to concentrate definitely took a hit after hour 20. I didn't get any of the programming done that I had had on the list but my deadline on that got changed dramatically so the pressure to work on coding in the all-nighter was removed. I think I would have been able to do it adequately but I think I was definitely down by 10% by hour 20.

By hour 25, I would say my cognitituve ability was down around 20%. My verbal skills and such were fine. 

What was most affected by the sleep deprivation was my perception control. As the CEO bof a company, I have to keep tight control over my behavior. In my case, I tend to use excess humor and babble.  And I was definitely talking for the sake of talking by hour 25 and beyond. It's like I was talking in order to keep my brain functioning. I was even talking to myself (in the sense of thinking out loud).  The thinking out-loud caused me some embarassment.

Overall, I'd say it was definitely worth doing in order to get the things done I needed to get done. I think with some chemical help I could have stayed up another 24 hours without much problem and gotten even more done. But that kind of strain is only justifiable if there is enough pressing things to do and I was getting to the point of doing tedious stuff that I've just been putting off.

The joke at Stardock is that in the summer we might as well  be in the landscaping business. Things get so easy going.

But the Winter gets different. That's our busy season and this year is especially busy with Windows Vista on the way, the need to get Galactic Civilizations Gold Edition (GalCiv + Dark Avatar) put together for manufacturing for Walmart and elsewhere, and just the company's rapid growth has shown that our company structure hasn't scaled very well.

To that end, I have a list of 42 things I need to get done by Friday. And it became clear by Thursday that that was not going to happen unless I simply didn't stop working until the end of the day Friday. 

I normally am awake for 16 hours each day.  I spend a solid 3 hours of that 16 hours in bed -- awake.  2 of those hours are reading and the other is just laying there thinking I should get up but not able to.

I got to the office today at around 11am (I had worked until 2am the night before).  I've had half a can of coke, that's the only caffeine I've had so far.

It's now 6:09am the next day. 5 more hours and it'll be 24 hours.  I only expect to be up around 36 hours so it's not like I'm doing anything really insane here. There's lots of people who have been up a lot longer during busy times. I once was up for 42 hours straight and last year I was up for 38 hours finishing GalCiv II.

Anyway...

Hour 20:

No significant effects yet due to being tired other than yawning more.  I did just go to the store to pick up some Pepto. My tummy (er, I mean my GUT WORM) has been bugging me for the past few weeks and being up has not helped that. I never can tell what is the best over the counter solution for an upset stomach. I don't get them often so I'm not really up on that.

I did notice that my Lasik-induced halos were more noticeable (a lot more) when I was driving. Not sure if that's because my eyes are dry or due to being tired.

My depth perception is a bit off.  And my analytical abilities are definitely off a tad (i.e. I'm getting a bit sloppy).

No fatigue though (I  mean, I work at a software company, not much physical exertion there).

More to come... gotta get back to coding.

I have a problem. Okay, I have a lot of problems. But one of my problems is that I have a printer fetish. I like printers. Always have. I just like being able to print graphics and text and pictures onto a piece of paper. I acknowledge my problem.  Few individuals have purchased as many printers as I have. I've owned dozens of printers over my 30+ years of life.

If you're like me, you go on-line to try to find out how good different printers are. But usually, the reviews suck. Some places will get them quality ratings of like 8.7.  What the hell does that mean? Would it really be that hard to simply scan a picture in of your print out so we can look at it? That's what PC Magazine and PC World used to do (but don't seem to do it so much anymore).  At least then we could look at it.  Most of the "Reviews" I read on-line read like regurgitated media guides.

If your shopping for a printer on-line, the specs should matter. But they don't. Not really. Because DPI means nothing now. I have printers that claim 2400 dpi but look less impressive than 600dpi printers.  The other issue which is rarely talked about is color accuracy. I find this extraordinarily frustrating that my print outs on various "good" printers tend to not be very accurate. And few reviews bother to even talk about it. It's not a review unless there's some subjective talk in it. And most reviews these days are on injkets. No offense but with injkets costing $200 and available at a store, how much advice do I really need from a reviewer? I can go to the store and see a printout of any reasonably popular injket. Thanks. It's on those higher end printers that we tend to want to hear some advice on.  Okay, that's not really fair since most people are looking for injkets, but what about people who are looking for higher end printers?

And by higher end printers I'm talking about laser printers that do color.  The first question I've always wanted the answer to is how good can laser printing get? I mean, if you pay enough, where is the cut off? Can I basically get a laser printer that can print a photo about as well or better than an injket (except be able to print 10 of them a minute rather than 1 every 3 minutes?).

The answer is yes. But you get into diminishing returns. This little article is to share my experiences at buying printers. From $100 injkets to $20,000 industrial printers. I told you, I have a problem.

