Yes, 8x10"
I may be a bit late to the thread, but I was wondering if any of you guys make photobooks out of your prints. The lay flat kind. Would love to make one for a friend using our vacation pics.
I always order book and photos separately and insert via corner fixation. But my wife creates 2-3 photo books per year and they look okay too. She uses Roßmann in Germany. All the printer shops have acceptable quality as far as my experience goes.
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Despite owning a fancy photo printer, I order our yearly photo book from a retailer (Cewe).
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I am in the process of making a book…more of a zine format but whatever…I will be contracting out the printing when it gets closer to fruition. I briefly toyed with the idea of doing everything myself, but I need it complete more than I need to go down more book making rabbit-holes 
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Please report where you printed the zine and how it worked.
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Will do. It may be a few more months because I just realized this week that there is a distinct lack of people in my shots. Since the project is all about a local “park” which sees loads of humans, that is kind of a problem.
I have a lot of qualms with photographing people without thier knowledge/consent, so I have to figure out how I am going to do this. I have a few ideas, but I wont know if they will work until I cant get the frames.
Hello Andy
I owned an Epson SC-P600 and was very happy with the image quality (using Turboprint). The only issues have been ink clogging (if not used at last once a week) and ink cost.
Meanwhile, I own a Epson EW-M973A3T (which is the Japanese version of the ET-8550). Despite initial concerns I’m happy with the image quality and had during the last two years no issues with ink clogging at all. With the ink tank system printing costs are considerably lower. My only issues with the EW-M973A3T/ET-8550 is the handling of thicker paper via the front trays. However, that’s a minor issue as the back tray works without flaws even for thicker papers.
The Linux driver provided by Epson works fine. With Airprint I have no experience at all.
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That sounds interesting. Do you know if this would also be possible for Canon printers and how I might go about trying it? Do you know of any documentation online?
It appears that the replacement for the Canon Pro 200 is the Canon Pixma Pro 200s, which I have my eye on. Does anyone have any experience or thoughts on this one? This will be my first photo inkjet in many years. Hopefully setup and use will not be too tricky.
Also, if I were looking for pigment-based inks and killer grayscale print quality in roughly the same price/size category, what might I consider? Or, am I going way up in price and size? I would be printing from Windows 11 (sorry, I feel unclean even saying it), at least until I can switch to some Linux distro.
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You found my post on the Pro200 already. It’s an extremely good printer. I have nothing but praise for its paper handling and print quality. It is well supported by paper manufacturers, too, so you get ICC profiles for all your fancy papers.
In my experience, it prints very well on glossy paper and coated art stock alike. Some say there’s a color sheen in black and white shadows (in all dye printers), but I can’t see it.
Prints look better than some Canon Pro1000 prints I got from a workshop. (The Pro1000 has a much bigger droplet size, and looks comparatively “grainy”).
Ink costs are, of course, high. But as far as I can tell, they are much more tolerable than e.g. the Pro310 or Pro1000. But of course, the ET8550 runs cheaper. I’d recommend looking up comparative reviews on Keith Cooper’s site and rtings.
I am happy with my choice of the Pro200 and can recommend it highly. My only caveat is, I print relatively few photos, so I’m not particularly concerned with running costs or longevity. For high volume printing, other printers may be better.
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Same here. And in the past I always had problems with clogged print heads. It felt like I had to use more ink for cleaning it than for the actual printing.
What is your experience in that respect?
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Both on my old XP8500 (not related to the ET8550) and my “new” Pro200, I can not remember a single paper jam or clogged print head. The XP8500 went through multiple moves, often sat months without printing. The Pro200 went at most weeks without printing.
Both printers do regular cleaning cycles. These presumably use ink. But I never bothered to test how much. I’d guess that one pack of cartridges is good for about 30-50 A3 prints or thereabouts on the Pro200. That’s about €2-€4 per print, plus €2-€4 per page of A3 photo paper. The price of a cup of coffee, in other words.
