I've been outsourcing my customers 4x6 and 5x7 prints for the past several years and doing my larger prints in house.
I'm giving some thought to doing the smaller prints myself, as I believe my volume level is enough to justify purchasing the equipment.
Problem is, I don't really know what is out there, so I figured I'd run this up the flag pole here as there appears to be no shortage of professional printers on this site.
What I need is a reliable, high speed economical printer for doing 4x6 and 5x7 prints on standard glossy and luster papers with quality. Desktop Inkjets are out of the question and I don't want to have to deal with replacing small cartridges every 30 prints. I'm talking print productions of at least 100 prints in a batch. All prints would be run from a Mac Pro, using Lightroom or Photoshop CS3. I'd like to keep the cost as reasonable as possible (under $1000).
Any thoughts, comments or recommendations would be appreciated.
There are some routes you can take. I do not have the experience with any but studied it a bit to see whether I could develop a new market for my shop. The budget you mention may be too optimistic for a good solution.
Epson, HP, Fuji, Noritsu etc they all have some new developments in inkjet based volume printers, basically small web inkjet printers for the minilab. The Fuji Frontier Dry Minilab DL410 with Epson technology aboard delivered a very high quality gloss print. Few new inkjet developments on the Photokina 2008 if compared to 2006 but the Minilab inkjet models were interesting. A big investment for your needs.
There are some desktop printer models Hp, Epson with high throughput and big carts, intended for the office but I wonder what their quality could be for the kind of work you refer to. Epson B500DN for example. Durabrite inkset. A4 sheets. Cutting of the sheets to the sizes mentioned could be done with a slitter or die cut machine like used for business cards but with larger cut sizes. An example:
http://www.asianproducts.com/product_9/bus...91809574799.htm Reading the text I think the company is aware of digital photo printing needs.
There's a niche in the market for a printer like that but with a better inkset, gloss + matte black, CcmY. The HP B9180 is an option but could be faster and have larger carts. And a slitter like above for A3 size
Then there are automatic cutters like Fotoba sells. Many small prints on a bigger sheet nested by Qimage and cut on an automatic cutter doesn't have to be a bad solution. Pity that Qimage doesn't include the extra code lines needed for Fotoba cutters. I suggested to Mike to include them and mentioned it to Fotoba people as well. Expensive RIPs have them. There will be more ink/paper waste though in that system. A slitter, cutter, that can handle sheets/rolls say at least 13" wide and the wide format printing print pages of 13" by 36" or 44" from the roll may be enough to solve your problem. Fotoba has machines like that as well but they are expensive durable machines that need more than a 100 pieces a day, week, month ? to justify cost.
Ernst Dinkla
Try:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Wide_Inkjet_Printers/