Which Printer for gloss stickers/decals

[MrsRogers]

Good morning all!
I currently use my inkjet to print onto gloss adhesive photo paper, gloss magnet sheets and adhesive vinyl to create decals and stickers for my hobby. I then feed media into my silhouette cameo to cut out said decals etc. I would like to add thick Cardstock to my repertoire too which lead me here!

With my current Brother the problem I’m having is it fails to pick up my media first go, resulting in full colour copy paper errors. I can’t load just my chosen media as it won’t grab at all- at least with copy paper it’ll grab it after first go. Until today - I’m trying to print on vinyl and no dice. The ink in one cartridge has now also run out which means printer won’t run at all. I’m beyond frustrated as I’m not ready to buy new printer - haven’t researched enough!

I’m definitely wanting continuous ink but which brand? I’m in Australia and seem to have easy access to Epson and canons locally. I believe I need dye based inks to print in coated Cardstock (I only say this as I tried printing on my brother and colour was perfect but the black smudged). Direct feed/drop in supply would be best and eliminate my current “grabby” Brother woes?

Any assistance you could provide would be wonderful!

 

[pharmacist]

The reason of your black smudges is you are using the normal paper setting. Brother uses pigment black and dye cyan/magenta/yellow. You can circumvent this by setting your paper to glossy photo paper, by which the printer will fall back to the dye-only CMY-printing system, in which "black" on photo paper is composed by mixing the dye inks only. It is visually black and depending on the surface it looks very dark grey up to almost perfect black. In this case your prints will no longer smudge.

 

[MrsRogers]

I felt sure I had selected photo paper but perhaps not!

Do all inkjets revert to cmky “black” when correct media is selected?

Regardless of me liking the print quality of my brother, it is too finicky - hence me thinking drop in feed might be more suitable. Is canon or Epson better choice for what I’m after ? When printing on Cardstock (I’ve been using 400gsm at local printers but thinking this is too thick for home printers?) I do affirmations with text and image , so need crisp and clear.

 

[pharmacist]

Normally it should. There are also 5 channel printers with an extra photo black (dye), because text black (pigment) does not adhere well on glossy papers (smudging), but true black is often needed for extra contrast in photo printing this extra (dye) black is added to increase contrast by producing true black on papers compatible to dye inks (glossy photo paper). It could be the amount of CMY needed to make composite black is just a bit too much for your glossy paper to absorb all the ink instantly making it to smudge (because you will need a lot more to get an acceptable looking "black", as it is just a simulated black and you cannot use the pigment black on it, which will be worse).