Printer Advice/Suggestions

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I've decided it's time to take the plunge and buy myself a photo printer for home (never had a printer at home before). I'm after advice and suggestions on what I need to look at.

Budget is upto £1K if absolutely necessary, but I would prefer if it was about half that because I could do with a new monitor as well!!

Any accessories or anything else I need to consider other than the printer itself? (as said, I've never had a printer before so don't know anything about this).

Thanks,
Dave.

P.S. My main camera is a Canon 1DsII if that makes any difference.
 
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I would advise going for an A3 model if possible (they do take up a fair bit of space though!) since an A3 one can do any size print up to A3 but an A4 one can't do bigger than A4.

Once you do get yourself one, I would strongly suggest sticking to original manufacturer's own inks. 3rd party inks are a LOT cheaper but can cause odd colour casts, weird effects as they fade faster than originals and also have a nasty habit of causing nozzle blockages and thus wasting time, ink and paper (which can soon negate any savings made on the inks). Buy from 7dayshop or similar and prices aren't too horrendous.

I have 2 Canon printers - an elderly s820 which has just been semi-retired to make space for a mono laser printer for documents and a younger iX4000 (A3) which deals with the photographic side of things. Both benefit from doing a couple of prints per week to get the ink flowing through all the nozzles to reduce the chance of blockages. The s820 is a 6 cart printer (C, M, Y, K PC & PM) while the iX makes do with just 4 (C, M, Y & K). To be honest, it's hard to tell the prints apart - if anything, I prefer those from the iX4000.

My wife uses an Epson 220 but very few photos have been printed on it so I can't really make a comment on the quality of photo prints - graphics on plain paper look OK though!

Costs of prints through them? I haven't got a clue TBH! I'm pretty sure that cost wise you're better off getting them done by a lab but home printing gives YOU the control as well as the chance to do instant reprints if you feel the first one isn't up to scratch.
 
personally with that kind of budget I would go for an epson pro 3880 and save another £100 for a monitor next month
 
Epson P50 and cheap inks, anything larger get a pro lab to print cheaper and better.........
 
Well, what I have done is get a Canon MP560, same print system as the ip4700 but bizarrely, cheaper at the time of purchase, wifi equipped, and super easy printhead alignment.

Feed it Canon paper and inks and the output is astonishingly (jaw dropping!) good.

Now, on the odd occasion you need bigger than A4, farm that out to a Pro Lab.

For me the economics have underlined my choice as the right one - for you it may be different.

-Rob
 
Thanks for the help so far. On balance, I think I would probably best starting with just an A4 printer initially, and as people have suggested if I need anything bigger, use a professional printing service.
 
actually smaller is the cheaper option for prints. when you go larger they tend to be more expensive


Thanks for the help so far. On balance, I think I would probably best starting with just an A4 printer initially, and as people have suggested if I need anything bigger, use a professional printing service.
 
If you can live without the Wireless of the Canon MP560 then Tesco are doing the MP550 exactly the same machine without wifi for just £49.99 at the moment (Online and instore), RRP is £169 but its normally around £100 so about half the cheapest price elsewhere.
 
After doing a lot of research recently I went for a Canon Pixma pro 9000 II A3+

If I'd had the extra I would have gone for the 9500.

Out of the box the 9000 gives stunning prints, profiled you can hardly tell the difference.

I reckon that Pigment inks is the way to go but the printers need to be used fairly regularly to stop any risk of drying up he head.

The 9000 will do everything including cd's and fine art paper. Carts aren't to hidiuos to buy so running costs not to bad.

The 9000 is about £340 so would give you plenty of change for a top of the line monitor.
 
I've decided I am going to go with the Tesco Canon MP550 deal initially - it's too much of a good deal to ignore. I can always upgrade to a better printer in the future.

Thanks for all the advice, I really appreciate it.

Cheers,
Dave.
 
A printer easily capable of quality output for less than a tank of diesel?

Can't be bad!

-Rob
 
don't expect lab quality prints even on the highest quality setting though.

also the canon printer dialogue is shockingly overly complecated compared to epson.

Hope you are satisfied with the results.

I've decided I am going to go with the Tesco Canon MP550 deal initially - it's too much of a good deal to ignore. I can always upgrade to a better printer in the future.

Thanks for all the advice, I really appreciate it.

Cheers,
Dave.
 
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