I am using a kodak 8500 dye-sub. Fast, sharp..ok flesh...but has a bit of green to it. Also, Reds and blues are too dense and seeting a lower saturation in red and/or blue kills the rest of the image. The cost is about $1.65 per print. I am looking to get a new printer for sports portraits, teams, and other graphics. I am hoping to find one that is vibrant in color as sharp as kodak, with better skin tones than the kodak. I was thing of staying with dye-sub because I know exacally 100 sheet ribbon and 100 sheet paper...where Inks are hard to gauge. Any suggestions?
It's not a dye-sub, but I've gotten excellent results with the Epson 4000 series; current model is the 4800. It's very dependable, image quality is excellent. I've run over 13,000 pages worth through it over the last few years, and image quality hasn't degraded at all. It costs about $400 for a full set of inks (8 individual cartridges), but being 110ml each (or 220ml), they usually last pretty well. When mine finally quits, I'll definitely get another in this line.
hmm, that's a tough one, since I haven't though that much about it, but a 100' roll of premium luster paper is about $45 to $47, so about .45 for paper, Ink could be less than a dime per print I'd say, depending of course on the image content itself. Maybe .55 tops?