Frankly, that price is low enough that I won’t waste my time optimizing this any further.
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Thanks, it sounds like just what I need at this point. I do not foresee high volume printing–likely one or two per week on average. Maybe a bit more during the holidays to make calendars and such.
You should probably still consider the ET8550. The ink tanks and replaceable waste pads are a definite advantage over the Canon Pro200. If you’re going to use it as an office printer as well, it comes with a scanner, and the pigment black makes documents look much crisper. The main problems I read about are “pizza cutter” marks on very thick paper, and the higher up front cost.
Despite a lot of research, I wasn’t able to find a good source for the effect of the differences in dye combinations. The ET8550 uses CMYK, plus a pigment black, and a grey. The Pro200 uses CMYK, a light magenta, a light cyan, a grey, and a light grey. With more of the light variants, I’d assume that gradients can be a bit smoother. But it’s still fundamentally CMYK, so the gamut is probably similar. If you look at comparative test prints on rtings, these differences seem very minor, though.
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Isn’t the “K” is the same as the black? I thought it just had a double black cartridge (which makes sense, black goes fastest). Or are they different blacks?
Yes, there are two different blacks. one as dye and another one as pigment color.
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Thanks! I see that in the item numbers one is BK and the other is PBK (“photo black”).
Thanks again. Likely will not get to this until summer after our Japan trip is over… What is the verdict on dye-based vs pigment-based inks? I understand the basic differences in theory; it seems that the major one is longevity and colorfastness under certain conditions. I have read that dyes have made advances in this respect. Canon Prograf 310 and/or a similar Epson is probably worth looking at as well.
Basically, it comes down to four things
- longevity
- matte papers
- RC coated papers
- neutrality
In terms of longevity, pigment inks generally last longer than dye inks. However, the ET8550 and Pro200 use very good dye inks which are rated at 30 years for bare prints and 100 years under glass. These are similar numbers to pigment inks. I’ll be long dead before my prints will significantly fade. That’s good enough for me. Furthermore, longevity is always a combination of how you keep your prints (bare, glass, UV glass), what paper you use (optical brighteners kill inks), and the inks. The former points are much more significant than the latter for these top quality printers. Look up Wilhelm Research if you want to know more. I wouldn’t worry about this at all.
Matte papers (“art”, card stock) need to be especially coated to be usable with dye inks, whereas pigment ink sticks to any surface. However, Hahnemühle, Canson, Fotospeed, and the like all produce every kind of paper imaginable with the appropriate coatings. These papers look like regular card stock, but they don’t “soak up” the dyes, but let them sit on the surface. I wouldn’t worry about this point.
On glossy (resin coated) paper, the dyes go into the resin, and produce a nice, even gloss. Pigments on the other hand always sit on top of the paper, which varies the gloss depending on the amount of ink. They compensate with a “gloss optimizer” glossy overcoat, but the effect isn’t quite the same. This is a slight, but visible difference between the ink types.
Lastly, neutrality. Dye inks can produce a slight color cast in the deep shadows, in bad light. Apparently you can’t get their black spectrum completely neutral, so low-CRI lighting can make them look slightly tinted. The effect is very subtle, and only matters if you use the dedicated black and white printing modes. It varies with the light, and shouldn’t be visible in good-CRI light. Some people claim they can’t see it at all, that’s how subtle it is. I’d only consider this important if you are really keen on black and white printing. As a beginner printer, this is probably not worthy of concern. I’ve never seen this myself, but then I did make sure to use decent light bulbs everywhere.
Summary: if someone hands you a print, chances are you won’t be able to tell how it was printed.
With a magnifying glass, you’ll be able to tell whether the droplets mix (that’s a dye) or overlap (that’s pigments). If you examine the gloss of an RC print closely, you may find it a bit more uniform for dyes than pigments. And if you look very closely, you’ll see the dyes sitting “in” the paper, whereas the pigments sit “on top”.
But these differences are so subtle, I really wouldn’t worry about it.
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