Whats your favoured Printer

Shootnbreeze

Hi there

I am contemplating the purchase of a quality printer. The dilemha is do I choose epson or go for canon.

Can you tell me your pro's and con's of your printer if you have any or the above?


thank you

Heebie

I vastly prefer Epson gear that uses archival pigment-based ink in at least 5 colors/shades, 7 is even better.

The archival ink bit is important. Print lifespan of 8-10 years vs. 200+ on the right paper.

Canon has some archival ink printers, but I've never seen one match the output that can be had from the archival Epson printers.
Canon also has some dye-sublimation printers from which the prints look great from exactly the perfect angle, but they have weird color sheens (not as weird as Charlie Sheen) and textures where the dye sublimated onto the paper is thicker when viewed from any other angle. It's also a printing process that generates a lot of waste.

Don't even *think* about an "all-in-one" unit! (Barf gak, gak barf!) 

I used to work in a photolab where we used Epson gear, and Fujifilm Frontier and Pictrography gear... and sold Canon printers. We got questions about why customers couldn't get the same results. (Even if we profiled their monitors and printer, ink & paper combinations as we did with all our own gear)

I am a bit jaded from having been the guy in charge of color control, and being good at it.. you might not be nearly as fussy as I am.

Adrian.Sadlier

I currently use an Epson SureColor P800. Before that a 3880.

Never been disappointed.

Shootnbreeze

Heebie wrote: »

I vastly prefer Epson gear that uses archival pigment-based ink in at least 5 colors/shades, 7 is even better.

The archival ink bit is important. Print lifespan of 8-10 years vs. 200+ on the right paper.

Canon has some archival ink printers, but I've never seen one match the output that can be had from the archival Epson printers.
Canon also has some dye-sublimation printers from which the prints look great from exactly the perfect angle, but they have weird color sheens (not as weird as Charlie Sheen) and textures where the dye sublimated onto the paper is thicker when viewed from any other angle. It's also a printing process that generates a lot of waste.

Don't even *think* about an "all-in-one" unit! (Barf gak, gak barf!) 

I used to work in a photolab where we used Epson gear, and Fujifilm Frontier and Pictrography gear... and sold Canon printers. We got questions about why customers couldn't get the same results. (Even if we profiled their monitors and printer, ink & paper combinations as we did with all our own gear)

I am a bit jaded from having been the guy in charge of color control, and being good at it.. you might not be nearly as fussy as I am.

Thank you for this very detailed response. I do believe Epson is the way to go.