Good color printer for crafting?

November 17, 2008 9:22 AM

My wife is looking for a good color printer for crafting projects. We have a cheap-ish inkjet now, but the color quality is disappointing. Decent color fidelity for the occasional photos and the ability to print on thicker papers are important to us, but we're hoping to avoid spending Money Hats(tm). Should I look at color laser printers? Anyone have suggestions on particular printers?
posted by verb to computers & internet (5 comments total)

You might try the HP9180 (I think they are replacing it with the 8880 or something like that).

Handles thick paper well, colors are amazing. There appears to be some quality control problems with them. I have one and I'm mostly pleased with it. Ink is pretty expensive if you are printing a lot. But there are some aftermarket bulk ink providers which apparently work well.

It's in the $600 range.
posted by sully75 at 10:29 AM on November 17, 2008

What sort of crafting projects? HP inks are water based - if she is looking to do collage with water based glue like acrylic medium she'll be happier with an Epson. It also depends on how big she wants to be able to print and if she is concerned about archivality. Higher end printers have 6, 7 or more colors and depending on what she wants to print she'll be happier with the color acuity with one of those and the right profiles. Epson inkjets are more expensive than HPs but my experience has been that the Epson printers have a higher clearance to handle thick papers. The only time I'd recommend a color later printer is if she wants to do acetone transfers or high volume office graphics.

Archivality information here PC Magazine's current issue has a lot on inkjet printers here. I have a large format HP designjet - 24" wide, which replaced a smaller large format Epson. The HP was much less expensive than the same size Epson and has user-swappable print-heads, something you won't find in 8.5 x 11 sized printers. BUT Epson printers typically handle thicker paper than my HP can and the current Epson inks are significantly more archival - ~210 years to HP's 82. You'll have to make some choices about which features are most important to you and her.
posted by leslies at 10:50 AM on November 17, 2008

I would stay awar from the colour lasers we have some real nice colour laser equipment at work including some high end stuff and its always disappointing compared to the inkjets.

i would definitely go with a large format Epson mainly for the points outlined above
posted by moochoo at 11:05 AM on November 17, 2008

normally i always recommend the canon pixma line for questions like these, but the one i have (the mp500) doesn't handle thicker paper that well, which was a disappointment for me. so if that is something you definitely want, at least avoide the mp500.
posted by misanthropicsarah at 11:15 AM on November 17, 2008

I heart my canon printer for amazing photo printouts.
posted by santojulieta at 4:38 PM on November 17, 2008