Is an Expensive Photo Printer Worth It?

A 17-inch pigment printer with a dozen inks looks like a sure path to better prints, and a modest ink tank model can feel like settling. Choosing between them affects your running costs, how often you print, and which papers you can use.

Two well-made prints from two very different printers are almost impossible to tell apart, even for people who print a lot. Keith Cooper has reviewed a long list of printers, and he explains why he won't hold up two sheets and declare a winner. A camera recording in HD can't capture the differences that separate good prints. Tilting a sheet or changing the light can make one print look better than the other. Canon promoted better blues in the Canon imagePROGRAF PRO-1100 compared with the Canon imagePROGRAF PRO-1000, but Cooper's own testing found no strong difference between them. He describes the current era of printers as the gap between "very good and very good plus a little bit." About 15 years ago, a new model could look clearly better than the one before it. That rarely happens now.

If print quality is close across the board, other features decide the purchase. Cooper compares the PRO-1100 with the Epson EcoTank ET-8550, which serves as the office printer upstairs. The Canon has 12 ink slots, one of them a chroma optimizer, along with pigment inks and excellent paper handling. It is also very large and very heavy, and you pay for ink used in cleaning and maintenance as well as ink on paper. The Epson has a built-in scanner, moves around easily, and has a straight-through paper path that accepts poster board, which the Canon can't take. Luster paper feeds through it without marks. Thicker art papers are harder, and the rear feed that handles them is awkward to use. Pigment inks shift reflections slightly when you view a print at a glancing angle, though almost nobody looks at a print that way.

Epson brought its EcoTank line to the U.S. in 2015 as office equipment, and refillable bottles have since moved into photo models like the ET-8550, which runs six dye inks and takes sheets up to 13 x 19 inches. Cheap ink changes how you work, much as digital capture changed how people shoot once frames stopped costing money. One habit is easy to build when ink is cheap: print a 5 x 7-inch proof of an image before committing to a large sheet, then compare the two under the same light. When proofs cost almost nothing, you make them every time, and you start seeing how a paper, a profile, or a small edit changes the result. Printers have become close in quality, so paper choice and color management now cause more of the differences you can see on a wall. A printer that gets used every week will teach you more about those variables than a better one you hesitate to load.

When people look at prints, very few of them examine print quality. Something has to be clearly wrong, such as a green or magenta tint on skin, before most viewers notice. Cooper mentions an artist who photographed her artwork with an old phone, printed copies on a standard inkjet through the phone's app, and sold them. When people ask him which printer is best for selling prints, he tells them to first ask who wants to buy their work. Ink cost is the other thing that shapes buying decisions. He has found that people worry more about ink than paper, even when the paper is expensive. That worry is why he doesn't push the Canon PIXMA PRO-200 or Canon imagePROGRAF PRO-310 on anyone concerned about running costs. In his view, both are superior printers to the ET-8550 in many respects. Their cartridges, however, hold only a little over 13 ml each, so you need to keep spares on hand.

Cooper's take on Canon's own ink tank option, and more, is in the video above.