Best printer for comics

[WoodenCn]

Hello,

I got a question about what would be the best printer to buy for occasionally printing some of our Webcomics on A4/A3 and maybe print them to sell on conventions etc.

I did some research myself and I first started looking at the Epson 7610/7620 because I liked how it could kinda double as a real office printer but then I started looking more into photography printing I was worried the Epson 7610 wouldn't be good enough in therms of quality. So I searched the internet and came upon some posts mainly on this website about the artisan 1430 aka 1500w and how it would be a nice printer when you combine it with pigment based inkt (we want our comic prints to be relatively long lasting of course) but later I also saw some Canon possibilities fly by.

So I maybe have almost made up my mind but my question would be. Will the 1430/1500w with pigment ink be the best choice or is there another printer from Canon or maybe potential secondhand models from Epson that would be more bang for my bucks? My budget is around €200-€300 but can stretch a little bit if needed.

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

When you look for a budget level A3 printer you may check special discount offers at particular dealers for Canon printers of the Canon Pro -xx type . You didn't mention the overall print volume and frequency yet and whether you plan or look to the option of using 3rd party/refill inks or cartridges to save some of the running ink cost. I would not recommend to buy a used printer just like that. If you are looking for a WF76xx instead you might find this posting interesting
http://www.printerknowledge.com/thr...-be-used-for-photo-printing.10972/#post-92003

 

[WoodenCn]

When you look for a budget level A3 printer you may check special discount offers at particular dealers for Canon printers of the Canon Pro -xx type . You didn't mention the overall print volume and frequency yet and whether you plan or look to the option of using 3rd party/refill inks or cartridges to save some of the running ink cost. I would not recommend to buy a used printer just like that. If you are looking for a WF76xx instead you might find this posting interesting
http://www.printerknowledge.com/thr...-be-used-for-photo-printing.10972/#post-92003

I looked around at some shops nearby and they only had a Canon Pro 100 for €250 and a IP8750 for €150 which are both Dye printers if i'm correct. Printing volume would be monthly only around 10 A3 prints en 10 A4 prints with some occasionally spikes to like 50 in a month when we stack up to sell at a convention but that will only happen once or twice a year. Maybe in the future (speaking about like 6 months) we wanna sell prints of our comic on a webshop but then again we don't think that would be more then like 10 prints at max a month.

I am certainly looking into the possibilities of printing with a CISS or refillable inks because of the lower running costs.

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

the Canon Pro 10(S) is a pigment ink printer, as well the Epson Workforce models. Refill is an option, I don't know whether a CISS would be available or would even make real sense with your print volume

 

[WoodenCn]

I found different CISS systems for the 1430/1500w and after some searching I found on the Red River website a page about printing cost for the Artisan 1400 and if I calculated it for A3 the main size we will be printing it will cost around €2 per print (The original cartridges are relatively cheap here). so monthly we will be spending about €20 on printing a couple A3 and A4 so maybe original or refill is the way to start and if our printing grows maybe buy a CISS in the future I guess.

So yeah I'm almost sure about the 1430/1500w only a really tiny doubt for the Workforce 7610/7620 any thoughts of you guys on those 2 printers?

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

you brought up the point of looking for a workforce model for the regular business/office stuff to print in the first place. You may as well go for an A4 multifunction model for this purpose and use the 1400/1500W solely for the graphics prints, I can't really make a recommendation here. This 1500W uses dye inks, Claria inks called by Epson, these are inks with the best longevity performance of dye inks. Once you go to refill - with cartridges or CISS - ink suppliers offer you a myriad of inks claimed to be equivalent to the Claria inks - which they are not - by far not , they are cheaper , much cheaper but with poor longevity performance, in my eyes not suitable for sale. There is only one choice which is available for refill as a dye ink which is close to the quality of the Epson inks, the Fujifilm Drylab inks which have been discussed in length in another thread here
http://www.printerknowledge.com/threads/which-pigment-ink-for-epson-1500w.9323/page-18#post-91961

The other option suitable as well with this printer model is the use of refill pigment inks which would last much longer, but may have some other problems if not carefully worked out and tested.
And as soon as you start using 3rd party inks in combination with an arbitrary choice of papers you are advised to go for an ICC color profile for the correct color representation.

 

[WoodenCn]

So we did a very simple material test on a couple of different normal paper and we figured that just normal ~160-240 gram paper is better for our comics then gloss or semi gloss photopaper. So we just ordered the WF-7620 and we'll see how it turns out. Gonna buy a whole slew of different paper weights and types and when the printer is delivered we will run some tests till the moment we get the result that we want