Pro photo printers – Photos only?

For budding amateurs and professional photographer’s, a pro photo printer is the obvious choice for creating gallery quality, saleable prints – but is photo production the only suitable purpose for these devices? Let’s find out!

Printing documents

Whilst it wouldn’t be recommended to purchase a pro photo device for the sole purpose of printing general office documents, both the Epson SC-P series and Canon Pixma Pro series can readily produce them. By choosing a plain A4 paper and using a plain paper setting within the driver both ranges make use of pigment black inks to produce crisp text – ideal if you don’t also own a standalone office printer and just occasionally need to print out something like a ticket or an invoice.

Fine Art

Thanks to their excellent media handling capabilities, pro photo printers are just as suitable for recreating artworks as they are for printing photo’s. Whether you like to use matte coated textured paper for reproducing watercolour prints or are looking to create Museum quality reproductions on a real Canvas, the fine art path is perfect for these applications.

Card and stationery

An ever-increasingly asked question is ‘which machines are suitable for printing wedding stationery and invitations?’. Usually this entails printing onto heavyweight cards of 300gsm+ and so standard inkjet machines and laser devices will not help here. Inkjets at the lower end tend to only accept heavyweight photo papers and not cardstock, whereas laser machines capable of heavy media printing are cost prohibitive at several thousand pounds making them suited for production environments.

This is where professional photo printers are especially useful as they can handle media 350gsm or thicker in some cases – thanks to rear feed and fine art paper paths. When coupled with pigment inks these machines can produce crisp output suitable for all manner of wedding stationery and craft applications.

Whilst Pro photo machines require a significant investment, they offer a wide range of media flexibility when compared to their laser counterparts at a fraction of the cost which makes them versatile and cost-effective solutions for a variety of applications, not just photos!

If you have any questions or any other photo printing questions, don’t hesitate to ask!