need help with buying an inkjet printer

[sujatha]

Hi,

This will be my first printer.
I need help in selecting a printer with following specs:

- I want to use it primarily for photo printing so I need boarder-less color printing. Boarder-less printing is not so important for me as I can cut the edges manually.

- color resolution should be 4800 x 1200 dpi for printing with decent dpi for scanning also.

- Preferably top-loading because the photo-printing paper will be thick and it will cause problem if the printer is bottom
loading one.

- Ink cartridges should be large (some printers restrict to small cartridges and it will increase cost per page).

- Cartridges should be individual colors separately. I don't want to replace cartridge everytime one color is exhausted.

- should have scanner or copier also (all in one type).

- Epson has released a new cartridge I guess for just Rs. 275/- per color, but I don't know how many ml of ink they are giving with it. Please suggest a printer which will allow me to take more photographs for reasonable price.

- I don't want to call the service person to replace the cartridges every time. So please suggest a model in which replacing old cartidges is not complicated.

- My budget is between Rs. 3500 and Rs. 8000.

Please kindly help.

 

[qwertydude]

Best photo quality for the money is a Canon, I like my ip4600 for its picture quality. Forget about large carts or complex CIS systems unless you're printing seriously large amounts of photos continuously. I can usually do at least 100 4x6 photos before needing to refill. With two sets of carts and the german refill you can print almost continuously. Just swap out the empties and fill them. The nice thing about these printers is speed, quality and ease of profiling so third party inks cause less color variance. 5 or more photo colors makes for more difficult color adjustments cause the balance between the photo colors and regular colors needs to be precise and consistent. The ip4600 uses 1 picoliter dots so it gets rid of the need for watered down photo colors.

 

[Revolution]

Do you need chip re-setter for cartridges of Canon ip4600 ?
Or just refill and ready to go or have to use any kind of software or any other trick ?

 

[qwertydude]

I simply disable the ink monitoring. When you run out you simply go through the prompts and you refill you disable your ink monitoring so you need to manually check so you don't run out of ink unexpectedly which could damage your printhead. But a big advantage is it gets rid of all the unnecessary "cleaning" cycles every time before you print and even between prints so you fill the waste ink pad less. This is important because these printers were designed to waste ink, you could go through half your ink in just cleaning cycles alone from sporadic printer use, especially for photo prints. The printer seems to go through a long winding cleaning cycle before printing photos, with ink monitoring disabled it prints immediately and "cleans" less often. There are no tricks as auto reset chips never became available even with a new generation of printers already there is still no arc chip. And no easy way to reset the waste counter or easy way to clean the waste ink pad so you might as well disable the monitoring to save waste ink usage.

 

[siusiuenen]

Since you want a AIO printer , i recommend that you should look into Epson Artisan 710 or 810. In my opinion, it's the best in it's range. It's produced beautiful photo, best scanner and very fast. You can also get good refillable cart or ciss for it if you want to save money on ink.

 

[sujatha]

Thanks for your replies. Canon ip4600 is not an all-in-one printer and Epson artisan seems to be a little more than what my budget allows me. Any other suggestions would be most appreciated.