Decent Quality Printer Question

[Mark Benson]

My 'Left Seat Brake' is a designer, who at the moment is building up her freelance business while still doing her day job at a publisher. She uses a £3000 colour laser at work to do proofs for customers before sending off jobs to professional printers to produce, her employer is OK with her doing a few private proofs every now and again.

As her business expands though she'd like to produce her own stuff, and the little inkjet we have at home won't allow her to produce proofs of a quality she can show her clients.

Neither of us are particularly knowledgeable about printers, so can anyone recommend what we should be looking at to produce reasonable quality printing on normal paper for items such as brochures, flyers etc. £3k is a bit rich for a fledgeling home-run business, and space is limited so is there a way to produce decent quality printing at a more reasonable price? FWIW we accept that consumables won't come cheap.

Also, does anyone know if there are places that sell office equipment such as colour laser printers cheap/secondhand/reconditioned?

EDIT - ability to print A3 size would be a definite advantage.

Edited by Mark Benson on Thursday 22 March 15:15