Injkets

My current Injket of choice is the Canon i9900. It's outdated now. But the quality it produces is fantastic. It's not a terribly fast printer but it produces incredibly good output. My main beef with Inkjets is that they've slowly morphed into being photo printers. I'd like to see more injkets being made that produce great photo output (doesn't have to be godly good, I have a Canon photo printer for that!) but can reasonably be used for printing email and other documents at home or casually at work without thinking I just spent a buck in ink to do it. But right now it seems I can either get an inkjet with sub-par graphics output but is a practical casual multi-purpose printer or I can get something that will show every zit on my face in a photo print out.

I tend to also like Epson injket printers. But they tend to lag a bit beyond Canon in quality in my experience. Still, the Epson Stylus printers are very nice. Lexmark makes decent printers but they tend to be run of the mill. I won't buy HP printers at all for personal reasons -- their driver support during the Windows 2000 era really ticked me off and so I've avoided them since. I buy lots of other HP stuff and they do make good printers, I'm just still sore about the scanners and printers from the Windows 2000 era that they refused to update the drivers to work on back then.

The Main Event

Okay, injkets aren't really my main interest.  Where I've gone on-line over the years is to find out just how good the high end printers really are. And that's where I've been disappointed. I get that injkets can produce photo quality output if you buy the right paper. Fine. Good. Understood. What about printers that can crank out 10 pages or more per minute?

Well...

Quality is a relative term. So I'm going to go with 3 different printers here.

Phaser 8500

The entry level Phaser 8500 (8400 shown but it's the same output). You can get these for starting at $500. Great printer at the price. Here's a sample of the output:

Xerox 8500 (8400)

Not bad but somewhat muted. It's a solid ink printer and that's one of the gotchas with them in my experience. The colors tend to be a bit washed.

Xerox Phaser 8400DX

Oye. It's a bit fuzzy. I printed out my Christmas letter on one of these and the photos, while pretty decent, were definitely fuzzy. I'm pretty picky on this kind of thing, most casual users would think it's fine. One thing that annoys me about most reviews is that they print out the test page where they're alreayd optimized.

Now, on-line on PrinterShowcase.com they rated the quality as 8.5 (good).  That's probably a reasonable rating.  But it doesn't really tell you much.  I do know that anything under the 8400 would be something I'd consider unacceptable for work use. At that point, it's just a casual printer for printing out "stuff" that just happens to be in color.

What I love about the Phaser 8x00 series is how easy they are to maintain. They're "solid ink" which means they're wax. You can eat the wax (not that you should but it's just kind of cool).  You just plop in the wax blocks and off you go. Virtually no maintenance required. A true install and forget. I can't say enough nice things about the solid ink Phasers other than their quality of print is not something you'd want to use if graphics quality is a major factor in your decision.

Phaser 6300DN

The Phaser 6300DN is a regular injket printer. Like the 8500, it's a great product and great for office environments.

Xerox 6300DN

Impressive results but not noticebly better than the Xerox 8500. Moreover, I have noticed a tendancy to streak on out put. I notice faint banding here and there on it. The test pages show fine but I see it. Look really closely on the zoom in on the colored checker board and you'll see it too. It's also got a red-ish tint to the whole thing.

Xerox Phaser 6300DN

It is definitely sharper than the Xerox 8500. You can read the text and the colors are more accurate (the Phaser 8400's colors tend to be just way too muted for serious image work)

That said, right now the Phaser 6300DN is my favorite daily printer. It's incredibly fast and reliable. The banding issue is something I'm still a bit concerned about. And it's not as sharp as the 2400dpi specs lead you to believe.  On Printer Show case it comes out with an 8.7 on quality. That is something I'd agree with. It's a tad better than the 8400/8500 in quality.

Now according to PrinterShowcase.com, the Ricoh C410 has the best quality output of any of the printers in their class with a 9.5 rating. But I don't have that printer so I can't really say. The 6300 is around $1300 . It's got marginally better quality than the 8500 which is significantly cheaper.

Canon CLC 1180

I do know the best printer I have is significantly better than these in quality and it's the Canon CLC 1180. But you pay a bundle. Anywhere from $15,000 to $20,000 depending on options. And you will need maintenance agreement because they are very temperamental and engineered like something out of a Dr. Seus cartoon. They are very VERY large. And it's technically listed as a photocopier but nowadays, it's all so blurred because of the multi-function nature of these things.

So how does it do on printing? Well, bear in mind its specs only claim 600dpi. That's important to remember because the lesson I've learned is the specs mean little. Number of colors matters a lot more and I suspect that is why this one is so much better. It's just got the ability to mix up a lot more colors.

