Which printer should you buy?Tips on choosing a printer for your home.
pcmag has some useful advice to offer here:
“Near-dedicated photo printers ($400 to $2,000) are designed for professional photographers and photo enthusiasts. Although photo printers can print text and graphics, they are primarily for printing high-quality photos. Some are wide-format printers with wide frames to accommodate large-format paper, and many can print from paper rolls as well. For precision color, they use up to a dozen ink cartridges. You’ll often pay more per page due to the amount of ink they use and the high-quality paper that gives the prettiest results.”
– https://www.pcmag.com/picks/the-best-printers
Choosing a Printer
Ppi, dpi, image size vs. paper size; canvas versus fine art paper versus some other substrate; necessary resolution, rgb versus cmyk; coated versus uncoated paper stock; wireless; cost of OEM ink cartridges versus (lower-cost) compatible cartridges; HP vs. Epson vs. Canon…
The list of questions and problems goes on—especially if you’re an artist who is going to depend on your printer’s output for your daily bread.
What to look for in a production printer:
They don’t call it Photoshop—as in Photo-shop— for nothing. The reproduction of fine art photographs is often more demanding from a technological point of view than that of paintings, drawings or illustrations since photos often have a much greater tonal scale. With the introduction of the wide-format Colorspan printer in 1993, along with the emergence of digital files as the main source of artwork-to-be-printed (that very same year), a new day dawned for photographers who wanted to have their work reproduced in print. And if it worked for photographers it also worked for artists who created their work with brush, pencil or chalk.
No longer was the cost of printed productions out of the reach of many or most artists; no longer was it necessary to shell out many hundreds or thousands of dollars just for press proofs—which even if approved, would be printed on equally pricey 4-to-8 unit presses.
Plan Backwards!
One of the most important “best practices” in manufacturing is to work backwards from the last step. In the commercial printing and publishing industries the last step is distribution. if your company is doing a mailing campaign you’ll want to choose a printed format and finished size for your printed piece that takes mailing costs into account. With that information in hand you can then go on and choose a print source that has the right equipment for that job and is therefore in a better position to offer you both quality and a competitive price. The same approach goes for your choosing the right printer to buy.
Now let’s apply that strategy to your search for a printer. What size(s) is/are your finished piece(s)? What you might want to do at this point is to make a list of your desired sizes. Once you’ve done that, research the most common off-the-shelf papers for those sizes. Re cost, It is a question of economy of scale: the more popular a size the more affordable it is. How much labor and equipment is needed? For example, you can always trim a printed sheet to the desired size, but why go through the bother and expense of doing so if it isn’t necessary? If you’re talking about smaller /smallish sizes—anything between 4 x 6” and tabloid (11 x 17”)—it is much more of a buyer’s market than it is for larger print sizes, with a considerably greater availability of competitively priced paper stock and printers
Are you going to offer framed prints?
Once again, you want to find a solution that factors in two considerations: what your customers want and what you can afford to give them. Fortunately there are a half dozen common frame sizes ranging from 5 x 7 to 30 x 40 inches that will please most of your customers; frame sizes for which there are so many product offerings that in many instances it is very much a buyers market.
Picture frames are an integral part of your market, and therefore of your printed reproductions as well. Most prospective buyers will be happy to save money by choosing a common and readily available frame with a reproduction size to fit. If someone insists on a custom frame and/or print size, then so be it. After all, the customer is always right. Right? If that’s the case though, keep the following principle in mind: price = scarcity & difficulty. Once your frame and print are no longer “off-the-rack,” the price for both will rise accordingly—and I do mean rise, as in considerably higher.
Generally, custom customers are more demanding and knowledgeable regarding other aspects of print buying. They will often be concerned about durability, wanting to know if the inks or timer are archival and if the glass is anti-UV (to help to reduce fading caused by exposure to sunlight).
