Filmwasters
Which Board? => Main Forum => : Urban Hafner February 23, 2013, 12:21:51 PM
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So after two years of a paperless office I now need a printer again. Mostly because I can give stuff to my wife so that she will print it for me at work ::)
Anyway, I thought why not get a printer that can do reasonable photos, too? Some color images for the grandparents and some black & white for me. As I have no idea of the current printer market I thought I'd ask you guys. Nothing smaller than A4 paper of course. A3 would be nice, but I guess that's too expensive.
Urban
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The Epson TX100 can be had for around $20 on eBay. Its by no means the best but in terms of value for money it can not be beat.its slow takes bout 7 minutes to do a full A4 colour full quality print, however ink is cheeeeap. Now if you buy standard cartridges you'll be spending hundreds, the key is to grab a CIS kit from eBay. Continuous Ink Systems are basically empty chipped cartridge systems with reset buttons that connect to indivuaul colour ink bottles with rubber tubes. For $50 you get a whole kit and 100ml of each ink CMYK. I bought 2 x 100 ml refils and I have printed over 300 full qualit a4 colour prints and only used 25% of the 1st refill.
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Canon PIXMA Pro 9500 (9900) MARK II can be had for US$ 60 - 225 (http://www.ebay.com/itm/Canon-PIXMA-Pro-9500-Mark-II-Digital-Photo-Inkjet-Printer-/200897311958?pt=COMP_Printers&hash=item2ec669b4d6)
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Surprisingly, even the cheapest printers nowadays can give decent results.
I use a run of the mill HP deskjet (4 color) that cost me 28$ brand new and it's fine for what I want to do with it.
If you shop carefully, you'll find that some of their printers have the possibility to switch the black ink for a photo cartridge...
But an Epson with a continuous ink system can be worth it if you print a lot.
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Thanks everyone. I had a look around and A3+ size printers can be had for around 200€. They certainly aren't the best photo printers out there but I guess for the occasional print they might be good enough (and with third party inks not that expensive either).