To Print or not to Print?
It’s a good question. Should you buy a pro level printer? Should you buy a printer and hope that it’s close enough to pro? I’ve seen people use cheaper printers to print, and I suppose as long as the photos print, then it’s pro, isn’t it?
That’s why this is in the pro section, it’s a way to determine IF you need it, or what you should go for IF you want one.
So I’ve broken up the printer section up in the same way as the builds section-from the simple and cheap level, to the pro level that doesn’t fool around. There’s many printers to choose from, so we’ve condensed them into simpler/most popular options, which should help. Again, your mileage may vary, so choose what you want, make it work, and then have a backup.
Like a standard cheap $100 printer. There’s plenty of these around, and you can pick up a Canon, HP, Dell, etc for a beaner. That’s the Donnie Brasco-Al Pacino wise-guy talk here, get out of here with your racist crap. These printers work well, they’ll give you a decent print, and with the proper paper, nobody will know the wiser. Plenty of professional setups use printers like this, which is crazy in my opinion because quality isn’t really that great, but it’s also cheap and nobody knows the wiser.
Print time won’t be too fast, but it will be decent depending on the printer, and you can get value from these. Plus since it’s relatively cheap, you’ll be able to replace it easily should it get damaged during loading and unloading.
A note to add here is also using a small printer like a Canon Selphy 1300, or even a pocket printer. The Selphy is small, battery powered and portable. If you build a small booth like we have in our guides, you could use a Selphy to print it for an hour or two, depending on your battery and print amounts. They take about a minute to spit out a print, and the prints are decent quality-comparable to the printers above and the next level of print quality.
A pocket printer spits out small sticker prints, like the HP Zink series. The prints can vary from decent to suck, and you probably won’t want to use it professionally, but if you wanted to hand out stickers to your friends, that’s cool too. Using an app to set it up is a pain, since you can’t print just from the photo booth app, but it still gets the job done if you’re having fun. DO NOT USE if you’re a pro. It won’t work like you want/think, and it’ll make you look like a joke. You’re probably going to have trouble with the print connection too, keeping it close to the phone and then using the app to print.
The Canon Selphy are a bit bigger than the pocket printer, and can also run on battery, but are full fledged printers. These prints can be as good as a full sized printer, but can also suck if you’re using a sucky printer. The newest Selphy is airprint enabled, which rocks if you have a wifi network. So you can wireless print a 4×6 in a minute or so, and if you’re using s DSLR, should be a decent print. The drawbacks are that the printer cartridge only holds a few photos at a time (10), so you’ll have to man to constantly refill the printer. You make also have trouble with the print-selecting the size and making sure it recognized the size properly. But you can get it to work, and again, it can run on battery so you can really get some decent wireless prints going if you’re prepped.
You can step it up to a Canon Pixma Pro (!) or Epson R series (!!), which use up to 10 different ink levels. These aren’t as expensive as you think. They run normally $300 or under brand new, depending on the rebate and rebate season, since lots of people get one bundled and then resell it for cheap. Try ebay or other resales to get one brand new for that price instead of the brand new $999 price. That’s a bargain discount. The only other problem with these are that they’re heavy and somewhat loud.
Dragging one around would be a pain in the butt. Using it would give you excellent prints, and probably a little faster than the other printers. But they also use plenty of ink, and with 8-10 different tanks, when you lose one, you potentially lose the capability of the printer, which sucks for budgeting. Carrying a spare is expensive, and also time consuming to change. But you WILL get good prints. And bonus is that you can get larger prints, so if you wanted to go A3, you can. That’s a huge print for a photo booth, but if you can sell it bundled with your package or whatever, it’s a deal to make. Hey, want to buy a 13 x 19 print?? Uh, Sure…
Or you can step up to the big boy leagues like the DNP Ds40, or HiTi P525. These are serious roll printers. That means that they literally come with a paper roll that they will cut the paper after they spit out a print. The prints spit out the fastest, and to be honest, I’ve been a photographer for 15 years, and the prints are nice, but it all depends on your setup/camera to make theses photos look the best. For a controlled, great lighting shot, it’ll be awesome, and the prints will spit out fast, cut and make you look like a rock star. This is the level that you want to be at if you’re doing this pro. The caveats to these printers is that they’re heavy-20 pounds and up and expensive-$500 and up, and the rolls are expensive, $200 per roll. But they offer the cheapest options per actual photo-at usually 25 cents or so. And since they’re the fastest, you definitely look like a professional and have a pro setup.
There’s a few more options, and they all go up in price from there. Personally, I go between a Pro 100 and a DS40. The pro 100 gives me great options for great prints, and is as heavy or less to haul than the DS40. DO get a case, because with stuff this heavy, you’ll be banging it around as you load or worse, and you don’t want to damage the key star of your photo equipment. This is what sells the photo once the whole setup is done, so be smart and get the best you can afford. A cheapo printer is good enough, but if you care about impressions, you know that it’ll pay off in the end.
NOW you can always decide that you don’t a printer. It’s cheaper without one, and heck, it’s the digital age after all. Why can’t these lazy people just print their own prints off facebook danggit!? Well, aside from your vulgar language issues, I’d say that you being a cheapo and not providing a printer makes you look sloppy. A tangible good in someone’s hands is always easier to justify cost. Plus, it also makes your job easier since you do the job in a night and walk after that. It’s why I like DJ versus Photography, because once the night is over, I don’t have to revisit that nightmare again and again to fix my photos. Er, it’s plain easier, and you won’t have to reprint later, and you won’t have them scrutinizing the photos so much looking for an amount to print. Just print all that happens, and you can walk away happy, the client is happy, and if they want more or doubles, they will ask and you can charge for more. That makes sense and makes dollars as well (OooOOoo, he’s so good at puns). When you have a printer that spits out prints under a minute and they look great, you have a recipe for easy success, just like ramen noodles.
Or don’t, and get it to work cheaply, it’s all up to you.
The next biggest thing besides the actual printer, is the way that you connect to the printer. If you have a newer printer, the chances that it has the ability to connect to the internet are high. That means that within the last few years, you can use one of those sub-100 dollar printers to print a photo using airprint/android print, and then you don’t need wireless connecting your printer to your booth. That’s a huge and easy step, because unless you’re using some wires and adaptors, connecting a printer via usb to a tablet can be a pain in the butt. Direct connect also works as well, so that’s pretty easy and fun that you can create a network without a network. If you need to create a network, you can use the cheap wifi adaptors found here: which are great to create a mini network to connect devices to. Some of these wifi devices also double as a print server so bonus for those that don’t have airprint in the printer.
You can also use one of those nifty 5 dollar rpi devices to create a wireless print server and then connect that to your printer. That essentially makes your printer wireless, and for most sakes, that’s enough. Connect it to your software configuration and then you’re good to go. This will require some testing, so DO NOT leave it for live full production or you’ll look like a jackass. If you find that you cannot make your printer an airprinter, then you should probably try another solution or try a different printer in your setup (duh).