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Which inkjet printer do you recommend?

Started by Oceaneer99, February 19, 2008, 07:07:21 PM

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Oceaneer99

I'm copying this from another post I made on a different topic.

some printer information:

I also with an Epson printer, which I bought because their ink is a pigment (instead of a dye) and is fairly to very water resistant (my old printer was fairly water resistant, the new Epson ink seems to be nearly impervious to water). 

The old printer was a 777i, and the ink would run a little bit of a drop of water sat on it.  This was a slight issue with cardstock models if I used liquid white glue to build them, but I found that spraying lacquer over the print before cutting reduced the issue. 

My new printer is an Epson Stylus CX8400, which uses DuraBright Ultra ink.  A lot of their printers use this ink (though not the "photo" printers), and you can dip a piece of cardstock printed with it into water, and there is no running whatsoever. 

When I was printer shopping, I tested prints of all the brands in water (they must have thought I was nuts in the store).  The second best after the Epson ink was the HP Vivera ink, which is a dye.  It runs a little bit, about like the Epson 777i did.  HP has a more expensive line of printers that use pigment ink and are supposed to be very water resistant as well. 

I think that with the protective spray on the decal film, you can make most inkjet printers work, so don't go out and buy a new printer just to make decals.  In my case, the ink for the older one was getting hard to find, and my scanner died, so I ended up buying an all-in-one with a scanner and a printer, for $60, that was better than my old scanner and old printer.  In general, I don't print photos on my inkjet printer, and use it only for crafts and hobbies, so I figured I'd go for the not-perfect photo quality with really good water resistance model.

Garet