Felt compelled to put in my 50 cents (or 50 pence – I’m English!) after printing many thousands of icing sheets for our customers over the years, using a number of different printers.
I would also agree with Tracey / Sheila / Brooke420 / Tracie / Tcomfort – we also use the Canon MG5320 in our business and it has been very reliable. (It has since been upgraded by Canon to the MG5520).
A couple of important points here though I wanted to highlight before making a purchase:
- How often you will be printing? As a basic rule of thumb, if you are going to be printing more than 20-30 sheets over a year, it is worth investing in a printer from both a maintenance and financial perspective. Otherwise, it is worth ordering prints from a local bakery or online site. Just to add a little more detail on the ‘ maintenance’ perspective, I would respectfully disagree with The Tailored Cookie and say it’s not necessary to remove inks / print heads each time - however to avoid the risk of inks drying up, try to get the printer running every 1 to 2 weeks if you can – even if just printing on piece of plain paper if you want to save costs. (Note there are some other ‘ongoing’ maintenance tips, which probably sit as another discussion!)
- What kind of printing will you mostly be doing? (This is a rhetorical question for others as I expect Gigi had bought a printer a while ago now!) If you need to print on large icing sheets (eg A3 size), go for an iX6500 series. If you need a scanner, go for the MG5300 series. Otherwise, go for something like the iP4800 series. Basically there’s no point spending extra on additional printer features if you don’t use them – the print quality is the same. We’ve used all three of the above in our cake decorating business and would recommend all of them depending on your needs. We haven’t had experience using other brands like the Epson that Julia has – we have found the biggest ‘support’ generally is on the Canon brand due to historic reasons in Edible Printing (and as a result the ink cartridges can sometimes be a little cheaper).
Hope that helps to any future purchasers - any thoughts or comments on the above welcome!