Canon - imagePROGRAF PRO-1100

Exactly as mentioned above; - CP1500 is perfect for 10x15 prints and it is cheap to run. approx 0.33€/print - G550 or G650 are a great option if you don’t want to deal with any cartridge printers as they both work work bottled ink - PRO-1100 seems overkill in this scenario, it prints up to A2 - PRO-200S or PRO-310 are better option as they give you more control over your prints with more colors to work with. Or if you find a PRO-300 on the cheap. Go for that. They are both cartridge printers. The cost of running is higher the a G650 but you do get better color reproduction. I hope this helps!

Depends on your budget. The main cost would be inks. Printers with bigger ink cartridges (or ink tanks in case of some printers) will be cheaper in terms of price per print if you're only sticking to OEM inks. Canon pro 1100 is the well reviewed and highly recommended printer. Epson P700 or Epson P900 is also a solid choice, and they are cheaper to run compared to Canon, but they are also not as reliable as compared to Canon and need regular maintenance more often. On the budget side, Epson ET-8550 is a good choice, but this is a dye ink based printer. Also this printer struggles to produce really vibrant images, because it's only using 5 color inks (compared to 10 or 12 color inks in higher cost models).

If you are selling prints you for sure want the 1100. It makes incredibly stunning prints that will last.

Get the lawyer a laser printer. For your photography, a dedicated A3+ photo printer is a beautiful thing. I used a Canon Pro-100 dye based printer for years. Great output. I think the pro-200 is its successor. Recently I jumped to the Pro-1100 17” pigment based printer. Excellent again plus even better, to my eye, on matte and art papers with the pigment inks. The Pro-300 also uses pigment inks but is cheaper being a 13” model.

Sorry i just saw this reply I agree with a lot of what you are saying for sure. I do have some experience with printers. My parents used to have a large format Epson and i grew up helping them with that and i have been quite hands on with other printers. I ended u going with the canon pro 1100. I also dont want to be wasting a lot of paper etc so for now ill still have the company do the larger ones for me and I can handle the smaller ones. I don't see me doing 100% of my own printing but i want that option. Im being realistic and careful with what i buy. I printed a few yesterday and they came out great but i know there will be some messed up prints in my future. Thank you for your thoughtful reply

good points. I just recieved the pro 1100 yesterday. It was that or the 2600 (Think thats the one) its about $3200 too. decided to start with the smaller printer

I do hav experience with epson but we were sticking with canon. Not sure why but just the reviews made us feel it was better for what we needed. I was looking at the canon pro 1100 and the 2600 ..i got the 1100

I got my names wrong..its the canon 2600...not epson. I ended up getting the pro 1100!!

Yes no way to predict! I ended up getting the canon pro 1100 just yesterday and printed one print so far that came out quite beautitful. Im running into margin issues now lol as i lie to add a one inch border. One image happened to fit great and the othEr was too small on the page. Thank you!

I have an Epson SP900 that can take 17" rolls but the head clogs and clogs. Id never recommend an Epson EVER. Canons Pro-1000 or newer Pro-1100 are awesome but I don't think you can use a roll. I have a friend that got a used Pro-2000 for about $1000 and he loves it.

It sounds like you have a similar situation as me where the main value of owning the printer is the flexibility of your inventory. As others have suggested, the Canon PRO line is really excellent. For archival quality there's the PRO 310 for 13" pigment ink or the 1100 for 17". The reason Canons are my favorite - aside from great print quality - is the maintenance is very easy to do yourself. Print heads don't last forever, and with Canon it's an extremely fast and easy swap. Same for ink waste pads and maintenance chips. I'm on my second of both and it was incredibly easy compared to any other printer brand I've owned, especially the Epsons.

Do you have space for the 2600? I have an older version, and it's *huge*, takes up half my studio. It's been well worth the investment, but the desktop versions are more convenient for most people. And around $2000 cheaper if purchasing new. The 9000 is dye ink, so not really a 1-to-1 equivalent (and I think it's been discontinued). But the 17" PRO 1100 is a really fantastic option. If my current printer died and I was shopping right now, it's the one I would go with. Still big by home printer standards, but not the size of an upright piano. Ink and good paper are expensive, but buying them isn't any more painful than paying for archival prints was. Where I personally save tons of money is from not having any unsold inventory. That along with not having to store hundreds of prints have been the biggest benefits of owning a printer. (It feels a bit weird to not recommend the 24" one considering how much I love it, but I do have to admit I look at it frequently and think "this thing is very impractical...")

