My wife and I are starting to paint full time since she retired last spring and have a need for a printer that will do the following:
Create gallery worthy prints from high resolution digital images of pastels, watercolors, oils, encaustics and other flat artwork, on watercolor and other cotton rag papers with and without textures on the paper, as well as on canvas in the case of the oil paintings and maybe the encaustics. Most will be 16x20 or smaller but it would be nice to be able to go bigger if the cost isn't prohibitive.
Printing fairly large sheets used to transfer an idea sketch onto a larger canvas or panel that will then be painted on using the transferred sketch as a layout guide. They will be created from black and white scanned pencil or pen sketches, usually 8x10 or smaller. The image quality does not need to be that good for these and the paper needs to be thin and inexpensive as it will be thrown away after use. The back side of the paper will be rubbed with graphite or something similar to create a large carbon copy paper. Thin paper is needed so that tracing over the lines with a ballpoint pen will transfer a line onto the canvas or other painting support. Outside dimensions of the artwork will be up to 8 feet on the longest side, maybe longer down the road. Tiling is OK, but we are currently tiling with 8 1/2" x 14" sheets and it is a bit cumbersome, larger sheets will be very helpful.
Photographic printing in color on glossy stock and also black and white on satin or matte stock will take a 3rd position of importance over the art prints, but we would still like to be able to produce a gallery worthy photographic print from the printer of at least 16x20. I am assuming if the printer can handle high quality art type printing on rag papers, it should also handle photo printing quite well.
Budget is around $1000. I am leaning towards a used 44"+ printer knowing that eventually I will want to be printing bigger than 16x20 and can't afford a new 44"+, but realistically a 16" wide or mabye 20" wide if they make them, should do the job for us. Larger prints can be farmed out. We probably won't be printing daily so a printer that doesn't clog up if not used daily would be a plus.
Thanks in advance for any suggestions.