Printer

For a long time I have been struggling with getting a printer that is suitable for my needs.  Until a few years ago we had a Brother black and white laser for business use, and a Canon A3 colour inkjet for personal use.  The “personal use” is almost entirely my own stuff as Rory hardly ever prints anything anyway, and when he does it is just black and white text documents, and is pretty varied.  I make a lot of “crafty” things involving thick textured papers and card, and quite often want to print in A3, but the Canon was not fit for purpose because it used ink cartridges which were prohibitively expensive and also tended to dry out if the printer wasn’t used for a few weeks.  So if I had a big professional job on and no time for craft work for a month or so, I would come back to find that the £70 a shot ink cartridges were jammed solid and would have to be replaced.

So when we moved here, R bought me a Brother A4 colour laser.  Problem sorted…  But no…  I would not wish to knock Brother printers because on the whole they are really good – and for long documents, quickly printed in colour this one was great.  But it was not A3 which meant that any large art works had to be meticulously printed in two sections and stuck back together (this never works perfectly), and worse than this, it did not handle anything other than bog standard basic cartridge paper.  Anything above about 200g or anything textured or stiff, would not print reliably, either getting jammed (sometimes in such a way that R had to take the printer to pieces with a screwdriver) or just being so streaky and smeared as to be useless.

So R just got his bonus and enter my new Epson 8550 ink tank printer.  Instead of cartridges it has tanks which means it can print 1000s of pages on one refill of ink.  And it is A3, and best of all it takes craft paper and card and prints brilliantly on textured paper.

Here is one I prepared earlier.

Brilliant – thank you R