Pro P900: - smaller, lighter - less frequent printhead cleaning / maintenance - prints any length, including rolls (with optional adapter) - can handle totally flat posterboard Pro Canon 1100: - sturdier Contra P900: - flimsy - pizza wheel marks on some papers - optional rollpaper adapter is not very good Contra Canon 1100: - banding visible on some papers - paper size limits - frequent automatic headcleans cannot be skipped I have the P900 and am happy with it. If I were to buy again, I'd go for the newer P5300. It's the same printhead and ink, but with bigger cartridges and sturdy mechanics. Money aside it's a no-brainer, better than both P900 and 1100. But it didn't exist back then.

Normally one of the 5/6-ink Canon PIXMAs would be my recommendation for high quality home photo printing, using only genuine Canon ink and high quality photo paper. Canon's own photo paper is excellent and works superbly with their ink, as you'd expect, but some people choose to go with a high end third party brand photo paper instead (Canon even sell some high end third party photo paper alongside their own). With a larger budget, one of Canon's PRO-series machines would be the next step up. The PIXMA PRO-200S is the prosumer/enthusiast model with 8 dye inks. The imagePROGRAF PRO-310 is the professional photographer's A3 machine with 10 pigment inks. The imagePROGRAF PRO-1100 is the professional photographer's A2 machine with 12 pigment inks. There are also large format imagePROGRAF PRO-series roll-fed machines from 24" to 60" width, but those would be beyond your budget and a long way beyond what you describe. You really need good pixels, and a lot of them, to get the best results printing on A3 or A2. I'm sure those machines would do excellent work with a high res photo from an exceptionally good phone, but they really need images from a Canon EOS camera (or a high spec Canon PowerShot), or something equally good, to get the best out of them and perform to their full potential. Now, in all honesty, a Canon PIXMA G500/600-series (A4), TS8700/8800-series (A4) or TS9500-series (A3) can do a superb job with a high quality image. Those are the 5/6-ink machines 1 step below the PRO-200S. I've got a Canon EOS camera and PIXMA TS9550, and the prints I get on A4 and A3 Canon photo paper are excellent. That could be all you need. Sure, the prints I would get from my EOS on a PRO-series would be a step closer to perfection, but I love what my PIXMA can do with a good image on good photo paper, and it was relatively affordable. If you don't already have a good enthusiast/pro level camera, I would spend that $1,500 on one of the Canon PIXMAs a step below the PRO machines and the remainder on a PowerShot or EOS R50/R10 starter kit (don't get the R100, it is still a good camera, but a generation behind on the image processor and kinda the no-frills model to entice people into the EOS ecosystem).

If the ability to print larger than A3 posters and banners appeals, have a look at the Canon imagePROGRAF TC-21/TC-21M. It's a 24" roll machine, so can do A1 & A2 or up to 24"-wide banners from the roll, and can additionally handle A3, A4, A5, A6 cut sheets. If you don't want to go as big as 24", have a look at the imagePROGRAF PRO-310 (A3) and PRO-1100 (A2) professional photo printers, or the PIXMA PRO-200S (A3) if you need to bring the price down. Paper weight is a complicated thing, as it's really the stiffness and thickness which matters. All of Canon's PIXMA printers will handle Canon's own photo paper up to 300 gsm, and their PRO-series photo printers will do slightly heavier stuff. Check the spec sheets for each model to get the specifics of what they say it can handle. The spec sheets tell you the maximum paper thickness that the machines will handle, which can be more important than the paper weight. In terms of photo paper quality, you might not really need to go above 300 gsm for business marketing. That gets you all the way up to Canon PT-101 Pro Platinum or LU-101 Luster paper from their professional grade papers. Their PRO-series machines will give you professional photo studio quality prints on their pro paper.

I got the pro 1100 and if you don’t print constantly it goes into a maintenance mode and dumps in into the maintenance tray. I didn’t print for almost 2 weeks. I went to print and all 12 cartridges were low and almost empty. At $60 a cartridge I learned my lesson. Edit: a pro 200 is a great printer for glossy prints and the ink isn’t that expensive. The printer itself is around $499