Need Recommendation for an Economical Printer

[Principal Skinr]

I'm looking for a printer for my daughter. I bought her a Cannon T6 camera, so I'd like to find a printer that is economical, but also prints nice photos. I also don't want to break the bank with printer ink. I'd prefer to have separate colors with the ink.

I once had a Kodak that actually worked very well and for a long time, and ink was cheap. I don't know if they still even make printers, though.

I'll be heading out sometime today to pick it up, most likely at Best Buy. Any help would be appreciated!

 

[BugI02]

PS could use a little more data. Do you think she might like to just print photos of a size similar to what you get back from commercial printers (4 x 6) or possibly do enlargements. My wife does a lot of work with photos and graphics and we have always had Epsons as our printers. The max size of possible output affects the specific model recommendation. Our previous Epson lasted about eight years and we would have bought another if they still made that model. The Epson ink cartridges are not cheap but they do last quite awhile, the caveat being that photo printing is a strong drain on ink supply

If the daughter would probably not go much beyond 8 x 10 prints, the Epson Artisan 1430 seems to be a good product, but I cannotr5 give recommendation as a user as we actually have the more expensive model ( Epson surecolor P400)

The 1430 is close to $300 at best buy but it does have 6-color individual ink cartridges. It also has a pretty big footprint. If you have time, google up some ratings results on inkjet photo printers and try to find ones with a photo magazine (like Digital Photography) as the source.

I can also tell you the Epsons give beautiful text output (the most common use I have for it) but are always rated slow on printing text. As I never print more than 8 to 12 pages this is never an issue. You cannot use non-Epson cartridges in Epson printers, also. Part of the print head is built into the cartridge. This makes them somewhat more expensive but you get much better results over time. The print heads are capable of very small droplet size, 0.5 picoliter I believe

Spending less in the Epson line, I've heard good things about some of the workforce line but mostly at the 4 x 6 size and you give up the seperate ink cartridges. It is my understanding that the Canon Pixma line's best days are behind them

 

[BugI02]

I have to run some errands, if I can be of any further assistance I won't be checking in again until around noon. If you look at ratings on Amazon, read a lot of them and read between the lines. Recall that on the internet, most ratings are either 5 or 1 as those are the people that feel most strongly and thus are most likely to give a rating. Pay attention to the 3's and 4's

 

[Principal Skinr]

Thanks for the help! I purchased a Cannon PIXMA 7720 (I think...I've already wrapped it and can't remember!). Anyway, it looks like a good photo printer with good resolution and it should communicate easily with her computer and even directly with her camera. Most of her printing will be 4x6, with a few 5x7 and 8x10 here and there.

We'll see what she does with it. I think she's going to enjoy playing with the whole camera/printer package.