hey guys...so i am wondering what you all do for photo printing. i am mainly interested in 8.5 X 11's. i use a canon i960 which uses 5 seperate ink tanks and does a pretty good job of printing high res images. i use the canon paper (photo paper plus glossy and photo paper pro) with this. which are your favorite papers/printers. any tips for clarity. thanks.

Andrew

 

Canon, Epson, and even HP have gotten very close to each other in photo quality. I stuck with Epson partly because more of the artist community used to chose them. In the past their printers handled various media (e.g. thick sheets) better but I haven't keep up on the competition.

I'm now using Epson's R1800. Their pigment-type inks have outstanding durability and decent gamut. I get the most awesome glossy prints (I only use Epson papers so far) and the blue gamut is stunning. They overcame "bronzing" with a really cool gloss cartridge and that works great. I haven't been overly impressed with my matte paper prints but that's not my thing anyway (semi-matte still rocks!).

What is not to like? Canon actually measures ink cartridge levels. Epson only estimates the ink level so more gets wasted. Canon's equivalent-quality printers print faster. And I hear they clog less (I have to run at least one print a week to resist clogs).

I don't know if Canon is better this way but I had to get a custom profile to achieve a really good match to my Spyder-calibrated monitor (I recommend cathy's Profiles for good & cheap).