A3 Printer Advice

[Philidor]

I'm looking to buy an A3 inkjet printer. Does anyone use one? How is it for printing music? I'm wanting to print A3 sheets which can be folded and bound as A4 scores. Has anyone any advice? Particularly welcome would be words along the lines of: DON'T BUY PRINTER X IT'S TOTAL GARBAGE!! There aren't that many on the market so it should be easy to find the best and the worst.

[Philidor]

*BUMP* Anyone? There must be A3 printer users out there, fed up with A4 sheets falling off their music stands.

[Choralia]

There is a rather old topic on this subject, with considerations, on the CPDL forums:

http://forums.cpdl.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=4729

Max

[Philidor]

Thanks. The HP 1220C looks interesting, printing up to 19 x 13 inches - bigger than A3 (16.54 x 11.69 inches) but apparently doesn't like anything other than copy paper! Any more?

[Allan]

I own a 1220C. It's about seven or eight years old at this point. Retail wise, I think it may have been replaced by a newer model. I've run regular paper of different weights that you would get from an office supply store, photo paper, and thin card stock, all of different sizes through it without problems. It does have an option to add an adapter for a roll feeder, which will then allow it to print 44 feet linearly. I never got that adapter so I don't know if it's still available. The only paper drawback is if you use it in a humid area. If it's humid, it has trouble separating the sheets when it feeds, and may drag two or three sheets through in a staggered manner. So you need to keep it where the air stays dry.

Ink wise, the cheaper generic cartridges that Office Max and Staples have under their brand names work just fine with it.

Overall I'm quite happy with it, and it is still working for me. Also, I use it with Linux, so base system doesn't matter. (Though, I did have to hand tweak four parameter numbers in the printer definition file to get the bleed areas right.)

[Philidor]

Allan, thanks, that's exactly what I wanted. Any more?

[kalliwoda]

Not the Inkjet you are looking for: I have a GCC Elite XL Laser Printer (10 years old), prints up to 13x35.4 inch - I am happy with it, use it with a Mac.
What may interest you more:
If you buy an oversize printer you may want to look around for a wholesale paper source:
Calling around to look for 9x12 inch paper I found a wholesale source that would sell "a quarter of a pallet = 12.500 sheets" a little more expensively. But this compared still very favourably to a paper shop.
The point is: On the pallet the standard paper size (at least in germany) is about 24x36 inch, which is then cut to A3/A4 or delivered to offset printing companies as "A3/A4 full bleed"
There was no extra fee when I asked the wholesale company to just cut the pallet stock to 12x18, or even to add 1000 sheets cut to 12x36 (2 pages with 2 additional fold-in pages). I purchased slightly yellow acid-free 110g paper like the one used by Bärenreiter, Breitkopf etc), all for not much more than standard laser printer A3 paper in the local paper shops. If I would have bought the whole pallet it would even have been cheaper!

[Philidor]

Thanks! Covers may be a problem. They need to be c. 300g and not be damaged by the machine's rollers.