Selling prints, cards and artwork made with the Epson EcoTank ET8550. Is the printer good enough?

hi my name's keith cooper from northlight images and in this video i'm going to try and address a question i'm asked quite often about selling prints of all sorts in particular using the epson et 8550 ecotank printer now i've done a review of that printer done a review of lots of different printers i've also addressed making cards various things scanning artwork and other stuff but this comes back to a question i'm often asked and i'll explain why later it's sometimes not the right question but suffice to say can i sell prints that i've made with the 8550 well yes course i can with the important proviso of if there's something that somebody actually wants to buy now this is a dye based printer but with a pigment black ink that is used on some media settings now that makes for interesting results which i i've looked at elsewhere such as uh this card here is a scan using the scanner of to print on a heavy cotton rag paper of a watercolor painting produced by a friend of mine slightly larger than this reduced to this size to make a card just whether it is possible to make some cards for with this image on it and they look very good well that's just a single example it's using a matte paper it's actually a heavy arc paper and that's using the pigment ink as well dye inks pigment inks i've i've looked at some of the differences between them and one of the key differences apart there are technical differences as well as to what the results you'll get off them but one of the key differences that if you're selling photos and you're selling them for people to put on the wall and you're selling photos that you hope are going to last then a pigment ink based printer is almost certainly what you want the die inks have improved considerably but they are not inks that are going to give really excellent archival properties they're not going to last for years and that's the sort of thing you expect if you sell a photo print then you expect them to last however i'm not going to think anyone's going to buy a card like this and expect the card to look absolutely perfect in 100 years time well frankly i'm not bothered because i'm not going to be here in 100 years time but you know your marketing may well consider that an important feature and i've looked at print marketing and other aspects in lots of other videos and things and they always come back to the business side of it so that whether it's archival or not that's a business decision as much as anything there are differences between the sorts of prints you'll get from pigment inks dye inks they're relatively trivial with a well set up printer with good paper and proper use of profiles and particularly with this printer a lot comes down to your choice of media it's capable of really excellent results on some media i've looked at printing cards elsewhere and i would reiterate that if you use cheap card that isn't meant for inkjet use you will almost certainly get rubbish results so cheap card rubbish prints it's as simple as that card is too expensive then you're not selling your cards for enough you can't sell your cards at a high enough price they're not good enough sorry that's it it's what people want to buy not what you want to sell is what it's about but you can also i would say i get asked quite often about you know printing stuff on cards so here's a cup this is a another paper and this has got text on it you can just about get away with this because it's pigment black for the text you can just about get away with printing on the inside with some text but don't try and pin print pictures unless it is a double-sided media now i have got one here a card and this is from a local supplier here in in leicester in the uk uh paper spectrum and this is a double-sided card but of course you have to be careful when you're using double-sided card because you have to line things up and print it and you want to hope that it doesn't mark your uh your main image on the pro on the print here so uh double-sided yes it's doable but uh with care one other thing don't even think of putting fine quality media in the front tray of this you feed it in the slot there or for heavier media and this is on on card you can actually feed it through the back um and there's a straight through path obviously i couldn't do it here because the walls in the way you have to turn the print around for doing that and feed it in but i've got a video covering doing that so when it comes down to the question again can i sell my princes yes if there's a market for them and with photos that's a fairly standard route of galleries displays the uh if you've got local restaurants you can have them up there because local restaurants welcome photographers and artists uh who are happy to give them free art um i would say i've mentioned some selling stuff before on this if next time you go to a restaurant with somebody how much attention do you pay to the art on the walls as opposed to the food or the person you're with i'm going to say that giving free art to restaurants and cafes and the like yeah maybe one or two people do sell pictures but precious few i'm going to say it's mainly a way of getting as a restaurant owner free art and you know stuff to cover your walls in your restaurant that's that but if you're making prints to sell and that's either cards well there's larger prints and things and perfectly you can do them on here and you decide that the dye pigment thing is not important to you doesn't really matter you're not selling archival products that are going to last 150 years you need to work out your true costs now when i get asked about cost of printing almost always it's about how much does the ink cost well it's relatively low with this printer because this is an ink tank printer where you fill up the carts the the tanks here from bottles and you fill it up and it makes it relatively cheap in terms of actual ink costs that you're paying out so i don't have exact costs to work out exact costs needs to do a lot of printing and a lot of measurement of what the display here is how the levels go down and some calculations and even then it's quite tricky suffice to say that if ink costs are a major impact on your sales plans then once again it suggests you're not charging enough for your product and if you can't oh i mentioned if you can't charge more for it then it's not good enough that's it it's it really is as simple as that as artists photographers we'd like to think of our work and it being somewhat special and sort of people wanting it because we did it no they they buy it for all kinds of reasons and it's very rarely for anything that you can think of beforehand somebody might like this card here somebody might like this card or even this one here a smaller one of a flower someone might like it i've no idea why they might like it if it sells then it's a product that sells that's the other thing are you serious about this is it a real business or are you just doing this perhaps just with that vague idea of oh i think i could make some money from it i come across a lot of people who ask the question is the 8550 okay for selling my prints when the question they really should be asking is does anyone want to buy my work now it's much easier to ask a technical question like is this printer up to it or not much more difficult to actually look at what your what your work is whether it's marketable whether there's a whether you've got the right market for it even this can definitely do it but you need to look at your true costs all your costs and that includes your time somebody asked me the other day about using this printer about getting it for producing a particular type of card and they were looking at producing a hundred cards a day perhaps now 100 cards a day the fact that this is not a lightning quick printer when it's printing at high quality on you know media like this makes a significant difference because i can't stack up 50 sheets of cards in the back and go away and do something else a printer like this needs minding you need to take the prints off as they come out of the tray you need to make sure they're feeling okay because although the printer handles card like this it may not 100 of the time perfectly feed a sheet and that's a wasted sheet or a jam sheet which you don't really want so you need to look at far more of it and in fact in this particular instance that somebody asked um i couldn't recommend any of the printers i've looked at recently because they're all aimed at i'm a professional photographer they're aimed at the sort of prints that i make now i do smaller printers such as this but i do much larger printers as well and they tend to be even more expensive and considerably larger but the key comes down to it as to what you're looking for in it if i wanted to produce 100 prints and they were all the same then i'm getting towards a day then i'm getting towards actually farming out the printing to someone else um you've got to look at your entire costs and ask yourself does my business work have i have planned for this or is it just a hobby and there's nothing wrong with just going well see if i can sell a few prints or give a few prints do a few prints for friends and things like that but don't mistake that for a proper business and that's more than anything is my answer to can i sell prints made with this yeah of course you can as long as somebody wants to buy them now i would say i've i've made this particular video with respect to the 8550 because the 8550 is probably the printer i've been asked this question most about but do have a look at some of my other printer videos and articles on the norflight site where i look at printing cards and other things on other printers i've looked at this year of this site so ones like the xp 15000 from epson small cartridges that's going to cost you more per print is it useful who knows it's up to you to decide and also the canon and other epson printers that i've looked at all of them capable of very good results but selling your prints is not really about how good the quality of the picture is it's about what it is the relevance to the customer and if anyone wants to buy them so hopefully that's of some interest please feel free to ask some questions in the comments below if you've got any questions on it have a look at the other videos particularly the business of photography side of things where i've got a lot of print selling related videos i've put together so thank you very much and i hope that's been of use cheers

Channel: Keith Cooper

Views: 5,940

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Id: l5cafpikhN8

Length: 12min 45sec (765 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 27 2021