Can anyone help with Canon printers and banner printing?

[The Hat]

I use a number of A4 & A3 Canon printers and would like to know
if anyone has being able to get round the problem of banner printing.

The longest page I can do is 596mm and would like to extend on that.
The old Epson I used could do banner prints but not the Canon, am I pissing up a rope ?

 

[ghwellsjr]

I think so. Banner printing started with dot matrix printers that used tractor fed fan-fold perforated paper which was ideal for making banners. There was always a sheet of paper at the print head. We used to have to waste a sheet between print jobs in order to rip off the last page and yet leave a sheet in the tractors which pulled the sheets out of the printer.

Most modern printers use individual sheets and have to eject each sheet after it is printed. There are a few printers that use non-perforated roll paper that have a cutting edge to allow removal of a print job without ejecting the whole roll.

So if you feed roll paper into a printer that is expecting sheets, it will attempt to eject the whole roll when done. That is the reason you cannot do banner printing on most printers. You need to find a printer designed to work with roll paper and has a cutting edge and permits banner printing by design.

 

[cmonkey]

Check to see if your printer has a 'custom' paper size.

I have the 9000 MKII, and it's max custom paper size is 14in x 26.61in ( 355.5mm x 676.0mm)
Hopefully your 9500II has the same capability.

One of these days, I'll hack my PPD to see if I print something longer.
I would LOVE to be able to do a 60inch panorama!


David S

 

[The Hat]

One of these days, I'll hack my PPD to see if I print something longer.
I would LOVE to be able to do a 60inch panorama!

So would I, thats where I'm coming from but the print drivers on these new printers arent as easy to fool now a days..
I was going for the Pro 9000 Mark II as well but decided on the pro9500 instead.. (pigment inks)..

The trouble with doing custom paper sizes is it tends to scale all unfamiliar sizes..
The old way of printing banner on the Epson was just cut to size and let the thing go..
I had a Epson 950 with a roller feed on the back and a cutter on the front, used it once and binned it..

 

[d1hamby]

Mine does what it calls a Poster. It can use 2, 4, 9 or 16 pages to print a large poster but you have to hook the pages together.

 

[ghwellsjr]

Do you also have to trim the pages so your final poster doesn't look like it's inside a window with panes?

 

[The Hat]

ghwellsjr..

I use Photoshop for any big posters I do and slice it up to print on sheets of matt self-adhesive paper then trim and patch it all together on to a large board..

 

[fotofreek]

I use a poster program that is very inexpensive. mine is "poster 7", but I googled it and came up with "poster 8". It does the "slice and dice" and prints to 8.5x11 paper. You can download it free to try it for a limited number of posters or banners and get a code to make it yours by paying a nominal sum. There is a bit of trimming involved, so you would need a paper trimmer or a sharp blade and straightedge. For a pieced-together poster it comes out really well.

I use inkjet coated matte finish photo paper and prefer thin rather than thick paper as it is best to overlap the edges and not show the backing. I generally mount them on foam core posterboard and cut to size with a sheetrock knife and roofing square. The one major glitch I've found is that you may have to reduce the size of the file as it will not handle extremely large files. The print quality is quite good. The version I have indicates that you can take the file it creates to Kinkos to have printed all in one piece but I've never tried it. Easier and cheaper to just do it on my 8.5x11 printer. If I were trying to create a "work of art" I guess I would have it printed elsewhere, but for a fun poster for a party this program is very good.

One of my favorite projects with this program is to make a very large version of a medicare card to present to friends at their 65th birthday party. I scanned a new medicare card, used photoshop to erase my personal information, and I added text to personalize it for my newly 65 year old friends. Also made a 2x3 foot poster of my granddaughter in her halloween costume for her bedroom.

 

[jackson]

For 8.5 banners, any of the older HP 900 range and Panorama Factory works with the old fanfold paper or custom cut parchment paper.
I used it for line drawings of ships, etc.

 

[fotofreek]

I do have some long inkjet poster paper but have not tried it in my Canon printers. I don't think the printer is "fooled" by photoshop's formatting of a page longer than a standard size in the printer setup screen. The dropdown window for selecting paper size on my i960 does show such sizes as 11x17 (scaled), but I expect that it scales down to an 11 inch length. The photoshop panorama stitching function or any camera's photo-stitch function would certainly provide the image for a poster, but I don't think the printer will print larger than the preselected sizes.