Best “affordable” Printer

Mirren

I currently have a HP Photosmart C4580 printer at home but I am now looking into selling my prints
This printer is terrible as it is high ink costs and also discovered it can not take in slightly glossy finished paper which defeats the purpose of what I’m trying to do

I hear a lot of artists praising Canon Pixma printers but wondered if anyone could suggest a decent printer for printing prints and affordable ink replacement (currently black and tricolour cartridges - was thinking individual cartridges)
I am starting small for now to trial it before looking into print on demand so would like to not spend a fortune on a printer.

Thanks

wongataa

Would it not be cheaper to outsource the printing to one of the many photo printers you can find on the internet?

Mr_Singleton

Mirren wrote: »

I am now looking into selling my prints
This printer is terrible as it is high ink costs

I hear a lot of artists praising Canon Pixma printers

I am starting small for now to trial it before looking into print on demand so would like to not spend a fortune on a printer.

Sorry to pee on your parade but your post makes me cringe.... might be worth remembering that your going to expect people to pay for your work I’m not sure they’re going to be that impressed if your going to be a cheapskate when it comes to paper and inks.

I’m going to assume you at the very least have a calibrated monitor.

Personally I like the Canon ImageProGraf Pro-1000 printer but it’s not particularly cheap or come to think of it that light either.

If you feel that your images are so spectacularly good that people are going to want to pay for them then I’d suggest you have them printed professionally to start with then take it from there.

Just looked at the Canon Pixma printer range and they cost like £50!

Handsome90

As a hobbyist it's fine to use consumer/prosumer printer with compatible inks. There are some good quality inks from Precision Colors and Octoink. But the problem is that good ink costs money and as far as I know no company was able to come up with compatible inks that have the same quality as the OEM. They fail horribly when it comes to fading.

As Mr_Singleton said the customers won't be happy if they see that the photos, which they purchased from you, start to fade after a few weeks or a month. If you want low cost per print then you will have to scale your business and purchase the pro models from Canon. One older model that's apparently pretty popular in the States is Canon Pixma Pro-100.

Lastly canon website states the number of expected prints from the ink cartridges. As far I can recall the ink cartridges for the TS consumer models like TS8150 print around 350 15*10cm prints (grey/blue is the exception). If think you'll make a profit from those print costs then you can buy one of those Canon used printers from eBay for around £50.

As with all business you have to calculate your costs and evaluate whether you can make a profit. All the best with your new business

Mirren

Thanks so much for the advice everyone - I do a lot of digital work but never printed at home, it was always in studio but sadly it’s since closed down since then and I don’t have access to their fancy printers and machines anymore.

It’s not a big business idea, i ran a similar small operation in the past (registered) for fun which was successful but now trying to see how it would be possible to run it from home
I am seriously thinking of print-on-demand over printing at home that I’ll have to look into supplier recommendations to find the best cost as you are definitely correct - quality is more important over value

Sadly I was given the world on a plate in the past with the free printers and now having to go it alone ��

System

Mirren wrote: »

I currently have a HP Photosmart C4580 printer at home but I am now looking into selling my prints
This printer is terrible as it is high ink costs and also discovered it can not take in slightly glossy finished paper which defeats the purpose of what I’m trying to do

You DO NOT want a printer that uses water based inks if you're going to be selling them. You need a proper commercial grade printer that uses solvent inks. The reason for this is clear if you pull out anything you printed several months prior which has been in daylight and look at the black text which will now actually be a shade of dark to light brown. Solvent based inks retain their colour for several years which is why sign companies use it.

JoelBeets

I don't know if this is still of interest to you (are you still using the same printer?) but if the ink costs for your modern printer are high then you probably aren't using compatible ink cartridges. They are much cheaper and I have never noticed any difference in quality.

There are lots of providers out there. I tend to use Incbomb or Amazon

grumpycrab

Ok, so I have no idea whether HP inks are any good or not... but get an HP ENVY PHOTO printer and that'll give you upto 700x12 prints FREE (for a year) to experiment with.

https://www.hotukdeals.com/deals/upto-17months-free-ink-with-printer-purchase-buy-an-hp-envy-or-hp-envy-photo-printer-enrol-and-get-12-months-hp-instant-ink-for-free-3225265

This HP data sheet (obviously biassed) implies the fading isn't bad...
http://www8.hp.com/h20195/v2/getpdf.aspx/4AA7-1156ENW.pdf