Quote - When making a buying decision for a large format printer you have to consider a number of factors; the current offerings from Epson, HP and Canon will all produce beautiful prints, but you'll need to consider ink costs, paper handling, quality of included software, cost and ease of servicing, and so on. You'll need to balance up these factors based on your own needs.

Personally, I think that Epson are the best in the market. Not perfect, but - especially with the newer 9900 / 7900 / 4900 series - they've got most of it right.

 

The problem with the Epson (and I have gone through three of their general consumer models) is the cost of the ink cartridges and their unwillingness to allow the consumer to use generic lower cost inks in them by implementing a chip in the cartridge that disallows that. Also, the heads always block up and are hard to get to and therefore almost impossible to remedy. All three of my printers were discarded because i could not for the life of me get the injector heads to unclog. I am not sure if this holds true in the pro level models but in either case though the print quality is gorgeous even at the general consumer level, I will never buy an Epson printer again.

Having worked in a grande format ink jet printing environment I have first hand experience with the hassle of maintenance of the equipment and all the time it took to keep them running right. The HP line was a good work horse and fairly easy to maintain and offered on the better grade papers made for it, photo quality prints.

If you have limited bucks, you might want to find a good printer in your area who does good custom work and just print what you need there without having to import all the hassle and cost overhead to get the printers yourself...unless of course you want to go into the business of doing other peoples' work then by all means go for it. The cost of the prints, and you might be able to contract a deal in cost for a guaranteed in quantities per run, rolling the cost into the final prices++ of the sale of each print. A perfectly acceptable methd of pricing for prints.