Nowadays, having a printer seems a bit unnecessary given that a lot of us have gone digital. At the airport, you just need to show your digital ticket for check in... for documents needed to be signed you can just sign it on your phone or iPad... and basically not being a student anymore or being at an office, having a printer doesn't feel like a need. Except for some other government transactions we need to do. 🙄
Whenever we needed to print or copy something, there are always sensitive information there that we don't want some random printer shops to see. Sometimes you'd need to airdrop/send them the documents to them directly so they can print it because for some reason (maybe virus reasons lol) they don't accept flash drives. So a lot of times those documents containing sensitive information just gets stored in some random's computer. So it got me thinking... maybe we need a printer.
While browsing for printers, I was looking at cheap ones. I saw some printers that are as low as $50 and some with scanners as well but still cheap. I was originally planning that until I remembered I wanted to print my art on paper and stick it on my wall because the wall is boring as fuck and at the same time I needed to be reminded of how my art looks like.
Cheap printers won't really print nice photos and they use cartridges and I am not in good terms with cartridges because bruhh they literally empty after a few pages of printing images and you'd need to spend $20 more for 1 ink. Disgusting lol.
We usually use what we call "unlimited ink" which is a third party ink system installed on the printer. They are basically big bottles of inks that last you forever before it runs out which was really great.
Apparently, big brands are now catching up. They know nobody really buys cartridges anymore cos they're expensive as fuck so now they have what they call ink tanks. Which is the same concept as what I've mentioned lol.
Then I saw the Canon Pixma photo printers which really caught my eye for the gorgeous 6-color ink tanks which prints better (like a lot better) quality prints for photos and I just decided to get it for myself.
Most normal printers have 4 inks if they're only printing documents and stuff. Photo printers on the other hand specializes in printing photos (thus the name) and they typically have 6 inks which makes the colors more vivid and the blacks even blacker.
I got a Canon Pixma G670 which is a 3-in-1 version of the Canon Pixma 570. 3-in-1 just means it has a scanner so I can also scan documents and my small physical artworks instead of taking photos of them and worry about the shadows and stuff lol.
Once you get the printer, it includes the 6 bottles of ink inside the box and you'd have to put them in the tanks yourself. It was actually pretty fun to do.
"So what about the inks can you just experiment and put the magenta in the black tank? lol"
Actually no. They built a system where you can't make a mistake or put them in wrong tanks by having this pattern that's different to other inks so it only matches with the tank for that. Like a key and a lock. The magenta bottle won't fit in the black tank and so on. Pretty nice actually.
It fills up pretty fast. :P
And as you can see... that's a lot of ink. :D
Canon says it can print up to 3,800 images in 4R size (4x6 in) and in high quality. Huh, we'll see about that!
The moment of truth... the testing!
I bought a few photo papers from the bookstore and honestly I was quite disappointed for the very few selections of photo paper brands. Years ago I see a lot of brands like Canon, Fujifilm, Kodak, etc. in my local bookstore but I don't see them now. I guess nobody really buys them anymore haha.
The result is really STUNNING and it feels like I went to a printing shop. :P It's really high quality and the colors are so vivid. Way way better than the normal printer that I had before. It's inkjet by the way.
Also short story about why I really get discouraged about printing my art in printing shops...
I had this one time I was printing stickers in a printer shop and the workers there were like fucking asking me if I made the art, staring at my art and asking questions if that was me in the art. Like bro just do your job maybe? What's worse is I don't even know if they deleted them from their computer, and as some of you may know my art can be quite sexual in some cases. So I didn't feel comfortable of them being nosy about my art and honestly I didn't expect that given that they are a printing shop. That's literally their job to print and they should have printed a lot of shit but for some reason had the time to ask me stuff instead of doing what I'm paying them for. Anyway... that's also why I didn't go to printing shops despite wanting my art to be printed for a long time. :D
Images are also so gorgeous. Like in some printers you can see the pixels or whatever in printing but this one really is high quality.
Also one of the good things of this printer??? WIFI!! Yeah I can just send my files over thru wifi instead of connecting the printer thru cable and worrying about where tf to put the printer lol but yeah honestly this is one of the features that I really enjoy. I can even print from my phone but I haven't tried that yet. Now let's not tell 
I'm also trying out sticker paper brands and this one in particular sucks big time. I gave it a lot of chance to prove itself since I was thinking maybe I wasn't using the right settings for the paper but nope. I really need to experiment on brands and see which I like the most since I really want to make stickers both for my journals and stuff but also maybe to give away to people. :D
That's it that I've tried so far. I really hope I can find good sticker and photo papers. As I have learned the papers really matter A LOT. I'm not gonna waste the ink to print on some cheapass ugly paper. I'm really excited to print some of my art. :D