Do It Yourself Insert Printing?

[praedicator]

I know a lot of people use Kinko's or equivalent to print out inserts, but does anyone use their own inkjet printers for any?

A while back I scored a good deal on the Canon S9000 large format printer and have been using that for printing out proofs of insert designs, but the media and consumables costs are adding up quickly. Is there an A3+ paper stock that people recommend for inkjet printers?

 

[galfordo]

I'd love to have some sort of home insert printing solution, but I really don't think I could afford something that would give me near the quality that Kinko's would.

So what kind of quality does the S9000 give? Can you post a pic or two of some inserts that you printed with it?

 

[praedicator]

You'd be surprised what an inkjet printer can do these days. Here's some of the inserts I've printed:

Matte vs. Glossy

Matte

The print head was out of alignment for a few of these, but it didn't ruin the print too bad. Recently I've been using heavy weight matte paper instead of glossy because the ink penetrates deeper with matte paper producing more saturated colors, but with a little less detail than glossy.

 

[galfordo]

Yeah - I'm with you one the matte paper. The color just looks richer than the glossy. Anyway, those look pretty damned good - I didn't think that a reasonably priced inkjet could produce that kind of detail.

Since I've got over twenty inserts that need to be printed, I may have to look into this - so I might be asking ya for a few pointers in the future if you're cool with that.

I'm just wondering - what kind of differences do you notice between your S9000 quality and the quality you typically receive from Kinko's? Are they about the same, almost indistinguishable, or what?

I know you mentioned that Kinko's has accuracy problems, but what about things like sharpness of the image, color bleeding, etc?