[Tom Swaman]

August,

I am making a terrible assumption that you want an inkjet printer that uses pigment-based inks in relatively large cartridges, i.e. perhaps 50 ml or greater. I do not know thw HP printers other than their laserjets, but I do know many of the Canon and Epson printers. Whwn researching printers, I found the comparisons to be incredibly biased, limited and misleading. I did get good comparisons from dealers and from printer repair folks. You must take your time with this one. The decision is a very difficult decision to make intelligently. You may be happy with information you can glean from searching the Internet, but I find much of this to be highly deceptive, particularly on printers.

A backdoor approach to your objective is to learn all you can about printing inks. This information is a bit more accurate as it is available than is information about printers. Frankly, I would suggest you pick the ink system you want and then the printer will fall in line. just my experience that I hope works for you.

With that said and with what you wrote, I suspect your budget needs to be in the $600 to $1,000 range minimum if you are not printing from rolls and about two to three times that if you elect to print from rolls. that minimum if you elect to print from rolls.

The final budget item lies with whether or niot you intend to use RIP. If yes is your answer, the additional software can be relatively expensive, but had within the budget mentioned above for the roll paper printers, but not for the strictly sheet printers.

Your best bet may come from finding a printer that is desigbed for printing larger than 11 inck X 14 inch despite your not needing to print larger.

Tom

Tom