Professional Photo Printers

Professional photo printers produce prints of exhibition quality and will save you a lot of money if you are a professional or ambitious amateur photographer who wants to print on a larger scale than an ordinary ink jet printer allows. Prices start around $500 and go up to well beyond $10,000 but at the lower end of the price range you can find really good printers that are superior to an ordinary ink-jet at the same cost.

This is because lower-end printers for professionals don't have the superfluous functions that you get with an ordinary ink-jet such as printing directly from a camera, for example, and the cost saved has gone into ensuring a better quality of print.

Below Left: Epson Stylus Photo R1900 Large Format Photo Printer

Pro photo printers usually start around tabloid size (i.e. the size of a small newspaper) or super-tabloid which will allow you to make prints which bleed to the edge of the paper at tabloid size.

Tabloid is about 11 x 17-inches (43 x 28 cm), super tabloid about 13 x 19-inches although professional photo printers go up to about 60 inches. Printers bigger than 100 inches are known as grand format and are used for printing posters and banners and may be more economical if this is your intended use.

Professional photo printers such as the Epson Stylus Pro 9880 (right)are often capable of printing onto paper rolls from anything between 24 inches up to 60 inches wide. They are often floor-standing printers and will set you back thousands of dollars.

If you are not sure whether or not buying a professional printer is really worth the extra cost, try working out how much you think you would spend by sending your work to a lab over the course of the next five years as this is the estimated lifetime of such a machine. Multiply the cost of one image, at the appropriate size, by the number of prints you think you will want to make in that time and compare. To be on the safe side, double the estimated number of prints to allow for tests and errors.

You may be surprised to find that it will not take that long to recuperate your inital outlay plus you have total control over the output. And the waiting time for your prints will be vastly shorter!

Top Recommendations

Under $1,000: The Canon Pixma PRO9500 MkII has a 10-color pigment ink system including matte black, photo black and gray for professional quality prints up to 4800 x 2400 dpi. It has an Ambient Light Correction feature which optimizes color output to match the specified lighting condition and PictBridge capability. Saving of around $330.99 from Amazon.com, at the time of writing.

Over $1,000: The Epson Stylus Pro 3880 uses Epson Ultrachrome K3 industry-leading pigment inks and gives very intense, vibrant colors. There is an Advanced Black-and-White Photo Mode so you can create neutral or toned black-and-white prints from color or monochrome images. Inks are auto-switched between Matte and Photo Black ink on glossy, matte and fine art papers. No colormetric calibration is needed to normalise the print head and there is dedicated technical support from an expert team at Epson. Saving of $95.05 from Amazon.com, at the time of writing.