Check out the results:

Canon CLC 1180

Canon CLC 1180

Even from the thumbnails you can tell it's significantly better in quality than the others. And those others are no slouches. But this is probably approaching the top end of what you're going to get with current (2006) printer technology. That isn't to say it's the best out there. The Xerox DocuColor 12 is in the same category as well and some have reported it being better. I can't say. I suspect I wouldn't have been able to get it new from Xerox at the price I got the CLC from Canon. In both cases, they're ancient ancient technology.  They're just slowly getting cheaper. But they're both were old technologies 5 years ago but the quality is obvious.

So as far as I can tell you, this is about as good as they get above. You can see the progression in quality as you go up. Where you stop is up to you.

Further reading.

The company recently decided it needed a high-quality, high-volume printer. And by quality, we mean the kind of quality that you normally have to go to a specialty print house to get. I wanted that quality in house. We send out a lot of reviewer guides, a lot of screenshots, and a lot of other marketing material. But mostly we just wanted to have a top of the line printer in terms of quality (inkjet quality on photos) but could do it on plain paper and at a reasonable speed. Turns out, you can get that printer if you're willing to pay enough.

The result of having huge scope and in-house means big money.  And it came in the form of the Canon CLC 1180.  With the options I have installed on it, it's rated at around $30,000.  Of course, no one actually pays the list price. At that point, you're buying a car and you can negotiate the price. I negotiated the price down to about half that but one would expect to normally pay around $20,000 probably for this configuration.

So what do you get for tens of thousands of dollars in a printer?  Well, the first part is that it's not technically a printer. It's a "copier" that happens to print. It is a pretty good color copier. In fact, it's the best color copier I've ever encountered. It also has a stapler on it. So if you have a 100 8 page reports to make, you can tell it to staple the reports as well as collate them. And it has a scanner with a TWAIN driver so that you can scan images to your computer from it (though bear in mind that involves walking all the way to the thing to switch pieces of paper).

So how is the quality? Well... It's by far the best quality I've ever seen on plain paper. Better than inket or anything else.  But is it $10,000 better? No, not really. But that's the problem, if you want to get above say the Xerox Phaser 6300 level, you're going to pay some bucks. A lot of bucks. You're way at the outter edge at that point and most people just don't need that kind of quality.  But it really does deliver.

In my recent review of the Xerox 6300DN, I pointed out that it beats the Xerox 8400/8500 series in quality.  But the Canon CLC 1180 creams both Xerox's in quality:

Canon CLC 1180

Xerox 6300DN

Even these scans don't do it justice. The Canon looks like a photo -- on plain paper. It's that good. The Xerox looks like a good laser print out.  Our art department loves the Canon because it is perfect at color matching. I mean perfect. There's no futzing with settings when you print, it simply nails the colors right every time.

So let's say you have $20,000 to spend. Should you get this? That's hard to say. One of the first things we've learned is that a printer like this is not like anything we've had before. You have to have maintenance on it. And it's expensive. On top of the rather large price point, maintenance costs $.11 per page (on a color print). That includes toner and everything else other than actual paper. But it's still pricey, especially when it screws up a job -- which it does...often. 

For example, I write a lengthy Christmas letter each year to people we know. It goes out to around 100 people. It includes lots of pictures.  Last year I did it with the Phaser 8400 and it did fine. Just sent the job to the printer, came back the next day and it was done. (well I did it in blocks of 50 to be fair).  Now, with my mega-expensive Canon CLC 1180, it was its time to shine. Its opportunity to demonstrate its premium price.  It was not a happy day. 

This year's letter was 11 pages and I needed about 100 of them.  The first thing I discovered is how archaic and stupid the RIP (basically a PC running Windows NT 4.0 that sits on the printer) is.  My letter has a ton of high resolution photos in it. I printed it from Word. Any modern printer would have no problem handling that. It would rescale the images to the output size on the fly. But not so the Canon CLC 1180. It took my 180 megabyte document into the RIP and expanded it into monster (god knows how many gigabytes it must have expanded these 5mega pixel pictures to) sizes. Suffice to say that a day later, not a single page had been printed.  So instead used Word's option of manually rescaling the images to print size and then exporting it as a PDF.  Then the printer worked fine. So now it was a snap right? Wrong.

I decided to use the stapler option.  So the stapler sorter jammed on the 10th print out. Jammed bad enough that we needed the Canon support people to come out. I will say that Canon support is phenomenal (so is Xerox's too). They were in next morning and fixed that.  So then I got going again and I quickly discover that I can only print 20 of these at a time with the stapler option. After that, the copies have to be removed before it will continue. No fire and forget there. Not that it mattered because it jammed three separate times while printing. It also crashed once.  In all, it took me over 3 days to print my 100 letters off on it compared to a single day last year on the Phaser 8400 (the Phaser 6300DN would have handled it all in a couple hours).  So it was not a triumph for the Canon CLC 1180 in what should be its area of expertise.

