magicsurfbus
Free Member
Among the vintage things I sell to people are original magazine adverts up to A3 in size - I charge £1 apiece and they sell steadily.
I scan the ones I particularly like at 1200 dpi on an A3 scanner and save them in .tif format - the files are pretty big. Most of the advert scans are monochrome, and I have a Canon Pro9000 A3 photo printer if I want to print in high quality colour, although it's not cheap to run. It has 8 different cartridges and the average price I pay for genuine Canon items is around £7-8 each.
My Brother b/w A4 laser printer is old and on its way out - I got it cheap and I've been refilling the cartridge with toner myself at a fiver a throw for some years so it's been extremely economical, but it only does 600 dpi and the quality is barely good enough to print readable text. It misses fine detail and leaves faint repeated images on the page. The drum was changed not long ago so it's no the drum. It's linked to one computer by cable only.
I'd like to be able to print the scanned monochrome ads up to A3 in size and in good clean quality then sell them profitably without the price going too high. It'd be small print runs only.
Any thoughts on my best option? The cost of the printer should be reasonable but can be considered an overhead as we'd keep it for ages and use it for loads of other things - it's the running/unit costs that interests me more. A wireless model would be handy too. I'm particularly keen to hear from anyone who's involved in printing as described above, or as part of their daily job.
I scan the ones I particularly like at 1200 dpi on an A3 scanner and save them in .tif format - the files are pretty big. Most of the advert scans are monochrome, and I have a Canon Pro9000 A3 photo printer if I want to print in high quality colour, although it's not cheap to run. It has 8 different cartridges and the average price I pay for genuine Canon items is around £7-8 each.
My Brother b/w A4 laser printer is old and on its way out - I got it cheap and I've been refilling the cartridge with toner myself at a fiver a throw for some years so it's been extremely economical, but it only does 600 dpi and the quality is barely good enough to print readable text. It misses fine detail and leaves faint repeated images on the page. The drum was changed not long ago so it's no the drum. It's linked to one computer by cable only.
I'd like to be able to print the scanned monochrome ads up to A3 in size and in good clean quality then sell them profitably without the price going too high. It'd be small print runs only.
Any thoughts on my best option? The cost of the printer should be reasonable but can be considered an overhead as we'd keep it for ages and use it for loads of other things - it's the running/unit costs that interests me more. A wireless model would be handy too. I'm particularly keen to hear from anyone who's involved in printing as described above, or as part of their daily job.
