Nedd Suggestion on Printers for Art Work Out put

[Bruce Morgan]

Hello !

I am starting to get involved with selling my graphic art work on line
So

i need advise on a printer which takes in info picture files etc as a stand alone printer accepting a flash drive or other input like cd -- a flash drive memory input for jpegs is best

It should be a color lazar or ink printer which can handle quality art bond paper to make art quality prints of my sketches and color drawing which are reworked in Photoshop

A printer with its own memory is best in my opinion and I know they are showing up more often
I am tired of printer and operating computer system compatibility

However if the printer must be an adjunct to my mac book pro -IT runs on mac os x .5.5 .
If there is someone I should call please let me know
I need knowledge of not only what is new but what the past printer models have been
Thanks
Bruce

[Jim Andrada]

Well - It all depends. What size prints are you thinking of? What kind of prints? Continuous tone (like photographs) or not? Archival permanence or not? What kind of resolution?

For example it is really hard to get good art quality prints of black and white photographs as the inks in inkjet printers actually look different under different types of illumination - you can get strange color casts in the blacks.The phenomenon is called metamerism and high end printers and drivers and raster image processors are set up to specifically counteract this - as are some special inks that are available.

Laser printers often have a sort of shiny waxy appearance and I think inkjets have pretty much taken center stage (although dye sublimation printers can slowly and expensively produce fabulous results)

There are a number of really great "fine art" papers available from companies like Hahnemuhle that you might want to look into. These companies also provide printer profiles to be used with software like Photoshop to optimize the results on their brands of papers.

I really doubt that any low cost (ie a few hundred $) printers will produce results that many people will pay good money for. All depends on what you want to print and your target market.

Printing is a very complex subject indeed.

[Chris Soucy]

I think Jim pretty well nailed it.

What you want is going to be a commercial grade printer and you'll only get that from the "big names" commercial divisions, and it's going to cost (big time).

Even if you pick one up second hand, the running costs for dye sublimation and large bed inkjet (A3, A2 & A1) printers are horrendous.

However, as you didn't mention a budget, that may well be ok, but you certainly won't find what you want at WalMart.

Can't be any more specific as you mysteriously don't even seem to live on planet Earth, and I'm not up on what printer agencies are currently active beyond the ISS.


CS

[Jim Andrada]

Hi Chris

Just as an example, I do B&W photography and wanted a printer that would make commercial/archival quality prints at least 16 X 20 inches and also had an ink system/drivers/RIP that would avoid metamerism. I also had a space that would accomodate a machine about 3 by 3 feet in size. Oh yeah - I had a budget in mind too. And my most important requirement was to produce top notch B&W. Good color was important but B&W was more important to me. I spent a lot of time researching papers as well and settled on Hahnemuhle Baryta fine art paper because I liked the way it complemented the prints I wanted to make. Oh - and I decided not to go so far as to use an external reservoir/pump system to replace the Epson cartridges using specially formulated black inks because I didn't feel it necessary for what I wanted to do. Maybe after I get rolling using my 5 x 7 view camera and scanning the negatives to get images in the hundreds of magapixels I might change my mind.

The key point is that I had a good idea of my actual requirements and budget ahead of time.

[Bruce Morgan]

Hello again and Thanks
I did beleive there was a budget start up method but i guess this is not so .
I do no some basic about dye sublimation but i knew it was beyond the low budget real .
It sounds like i need links to eassays or on line sites dealing with these printer issues and or
i need to just visit a local art printing shop and become a customer before i think about doing my own printing .

Thanks again
Bruce
ps i am in Los Angeles
and my budget right now is so sma;ll -i may have to just be a customer paying for prints at a printing shop .

[Dean Sensui]

The Epson 2200 does a great job.

That said, Costco also does a nice job of making prints at very reasonable prices. They're consistent and will be a fairly close match to a carefully calibrated monitor used under proper viewing conditions.

Please note that you really do need to calibrate the monitor and set up your room properly with the right type of light at the proper intensity.

I did prepress for several years and got very picky about color correction work. Those disciplines carried over pretty nicely into video color grading.

There are also black-and-white inkjet solutions for the Epson printer that employs different grey-toned pigments instead of colored pigments. The result is a very subtle tonal scale on par with continuous-tone b/w prints, with high potential for great archival longevity.

[Jim Andrada]

I've been looking into some of the external ink systems for my Epson 4880 but so far have been pretty satisfied with the standard Epson cartridges.

However, I expect in the near future to start using my 5 x 7 Linhof and scanning the negatives and I suspect I'll get more "focused" on nice long scale prints, at which time I may have to bite the bullet on one of the specialzed ink systems.