1 - Ink: quality and number of cartridges

What are the two main differences between an office printer and a photo printer? The ink quality and the number of cartridges!

Indeed, there are two technologies to make ink for printers :

1 - coloring agents-based inks
2 - pigment-based inks

The first ones are cheap to make but don't resist well to light. The second ones are made from pigments and are especially resistant to light exposure. Our best masterpieces are printed with these inks, for a lifetime of more than 100 years (keeping their beautiful original colors)!

And on the other hand, photo printers often have more ink cartridges, either to offer a wider gamut, meaning to offer a wider saturated colors pannel hence more relief in the sky and in gradations, and finally, better renderings in black and white. Let's see this in details now...

A - Inks quality: Inks made from coloring agents

These are the inks we use in our office printer or in photo printer under $500. The coloring agents are mixed with water, quite simply. It enables to make especially thin ink drops at the same time (around 1 picoliter), more interesting for finely printing text documents than for printing the finest details of our photos. Indeed, since the droplets are less than 4 picolitres, the printing point is totally invisible.

Assets

• The ink is cheaper, (although you also overpay for the fact the printer is often cheap.)
• Drops are especially thin for thin printing of text (as thin as with laser for the two models I tested: Canon TS8150 and Epson XP-760).
• It is already possible to make good prints at a reasonable cost.
• Glossy papers are brighter than pigmented inks - Very beautiful!

Drawbacks

• Ink doesn't resist to light because coloring agents lose their colors. Prints exposed to light quickly become dull but it is also without counting on the progress made by Canon and Epson in this field!
• It has nothing to do with ink quality, but on coloring agents printers, cartridges always have a low capacity, not compatible with intensive photo prints because you would have to replace empty cartridges all the time.  
• These inks are not eligible for the Digigraphie® Epson certification program or other long-term print run certification programs despite their obvious progress.

My recommendation! If you work mainly for the Internet, always choose: "Native contrast". On the other hand, if you print regularly or are looking for a good screen/sorting match, choose "Contrast 287:1" when possible.

B - Inks quality: inks with pigments...

It is the type of ink to favor when you want to get nice photo prints that will last. Indeed, the coloring agents are encapsulated in a resin bubble extremely resistant to light, instead of being mixed with water. The whole difficulty for manufacturers was to encapsulate this thin powder in a resin bubble thin enough in order to splatter super thin ink drops on our photo prints. They have succeeded! Well, there have been a few print head closures, but the trend with the latest generations of printers is down.

Assets

• The ink is very resistant to light - Prints can be certified up to 200 years on certain papers called "museum quality". You can thus guarantee a long lasting if you're selling your prints. 
• Pour cette raison, il faut au moins cette condition pour que votre imprimante For this reason, you need at least this condition for your printer to be eligible for the Digigraphie ® Epson program if it is not automatically a sufficient reason.
• The range of colors - called gamut - is often very wide and anyway broader than the gamut of an office printer. These inks enable to print more saturated colors, especially for printers with more than six cartridges.
• It is not due to the quality of ink but printers with pigment-based ink have at least ten ink cartridges for renderings with even more relief in gradations and whites and blacks a lot more neutral and subtle.

Drawbacks

• Prints on "Glossy" papers are duller than with dye inks,
• Reliability: Sometimes it says that the nozzles get clogged but it depends on a lot of criteria because it's something I haven't seen in six years on my Epson 7800. The next generation was particularly sensitive to this, but the very latest generation (since the end of 2015) seems to be returning to reliability.
• They're more expensive but mostly because you can buy high-capacity cartridges, so much more convenient and overall with a better price/quality ratio or quantity/price!

C - The number of ink cartridges...

Office printers only need four ink cartridges for the four colors CMYK to work. But photo printers must print colors with a lot more shades and above all, a wide enough gamut or even black and white. No need to go round in circles, it requires more cartridges. Nowadays, Canon sells a PRO printer with 1 to 12 cartridges and cheap printers with ink based on coloring agents have at least six cartridges...

My opinion and my: it is undeniable that bubble jet photo printers with more than four cartridges offer a way more "photographic" rendering, meaning with more shades. Reliefs and gradations in the sky will be more progressive hence without tone breakings as with an office printer. However, for printers with six cartridges, you'll often have a light cyan and a light magenta. It will be great for color prints, but not for black & whites. For that, you need even more cartridges, especially grey ones. With six cartridges only, black & white prints often have a predominance that is difficult to correct, even with a calibration in due form. It is also clear that the three grey cartridges of the Canon Pro-1 work wonders for truly neutral and particularly beautiful NetB prints. A real strength of this printer but only on glossy or barium paper.

2 - Printing precision: size of the ink drops and printing definition

Two important criteria could be watched to know which printer makes the most accurate prints :

• The size of the ink drops (their thiness)
• The printing definition (in dpi but not to be mistaken for the definition of your photo!!!).

Thiness of ink drops

For a few years, we witnessed a show-off competition between Canon and Epson to know who had the thinnest ink drops. Nowadays, Epson goes first with a thinness of 3.5 picoliters against 4 for Canon (on printers with pigments-based ink) but is it determining? Since the droplets have fallen below the 4 picoliters the differences are absolutely invisible to the naked eye. Let the marketing departments do their job, they enjoy it!

And about printing definition, the famous 1,440 x 2,880 dpi...

Canon will offer the standard value of 4,800 x 2,400 dpi and Epson 2,880 x 1,440 dpi. It's about the accuracy of spattering of the ink drops on the paper - which has nothing to do with the dpis of your photo, rather around 200 to 300 dpi. I might as well tell you right away that if I manage to find a difference between the 1,440 x 720 and the 2,880 x 1,440 dpi of my Epson printer, it's only because I find more relief to sky gradations at 2,880 dpi. On details, I don't see any difference, even when I get real close to the sheet.

3 - Printing size

Another way to distinguish printers is to choose them according to their maximum printing size, or more accurately their maximum printing format: A4, A3, A3+, A2, roll paper for digital printing of your panoramas, etc.

About the cost of ink according to the printer size! The smaller the printers (A4), the smaller their ink cartridges are. However, the smaller the cartridges are, the higher the price per ml of ink. This has two unfortunate consequences:

• The cost price of a print run is very high because the price of ink per ml is almost excessive,
• As soon as you print more than 50 sheets per year, you always have to change an empty cartridge and it will be cheaper in the end.

Two examples :

• The same ink costs 1.10 €/ml for a Canon IP7250 and 0.85 €/ml for a Canon Pro-10,
• It costs 0.68 € / ml for Epson 3800 and only 0.45 € / ml for an Epson 4800, which is more than 2X less than for an IP7250 first price with dye inks and not with pigments.

4 - So... Epson or Canon?

Canon's print quality has made great progress and has caught up with Epson overall. In 2016, Canon = Epson, but there are still significant differences according to the selection criteria. Now that I have tested a number of them, here are my buying tips: