Best printer for photographs

I think you would be best to send them off for professional printing.

A colour laser printer on the right paper and correct settings can get pretty good but it won't be cheap to buy these days and toner is usually daft money.

PhotoBox ours..

Have a look at the free prints app. For the price of the postage you can get 45 photos a month printed 'free'.

Exfarmer said:

you don't have to print many for a professional printer

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But 6x4 prints are very very cheap. You can also larger to suit yourself have them printed on acrylic/canvas etc. A half decent photo-quality printer is going to be costly to run.

I disagree that a great quality photo printer is going to be costly to run. The Epson ET 8500 A4 and its 8550 A3 big brother are amazingly cheap to run and use six inks. They are not archive quality but they should not fade much over 100 years apparently, if kept out of direct sunlight. Only one of the black inks is pigment based while the others are a quality dye based. To save even more money, generic refill bottles are commonly available at around half the Epson ink bottles. The initial bottles last about 15% less than subsequent bottles due to the ink used in priming pipes in a new machine.
The machine is about £400 to buy rather than the sub £100 common cartridge printers that fleece you on ink. Soon get your money back though, in about a year’s use for me, less if I printed more full colour A4 or pictures with a black background filling the print.

Pigment ink machines are only available with very expensive cartridges as far as I know and these require using all ink colours at least weekly or they will clog up. Also some printers of all inkjet types will use a lot of ink for doing maintenance and I found Canon to be particularly keen on wasting ink this way. The ET8500 eco-tank at least gives half an hour between jobs before purging compared to 30 second or so on my last Canon Pixma top of the range thing.

With a reasonably regularly used printer, expect it to last for between five and seven years. Ones that are not used for weeks at a time are likely to give trouble and better use a laser printer and get photos printed on-line when needed.

As an indication of ink use, I’m not a heavy user of printer but do print around 50 A4 sheets a week on average plus maybe half a dozen 5x7 high quality photos and two A4 photos every month. In six months, all inks apart from grey are at 75% with some of all still left in their bottles, yet to be tipped in. The one remaining is grey, which is at 85% plus. On my previous Canon Pixma I would have nearly finished a second set of cartridges if not well into a third set by now at a crippling cost.

Paper type and quality matched to your printer in its profiles is essential for quality photos and I use PPD SuperPremium Satin or Satin Pearl 280 gsm, which I find most satisfactory for most photos. I do have some more premium and exotic paper but these are very expensive and I don’t tend to get consistent results due to my low use and lack of experience. I’m sort of frightened to use expensive paper, so don’t and as a result when I do they sometimes just waste the paper and therefore it’s a vicious circle of not using it.

Exfarmer said:

masny thanks I have just ordered a new 8550 . I have been running an Epson ET 7750 but have had a lot of issues with smearing when printing photos. Happens occasionally when printing documents but is not really an issue there. Apparently it is a known issue and they claim the new one has fixed the issue with a new ink formulation too.
Anyone thinking of purchasing one, they retail at £699 with a £100 cash back from Epson which runs out end of March.
However to my Chagrin I discovered too late, that Epson are selling a large number of these which have damaged packaging for a £70 discount , with full warranty and the cash back offer which works out at £440 after VAT
This offer is on Ebay from Epson UK

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Smearing can be more of an issue if you print edge to edge. I usually print with a margin so as not to waste ink through coating the innards of the printer off the edge of the paper.

There’s a chap on YouTube whose name I forget but he has a company called NorthLight Images that specialises in printing and printer reviews. He has a comprehensive series of videos on setting up and getting the best from these two eco-tank printers, which are the same apart from width. Just had a look and his channel is ‘Keith Cooper’ and he has 18 videos on the 8550/8500 starting with this one

The users guide for Epson ET-8500/8550 can be found here