GaryFL2019 wrote:
Hi all,
Looking for a recommendation for an excellent home photo printer. Mostly 16x20 or 20x24. To be used mostly for contests and shows. Would prefer not spending an arm and leg. Also limited in space.
Your requirements (excellent, photo printer, 20", contests and shows) put you into a category of printer that is going to cost you an arm and a leg. You can get 24" printers that are fine for business graphics and CAD, for under $1000, but I would not suggest a 3 color printer + black for printing fine art.
HP, Epson and Canon own the market on 24" roll printers, and they are going to be over $2000. I would stay away from HP, though. I had a 24" HP Z3200 that shredded a drive belt (cheap rubber belt dried out and self-destructed) - and the cost to repair it was $1200. So I tossed it. Had they used a kevlar belt I might still be using it, because it did produce nice prints.
There is another consideration - a smaller cheaper printer will use smaller cartridges, and the cost per ml can be several times that for a printer that can use 110ml or 220ml or bigger carts. The cost of ink should be your main concern - not the cost of the printer. And most mfgrs only provide a "starter" kit of ink.
For example, an Epson 3880 uses 80ml carts and a full set of Ultrachrome ink is $621 ($.86/ml) from Epson .
The 4880 uses 220ml carts, and the inkset is $984 or $.56/ml. So for less than 50% more in price, you get almost 3X more ink.
And if you look at the smaller 13" roll feed Epson desktop photo printer, like a $600 Epson P400 which uses 14ml carts, the cost of an inkset is only $144, bu the cost per ml is
$1.29, or more than double the cost of the ink used in the 4880.
You'd have to make 100s of prints per month to make a 24" printer feasible. Between the cost of the printer - between $2000 for the 9 color Epson P6000, to the $2800 P7000 with 11 colors - and on top of that a another $600-$900 for a full inkset, along with a printer profiling kit from Xrite, it would be really hard to justify the cost of doing your own printing compared to sending the work out to a photo lab.