My new HP 2550Ln
This automation and printing ended up costing me more than a buck a card. Combine that with postage and the absolutely ridiculous Visa/Mastercard fees and already I've spent 10% of the $20 membership fee. I guess it isn't that big of a deal, but considering the combined cost of bandwidth and my own time in maintaining the site (not to mention the eventual rebuild), I have to pay attention to expenses. I don't work for The Man anymore, so this essentially is my living.
So I decided to do the math, and found that a color laser printer would save money and get the card cost down to around 55 cents a piece through the first thousand cards, then lower after that (since the printer will essentially be "paid off"). At this point, the only real question is about how (or if) to perforate and still get a credible looking membership card.
Anyway, I decided to go with HP's 2550Ln, the "n" meaning it has the built-in network printer server. The fact that they could get this machine down to a reasonable price point is impressive, especially considering how the inards are so cool. It has a Web-server to access all kinds of stats, including the number of pages printed and how your toner levels are doing (for all of the toner carts). The single imaging drum was certainly a good idea.
The only real negative, and I didn't really realize it at the time I bought it, is that it doesn't have a real paper tray. The fold-out "drawer" on the front holds about 50 pages or so and just generally sucks. So as it turns out, to make it a more practical solution in the home office, I needed to buy the optional paper tray so that it's contained.
Overall I'm pretty impressed with the print quality. I'll still send my 10D photos to Ofoto, but it does do remarkably nice work with surprisingly OK color.
Despite feeling a little cheated with the paper tray situation, overall I think any printer with these capabilities would be a steal for under a grand. To start the series at half that seems like a miracle. Now if I can just unload my LaserJet 1000...