Best choice for most economical high quality printing?
bwcolor wrote:
There is no way to keep ink cost down with the Canon pigment printers, but you can schedule your printing in a way to produce one print every 23 hours rather than print several times per week. Also, per print ink cost really doesn’t drop until you start printing with the wider printers above the 1100. The larger printers take the two largest sized ink cartridges and with volume comes a reduction in per print ink cost. If you print regularly, this is the answer:
I think you are right that there is no way to keep Canon pigment ink costs down. I did find some very interesting information at Red River Paper's web site which suggests the ink cost differences between the 300/310 and the 1000/1100 is not very great. They have done a very careful comparison of printing costs with a wide range of printers. Comparing the cost of prints between the two printers, they came up with, for example, a cost for an 8x10 of $0.72 on the 1000 vs $0.81 on the 300. Here's a link:
I am a slow but steady printer who wants high quality results rather than a high volume printer or someone making many large prints for sale. My style of editing and printing is to make small (4x6) test prints of various edits of a single image or of closely related images and then, after some time living with the test prints, to make a larger print as a "final" version. I could easily print 5-7 days a week, but probably only a few prints each day. I have a very large backlog of unprinted images to work on, but I work on each image slowly, spending time on alternate edits and then living with the 4x6 test prints.
So, the Pro-2600 is probably excessive for my needs. But I would like to get high quality results as efficiently and economically as possible, given my slow but steady manner of printing.
Best choice for most economical high quality printing?
bwcolor wrote:
There is no way to keep ink cost down with the Canon pigment printers, but you can schedule your printing in a way to produce one print every 23 hours rather than print several times per week. Also, per print ink cost really doesn’t drop until you start printing with the wider printers above the 1100. The larger printers take the two largest sized ink cartridges and with volume comes a reduction in per print ink cost. If you print regularly, this is the answer:
I think you are right that there is no way to keep Canon pigment ink costs down. I did find some very interesting information at Red River Paper's web site which suggests the ink cost differences between the 300/310 and the 1000/1100 is not very great. They have done a very careful comparison of printing costs with a wide range of printers. Comparing the cost of prints between the two printers, they came up with, for example, a cost for an 8x10 of $0.72 on the 1000 vs $0.81 on the 300. Here's a link:
I am a slow but steady printer who wants high quality results rather than a high volume printer or someone making many large prints for sale. My style of editing and printing is to make small (4x6) test prints of various edits of a single image or of closely related images and then, after some time living with the test prints, to make a larger print as a "final" version. I could easily print 5-7 days a week, but probably only a few prints each day. I have a very large backlog of unprinted images to work on, but I work on each image slowly, spending time on alternate edits and then living with the 4x6 test prints.
So, the Pro-2600 is probably excessive for my needs. But I would like to get high quality results as efficiently and economically as possible, given my slow but steady manner of printing.
Best choice for most economical high quality printing?
bwcolor wrote:
There is no way to keep ink cost down with the Canon pigment printers, but you can schedule your printing in a way to produce one print every 23 hours rather than print several times per week. Also, per print ink cost really doesn’t drop until you start printing with the wider printers above the 1100. The larger printers take the two largest sized ink cartridges and with volume comes a reduction in per print ink cost. If you print regularly, this is the answer:
I think you are right that there is no way to keep Canon pigment ink costs down. I did find some very interesting information at Red River Paper's web site which suggests the ink cost differences between the 300/310 and the 1000/1100 is not very great. They have done a very careful comparison of printing costs with a wide range of printers. Comparing the cost of prints between the two printers, they came up with, for example, a cost for an 8x10 of $0.72 on the 1000 vs $0.81 on the 300. Here's a link:
I am a slow but steady printer who wants high quality results rather than a high volume printer or someone making many large prints for sale. My style of editing and printing is to make small (4x6) test prints of various edits of a single image or of closely related images and then, after some time living with the test prints, to make a larger print as a "final" version. I could easily print 5-7 days a week, but probably only a few prints each day. I have a very large backlog of unprinted images to work on, but I work on each image slowly, spending time on alternate edits and then living with the 4x6 test prints.
So, the Pro-2600 is probably excessive for my needs. But I would like to get high quality results as efficiently and economically as possible, given my slow but steady manner of printing.
Feb 14, 2026 at 11:04 AM
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