Which Printer Should I Buy?
Deciding on a printer
How many of you are in the market for a printer? For those of you that have one or more photo oriented printers that may seem like a silly question to ask given the focus of this newsletter — physical print output. Based on my non-clinical research (talking with many of you and many who’ve attended our printing workshops) I’d say less than half of our readers have a printer. We have four printers in our studio of various sizes. That’s a lot of printers, they consist of the following:
A Canon Prograf 4000 a 44 inch roll printer (now superseded by the 4100 and 4600)
A Canon Prograf 2000 a 24 inch roll printer (again superseded by the 2100 and 2600)
And two Canon Prograf 1000 17 inch sheet fed printers (superseded by the 1100)
By an order of magnitude we use those 17 inch sheet fed printers the most. In fact if we had to give up all but one printer I’d say we’d keep one of the 17 inch printers and outsource giant prints. Many of you might keep the biggest printer instead thinking you can always make small prints on the 44 inch right? Sure, but feeding sheets into those roll printers is a slow and inconvenient process. How about printing a lot of little prints on a roll? Cutting them, flattening them, etc again are inconvenient processes. That may be okay if you’ve got dozens or hundreds of prints to produce every time you turn on the printer but that’s not reality for most individual photographers.
The question comes up all the time in our workshops — What printer should I buy? Our answer is almost always the Canon 17 inch desktop printer for 99% of photographer’s needs. The huge competitor Epson has the equivalent on almost a one-to-one basis. The huge advantage of the Canon printers used to be their print heads in that there was no need to “change inks” between photo black ink and matte black ink. That has largely been resolved with Epson’s current line up for quite some time. Our personal experience suggests that the Canons are a bit more operationally friendly and reliable but that may be anecdotal. The Canon printers seem a bit better built but again that’s not based on hard evidence, more of a feel.
Over the past couple of weeks I’ve rethought that recommendation of “get the 17 inch" printer quite a bit. In fact I am in the position where I need a new printer and deciding which one to buy. Personally I am going to buy one of the Canon printers but my thinking applies to either of the big two, Canon or Epson as their products are meant to compete against each other, especially in the general purpose desktop printers aimed primarily at photographers.
Why do I need a printer? I have access to four of them, what more could I want? Well I have access to those four in the studio but what about when I want or need to make a couple of prints today? That comes up a lot and the studio is 45 minutes away — on a good day with no traffic. I’ve maintained quite a few 17 inch printers, specifically the Epson 4880’s. Those were a royal pain because they were huge beasts and need to flush the black ink channels if switching from photo black to matte black. Those printers are long gone. What now? If I followed my own advice I’d just get the Canon 17 inch printer and be done with it but… That’s not a small printer and can hardly fit on my desk. It’s also more than $1000. The ink refills are also not cheap, they are also a lot less than the roll-paper printers. Maybe I should seriously consider the 13 inch printers instead.
The price between the 17 inch and 13 inch is not a lot when comparing the pigment based printers. Unless you are on a very tight budget that’s probably not the deciding factor, if that was the only consideration I’d save a bit and get the 17 inch.
Ink cartridge size and price. Here’s the real budget killer. The 17 inch printer is about $60 per 80ml cartridge. The 13 inch printer is about $16 per 14.4ml cartridge. It’s a lot less out of pocket when replacing cartridges even though the cost per ml is almost 50% more. If I were going to make A LOT of prints on a consistent basis I’d go for the 17in. If I was only making a couple prints I’d rather have less out-of-pocket costs to make the printer run and have fresher ink. How many? Well the 4x6in page yield for the Pro-1100 is 6,070, the Pro-310 is 1679. You can do some simple math for larger sizes. How many prints of what size do you make every month? The more the printer sits around doing nothing the more ink you’re going to waste in the initial cleaning cycles when you do use it. It’s a no brainer for the large volume use. My estimated home use would be very small so out-of-pocket cost to keep it running is probably more important to me.
Space considerations. I have a lot of photo and computer junk laying around. Finding a good place and a large flat surface for the Pro-1100 might be a challenge. Definitely more of a challenge than the Pro-310 which is significantly smaller and lighter which is far more convenient to move around.
The other super important factor is your work, specifically the work you print. I rarely print 17in prints for myself. A handful at best. The fact is I print far more 4x6, letter, and A4 than I do even 13in paper. The reason is that I far prefer sets of prints than I do giant individual single prints. I gift a lot of prints and most of those are smaller sizes. They are far more useful than handing someone a 17x22. In fact a 13in printer will serve me well as my darkroom was setup for 11x14 inch prints. I occasionally (once in a blue moon) did anything larger. I typically display prints in a set, on the wall, or in a box/portfolio. For the occasion I may need larger I am happy to out-source (in my case our studio).
Would I buy a large roll paper printer? Ever, even if I didn’t have access to our studio? Maybe but I’d certainly weigh that against what I was doing at the moment. That’s a decision for a different day. I’d still use the sheet printer more than I would the roll printer, even for proofing so it wouldn’t go to waste. I know this because I’ve that’s been true for the 20+ years of having access to both.
Wait one minute! What about that other 13in printer, in Canon land it would be the Canon Pro-200S, that printer is a lot less money. Well, you are right, the ink is less money as well but it’s a dye printer, not a pigment printer. If you want archival quality prints you’re going to want a pigment printer. This is especially true if you are using fine art papers, expensive paper from all the usual brands like Moab, Canson, etc. Especially if you print on matte papers. The Canon Pro-200S is no slouch, in fact I’ll bet the color gamut is actually wider on the dye based printer, it will make fine gloss and semi-gloss prints that are probably more archival than C-41 process photo papers or on par. I’d go by the rule of thumb if using “fine art” grade papers go for the pigment printer. If using general “photo” papers then I guess the Pro-200S or Epson equivalent might be fine for you.
I hope this little walk through is at all helpful for those just getting into making their own prints and are trying to decide on a printer. As always, thank you so much to our paid supporters in helping keep the lights on. Feel free to ask any specific questions or get opinions based on your needs.
I have both a Canon Pro-100 and Pro-1000. I loved the Pro-100 but needed pigment ink to be able to sell archival prints. I now use the Pro-100 for promotional stuff, cards, etc, anything that doesn't require longevity. With the Pro-1000 I discovered, that apart from nifty 17" prints, the majority of my fine art prints are 13" and I do the initial proofing on letter paper because that size allows me to evaluate the nuances between paper types. I also print regularly on 5x7 paper with no problems. I LOVE to print so I print several times a week to minimize the cleaning cycles. Even with letter and 13" prints, the ink seems to last forever so I just buy a cartridge or two every month so that when it's time, they are on hand, and I can change as many as possible at the same time, also minimizing ink loss to cleaning. In summary, the Pro-1000 requires regular use and thoughtfulness regarding ink management, a small price to pay for the benefits of gallery quality fine art prints for my clients. By contrast, the Pro-100 delivers beautiful prints too, just not marketable as archival, and doesn't complain when I go weeks at a time before I wake it up.
I have both the Canon 4100 and the Epson 4900 (17" roll and sheet feed printer). I've converted the Epson for purely BW use, using Jon Cone's Piezography inks (which does produce beautiful BW prints. But it still needs routine cleanings that waste inks. Although some say the latest Epson printers have solved the ink-clogging issues, anecdotally, others say they still have the issue. The Canon does not. I will likely add a Canon 17" or 13" printer mostly for proofing and occassional smaller prints. While the 17" printers would work for many prints if I could routninely print, say 17X22, the fact is that when you do full bleed prints you run into issues. I also like to have paper borders around my prints, so when I mat the prints a half inch or so of the base paper color is exposed. In retrospect, I probably would have been fine with the Canon 2100 (24" printer) and just sent out the oversized prints.