Why Inkjet Photo Printers Are So Bad | Hacker News Reader

Why Inkjet Photo Printers Are So Bad

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17 pointsmikece12 comments

If I want a nice color photo print, I use a service. Owning a color printer just seems not worth the hassle. And I still have darkroom stuff. These inkjet printers, esp. the cheap ones, are of less value than that.

Inkjet Photo printers are bad because you buy bad inkjet photo printers. Even for casual home users, there are great inkjet printers available at excellent prices prices such as the Epson SC-P700.

Inkjet printers have always been a dumpster fire. It is easy to blame devious and rapacious practices by their manufacturers - but these same manufacturers also make laser printers at similar price points that are much more reliable and do not have the same frustrating failure modes seemingly designed to keep you buying consumables.

Is it possible to make a good inkjet printer? Or is inkjet printing just an inherently bad technology?

> Is it possible to make a good inkjet printer?

I think so, in my experience Epson makes very good inkjet printers.

>Or is inkjet printing just an inherently bad technology?

I don't really know anything about the work that goes into developing and manufacturing these printers, but I'll never cease to be amazed by the precision and reliability at which a $700 inkjet printer can deposit 1.5 picoliter ink droplets onto the print medium.

Bad technology? I don't think so. What you can accomplish with modern inkjet printers for chump change is downright incredible.

> but these same manufacturers also make laser printers at similar price points that are much more reliable and do not have the same frustrating failure modes seemingly designed to keep you buying consumables

It's downright ridiculous to compare laser printers and inkjets, these have completely different use cases. Although these days laser printers generally do not offer advantages beyond speed and cost of operation, nice inkjets can produce crisper text at far smaller font sizes than laser printers.

I agree that Epson is among the best of the bunch, probably due to its precision piezoelectric inkheads. Brother has that too, though, and is reputedly even more precise. My epson suffers occasionally from the banding issue highlighted in the article. Dont know a good fix other than putting it through the wasteful clean cycle. Usually I just bear with it.

Of course the tremendous precision comes at some cost, but I think the fact that these machines are as reliable as they are is already incredible. The engineering challenges involved in managing the fluid dynamics of inks in order to reliably shoot out picoliter sized droplets with incredible precision must be massive.

> Brother has that too, though, and is reputedly even more precise

Really? I don't think Brother really offers products in this space. They have the Innobella line that can do 1.5pl droplets, the same as the Epson unit but with far less colors. However, none of the Brother printers supporting those cartridges seem to offer a very high DPI. The smaller drop size will primarily manifest as improved color reproduction, as blending becomes easier.

Is that true? Nifty.

I don't pay much attention to printers. I'd always found that laser printers produced more readable text. Ink jets always seemed a little blurry. At least, in the ones that I'd looked at -- down-scale stuff for the home market.

I stopped using inkjets at all because I used them so rarely that the ink would dry up. When I need photo prints or colored prints, I send them out. My home printer is an elderly laser printer that just keeps chugging along and producing lovely, sharp text.

Good to know that the ink jets have gotten better, but my use case still probably means I won't own one.

Does anyone know what kind of printers are used by professional photo services?

Most use Epson and if you go into really large format HP. Proof printers (best color reproduction) in agencies are 90% Epson machines. If you stray away from inkjet and go into wax based printers most are from a company called chromaline.

How do "professional" inkjet printers avoid these problems, and what's the transition point (in price, or whatever) at which this happens?

The big difference is maintenance the bigger proof printers are just build with exchangeable parts and guides how to keep the machine in working order. They also have color calibration build in. You can clean printheads with ease and you can flush the color lines easily with washing fluid. They basically have the same problems as desktop machines but instead of sending them in or do an RMA you can just mend it yourself. Proof Printers start, if you go for used ones, at 1500$ and go up to 100k$ with the larger formats going even more expensive. We are one of the biggest agency in germany and use printers priced around the 4-7k$ range.

The last one we bought for smaller jobs is this one https://epson.com/For-Work/Printers/Large-Format/SureColor-P...

Our local Walmart photo centre uses a Epson SureColor P8000.

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