[Kat999]

(10-13-2011, 04:41 AM)KevinD103 Wrote: I'm a new poster here, just signed up after purchasing the Standard version of Portrait Pro 10. Used the demo version last year and put it on my definite buy list!

I do several types of studio portraits including a session of professional athletes for a calendar shoot. The market for these calendars is very small (<250) and it is expensive to purchase less than 250-500 commercially. After investigating and trying several printing methods I found the best way to do the small runs was to print them myself.

Starting with an HP K8600 inkjet I found I could print the calendars for about $5-6 each. The problems with the HP were:

1. Reliability, as in replaced the printer twice (three printers in all!)

2. Ink cost, as in using HP cartridges were $15 to $35 each for four colors. That works out to about $5000 to $8000 per gallon (note that I don't actually use the ink by the gallon, it's just illustrate the point that ink can be very expensive when purchased by the cartridge).

3. Regular misfeeds of the paper resulted in about 10% waste. And I would need to constantly babysit the printer because a misprint could effect many following pages.

4. The printer itself was worn out when I had printed about 100 calendars (that's 13 pieces of paper printed both side for a total of 2600 pages).


Last year I bought an Epson 1400 printer from Cobra Inkjet and have been very happy with the result. It uses a continuous ink supply system and the ink costs are in the $200 per gallon range (for comparison). The quality is not quite as good as the best that HP, Canon or
Epson ink offers. However, it is more than adequate for my purposes and produces a very good image.

The Epson is still working after the 4000 plus pages it has printed (most of those are full bleed letter size) and the only problem I've had with it is the print heads drying out if it sits for more than a week or two (some windex in the printhead rest pan will fix that).

So far I've had fewer than a dozen misfeeds and most all of the print problems centered around the heads drying out. The cost per calendar is now about $3.80 each (that figure will be lower if I use the same Epson printer for this season).

I haven't tried the Canon's myself but I have seen the output, and it is very good. The HP had good output but was too expensive to operate.

Kevin....where did you get a continuous ink feed for the 1400....I didn't even know they made one....mine uses the carts....and where do you find the ink? (Is it still the Claria Ink that comes with the Printer?)