Now maybe my particular Canon CLC 1180 has issues. But I don't think so. The Canon support guys have replaced huge chunks of it already (I want to mention again - Canon's support team rocks. Without their incredible service, my opinion of Canon - and Stardock is a Canon shop on virtually everything other than the two Xerox printers we have -- would have dropped considerably).  The problem is that once you get to these kinds of printers, you're dealing with a machine that is as complicated as something out of a Dr. Sues novel. Just watching it run makes me think of some ridiculously over engineered machine in a cartoon. The number of moving parts in this thing is obscene.  The amount of work the thing has to do in order to do duplex when compared to the Xerox's really speaks volumes for the archaic engineering in this thing.

Which brings me to my main gripe with the Canon CLC 1180. It is archaic. It is basically an upgrade to a printer technology that is from the 1990s. The software it comes with is archaic. The usability of the front panel is archaic.  For example, the RIP has lots of space on it. The printer is a copier. So, why can't I, from the copier, tell it to copy something and save it to the RIP and then let me connect to the RIP like I would to a USB memory card?  The tools for it, and there are quite a bit, remind me of stuff written by IBM for OS/2. And I don't mean that in a nice way. My other Canon printers, which tend to cost less than $500 (the injkets) have wonderful software products that come with them. Yet this $20,000+ printer has tools that require me to look up that the device I want is known as "1100".

So if it sounds like I don't like this printer, that is not the impression I mean to leave with you. I think a better way to describe it is that I'm disappointed with the printer. It's not nearly as reliable as it should be, it does not provide nearly enough value for its cost. But it does deliver on the quality and performance and thus meets our specifications. It's just not a very good value for those specifications. I also had no idea of the level of maintenance a machine like this requires. My car requires less maintenance than the printer. And it's not a faulty printer, it's just apparently the nature of these super high end printers. And there are still printers way beyond this but whose quality is only marginally better.

Overall, I'm glad I got the printer. My complaints aside, we needed a printer that could deliver on normal paper very very high quality at a reasonable speed. And it does that. I am not even aware of an alternative to it. Simply put, as far as I know, if you want this kind of quality, this is pretty much your best option. Luckily for most people, this kind of quality isn't necessary or if it is, it's not a common enough situation to justify buying a printer like this. Most people would just go to a Kinkos or printhouse where they have their own Canon CLC that they'll charge you a buck per copy for.

Stardock's love affair with Xerox Phasers goes back a long time to our original Xerox Phaser 850DX.  When it died, we replaced it with the Xerox 8400.  My review of it can be found here. 

My main beef with the 8400 was that the quality had taken a bit of a hit from the 850DX. The 850DX was a 1200dpi printer, the 8400 (and now 8500) is a 600dpi printer. Of course, the price difference is pretty significant. But on printers, I'm not terribly price conscious, I want high quality even if I have to pay a premium.

As our office grew, we decided to go a different route. We picked up the Xerox Phaser 6300DN.  We still have the 8400 and it's working like a champ.  We use it as a general office printer now and in that role, it's print quality is fine. 

The Phaser 6300 is a color laser printer with toner.  The 6300DN prints very VERY fast. It's rated 26 pages per minute and it really definitely is doing that. Xerox also makes the 6350 which prints 36 pages per minute. That's over a page every other second. It's amazingly fast.

But the quality is very good too. At 2400 dpi, it gives very sharp results.  So how good it it in practice? I mean, 2400 dpi, that should be photorealistic right? Well...

It is sharper than the Phaser 8400/8500. But not by the margin you'd expect. Moreover, the color matching capabilities of the Xerox's always seems problematic. Where the Phaser 8400 print outs tend to be muted, the Phaser 6300 images tend to be a bit too warm in some places. I don't like having to monkey around with color settings. 

On a print out of an ad that was already shrunk on the page, I couldn't read the text of the ad that was printed out on the Phaser 8400 but could, barely on the Phaser 6300.

Xerox Phaser 6300DN

Xerox Phaser 8400DX

The Phaser 6300 was also much more accurate on the colors than the Phaser 8400/8500 series.

Xerox 6300DN

Xerox 8400DX

My bottom line is that the Xerox 6300DN is an outstanding office printer. It is better in quality in most respects over the Phaser 8400/8500. But it also does cost more.  The difference in quality, however, is not nearly as good as its specifications imply. At 2400DPI I expect razor sharp pictures.  Why isn't that advertisement's letters crystal clear? I don't know.  In fact, the Canon CLC 1180 that we have, which has a much MUCH lower DPI than the Phaser is far superior in quality. It's not even close (and it's also a $20,000 printer so it better bloody be better).   Don't let my whining dissuade you. The Xerox Phaser 6300DN is a great printer for any office environment. Just don't expect inkjet print quality on graphics and images. It's pretty good and its speed is great but don't let your expectations get the better of you.  If I were to recommend an office printer to anyone, it would be the Xerox Phaser 6300.