An American Dream Question, Kinda... Not Really.?

HELLO! Okay, my girlfriend and I are going to sell our artwork (her paintings/photography, and my photography) at an art "expo" (an event called "Art in the Park" in Lawrence, KS... where you rent a booth for a day and sell your art!).

Okay, but first we need to make prints of our stuff. Does ANYONE have any suggestions in what kind of printer we should use? Lazer, inkjet, certain brands, etc.? I'd like to spend less than $300, too. Please help?

Uh... try not to take my avatar personally. It's just a finger, not directed at anyone but my camera.

If you are going to be selling your work, you need to make sure you are using ARCHIVAL ink and paper, which can get somewhat costly, depending on what size/type of paper you use. It's important, however, because non-archival inks fade between 1-5 years, and then the buyer will be pissed, especially if it's a show print and not a postcard, or something small.

Another thing to be concerned about is a color balanced monitor -- because if it's not balanced, then the images can often look a lot different printed than they do on the screen. Sometime you can tweak it without getting it properly balanced but that can be really time consuming.

Anyway, I highly reccomend Epson printers. There's a "stylus" printer of theirs that prints up to 13x17 which I used when I was in skool that was quite good. I think they've put out a new model so you'd be able to get one for under 300. I think they retailed for about 700 about 4-5 years ago.

If your picture/photo in your Avatar is telling me to ****, why should I help you or anyone else for that matter? Why is it necessary?

use a professional service such as a copy company. also, bee sure you mark each one with the copyright symbol. You can then send it in for registering a copyright. Law firms abound for that pupose but are needed to do it right.

For very little effort you could have them printed at a professional lab. White House Custom Colour in St Paul MN is the one I would recommend. There prices are very reasonable and you can FTP the images to their lab. Shipping is included and the customer service is EXCELLENT. They have a variety of paper options and alot of high end products that you can sell for a large profit margin, 651-646-8263 is the phone number and the website is whcc.com

if you want to print them yourself go with inkjet. laser is very, very expensive for toner cartridges and not so great at matching colors in my experience. in your price range i suggest going with an epson or a canon. the epson 1280 (see link) is a decent brand. it's $400 but pretty good quality for the money. it prints up to 13"x19" and the ink is reasonably priced. i'm assuming your using this as a way for potential buyers to see your work w/out having to lug it all over creation? digitally photograph your work and print it out using epson photo paper. you might need to make a few test runs (on plain paper or small photo paper) to make sure all your color setting are correct. if you're looking for something a little cheaper the canon ipixma photo series makes good quality color reproductions and the ink is also rather cheap.
the website i gave you is b & h photo. shop around and you can probably find it cheaper. that particular epson is very common. you can probably find it at office depot/max or best buy for less.

I'd say if you are willing to spend at least $300 to get them done professionally. Money taken in from the expo will help reimburse you and pay for future prints.

I use a company called TPI Photo (www.tpiphoto.com) for all my printing. They are very reasonbly priced and handle all sorts of features such as matting, mounting, etc. If you are going for commercial prints, don't do them with a $300 printer.