Art Printer for AS Photography Course

[fil_b]

Hi All

 

We are planning on doing an AS Photography course from september. Need some ideas on printers and printer cartridges costs as out art dept is struggling with the Ink Jet they have available to them

 

Need some ideas of what others have done please

 

Tar

 

Feebs

[Duke]

Our graphic designer has a Canon PIXMA Pro 9000. Absolutely gorgeous but not cheap, especially on the ink front. Canon high-end inkjets are really nice in general though, well worth a look.

[dhicks]

Need some ideas on printers and printer cartridges costs as out art dept is struggling with the Ink Jet they have available to them

 

Struggling in what way? I have an HP OfficeJet Pro K8600 capable of printing edge-to-edge glossy A3 photos. It uses ink from a continuous ink system instead of individual cartridges, which reduces ink costs (see user Contink on these forums to purchase). I'm not that impressed with it as the paper feed is rather fiddly, meaning it's a fair bit of faffing around switching between A4 and A3 paper, which happens all the time - you might want to get something with multiple paper trays to avoid the messing around. The Canon machines sound good, but you might want to avoid Epson printers in a school context. They use different heads which are very good but tend to clog with dried ink if left for a while, and in a school there's always periods where the printer won't be used for a while (this advice is probably a couple of years old now, so you might want to double-check if this is still true - you'd think Epson would have this sorted by now, to be honest).

 

Our art department make extensive use of printing on A4 transparencies for some interesting visual effects, so you might want to make sure your printer can handle those. My A3 printer has been rather under-used as I actually charge money per print (50p for A4, £1 for A3, which is very cheap for glossy photo-quality prints and just about covers costs) - if people can print stuff out another way they will.

 

Don't forget to factor paper in to your costs - half-decent A4 glossy photo paper is easy enough to get hold of, but you might want to make sure you can get a consistent supply of both paper and ink so you can get a proper colour profile set up. You might also want to get some other bits and bobs in - t-shirt transfers, greetings cards, etc - as they can all add to the range of stuff people can do.

 

--

David Hicks

[RingOfFlame]

Canon PIXMA Pro9500 Mark II £779.00 with inks costing £15.00 (x10) or Epson Stylus Photo R2880 £720.00 with inks costing £11.50 (x9)

[K.C.Leblanc]

Canon PIXMA Pro9500 Mark II £779.00 with inks costing £15.00 (x10) or Epson Stylus Photo R2880 £720.00 with inks costing £11.50 (x9)

 

The Epson is often raved about on the talkphotography.co.uk forums.