I’m an industrial designer thinking of buying a printer. I want to spend around $200-300 and i’ll be mainly printing my portfolio pieces and presentation boards for clients. Is there a good color quality printer out there but that is not too pricey? (considering also Inks, glossy, matte paper…) what do u guys recommend?
i’m thinking of canon pixma iP4000, Epson 1280, Epson R200…somwhere along those lines…
any good suggestions will be appreciated, thanks!
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Go for the Ledger sized printers for portfolio work… 11x17 or 13x19.
I have the Canon S9000 at home and the S9100 at work and love them. BIG, fast, quiet, inexpensive, nice-looking, good Windows drivers and the quality is, well, perfect. The 9100 has 8 colors so the color gamut is wider than I’ve ever seen on a printer.
Epson makes a wide format printer too that is excellent and worth a look. It accepts rolls if that’s useful to you. …But I’m a Canon brand loyalist.
Epson 1280 is excellent. I printed out my presentation at 13x48 ft on glossy photo paper and felt like calling Kinkos to kiss my a55.
The ink is not too expensive, however, doesn’t have individual color separations.
Another thing is, Epson stopped producing it. So either you get a used or overstocked one, or look for their next model.
BTW I don’t think you can get a decent wide format (11x17) printer with $200~$300. You can get the 1280 at around $400 or less.
The Epson R200 is excellent. I got one for under $100 (see below link), mainly for printing borderless digital photos, which it excels at. I assume it would do fine on other stuff as well. It has 6 individual ink cartridges, and can even print on printable CD-Rs, which is nice if you want to hand out multimedia pieces on CDs.
I second cg.
I have the Canon S9000 at work and at home and absolutely love the results.
And yes, it is incredible quality for large size prints (up to 13x19).