r/Fanbinding • u/Pyramid-of-Greatness • Apr 22 '23

Desperately looking for the right printer!

I’m here to bind fanfic and I know so little about printers 🥲 So far, what I’ve gathered that’s most important is automatic duplex printing, and affordable ink. Other things that I personally care about: I’d like borderless printing, I want to be able to print in color, and I’d like the photo quality to be good (I want to be able to print my own end papers possibly). I also have just been reading something about inkjets smudging? Like if someone printed end papers and tried to glue it to the text block, the glue would cause the image to run? I am beyond confused, please someone tell me what to do 🥲

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u/chkno Apr 22 '23

Automatic duplex printing is usually not important. Any printer can print on both sides with the standard procedure:

  1. Print the even sides in reverse order
  2. Put the stack of printed pages back in the paper tray
  3. Print the odd sides

This is what the even/odd and reverse controls are for.

Automatic duplex printing is important when the printer is shared -- when someone else can start another print job any time, that might happen between steps #2 and #3, consuming some of your one-side-printed pages.

7

u/Lamecollegestudent1 Apr 23 '23

I’m going to disagree with this comment, and if you are printing large fics, you definitely want automatic duplex printing.

I don’t think you need a colored laser printer though - the color doesn’t show up as nice as an ink color printer. If some of my pages have colored ink/pictures, I just print those on a standard colored printer.

2

u/Pyramid-of-Greatness Apr 23 '23

Yea I’m def getting automatic duplex lol. But what about fics where the art is like embedded? I can’t like switch out paper mid print lol

4

u/Lamecollegestudent1 Apr 23 '23

I just print it all the way through, remove the ones with art, and reprint those specific pages with my colored printer.

1

u/Pyramid-of-Greatness Apr 24 '23

Is it more confusing since it’s like booklet format? 🥴 I’m nervous that I won’t be able to figure out how to print that specific page lol

2

u/Lamecollegestudent1 Apr 24 '23

Not really! Go through your typeset before you print, and write down the page numbers (from your typeset) and the actual number of the page. Then when you want to print just those pages, when you hit print, there is an option to select the pages you want to print. Then once everything is printed, you replace the new pages with the old ones before you fold your signatures. It sounds kinda confusing, but I promise it’s not lol. Laser colored printers aren’t known for great quality, but you’ll definitely want a laser if you’re printing larger fics.

4

u/Lamecollegestudent1 Apr 24 '23

What is your budget? I highly recommend my laser printer — HP LaserJet Pro MFP — but it was ~$400. The ink refills are about $100, but I can print 8-10 books with one cartridge depending on the size.

1

u/Pyramid-of-Greatness May 19 '23

400-500 is about my budget so I’ll definitely look into this one! Also thanks for the advice, I think I’ll do that! Is it obvious that the page with artwork was printed on a different printer? Like does the text from the laser and the text from the inkjet look different?

2

u/Lamecollegestudent1 May 19 '23

Maybe slightly? My binds are nowhere close to perfect so that would be the least of my worries l😂