Homebrew PCBs

>Laser printers can be bought for roughly $100 these days.
>It's hard to beat the consistent output and quality 
>of toner on transparencies. Also, if you're adventurous
>enough, they are good for direct iron-on transfer to PCB's.
>
>At that price, it's almost not worth hours of fiddling
>with inkjets - unless someone figures out how to
>do the direct inkjet resist to pcb method.
>
>~Rolan

The problem with the lasers is that they tend to unvorseably scale the
foils (and this also includes all other media like regular paper,
tracing paper etc) while they pass through the fixing station "at
will". This is usually no problem as long as you are not drilling
holes with a CNC machine. Another issue with lasers is that they are
not as black as it looks to the eye at the first glance. This is also
not a problem if you work with base material that is already coming
with photo sensitive cover. Since I'm trhough hole plating I'm using
copper plated only base material and then use photo resist laminate
after the trhough hole process. Because the laminate is magnitudes
more light sensitive, I can't use the laser anymore because it's
output is simply not black enough. I still use the laser for single
sided PCB's to use up my stock of coated base material though.

When it comes to creating totally black foils, InkJets are much better
here that said I especially agree with Adam's observations that Epson
printers (IMHO mostly because of the ink they use) give brilliant
results. I meanwhile use an Epson Stylus 62C (which goes for $80 over
here) exclusively to print high quality films althouhg I already had a
HP DeskJet which turned out to also create not "black enough" output.

Markus