Seems like this was a feature on EVERY printer in the late 90's. Now I've been to Office Max, Office Depot, Wal-Mart, and Super K-Mart and still can't find a printer that will allow me to print banner.



I have a HP D2545 sitting on my desk currently, I bought it because it looked like the cheap-o printer I used back in the day to print banners.... it has options to print iron on labels, but not a damn banner.



Am I missing some software that will allow me to print banner?



I'm starting to get pretty pissy about having to cut and splice 30 pages together at the end of every well.

How often do you do it?  Could you send the file to kinko's?

As far as I can recall, banner printing at home was only ever possible with a dot-matrix printer, using continuous-form paper.  I was still using a dot matrix printer until the mid/late 1990's.  I was "lucky" because mine was a 24-pin dot matrix, offering greater quality than the more common 9-pin dot matrix printers.  But it was still noisy as hell, slow, and unable to print even in shades of gray, let alone color.

An HP D2545 doesn't have the paper-handling mechanism to take continuous-form paper, so I don't know how you would print a banner with it.  You might as well take that printer back for a refund, because I don't think there's any way you're going to get it to print a banner.

OK, poking around a little more on the Web I found suggestions that you could maybe feed continuous-form paper (most likely a roll) through the manual feed, and thus create banners on your inkjet printer.  But you'd still be better off having Kinko's handling it, for reasons outlined below.

A lot of software (e.g. MS Word) still does support banner printing, although the equipment to do so has become rare.

Even if you could get that DeskJet to print banners, you'd probably go broke feeding it.  Printing a banner with an inkjet would eat through cartridges fast, and HP ink is not cheap.  

On balance, it would almost certainly be cheaper and easier to get your banner printer professionally, as suggested above.

We have one of these at the squadron i work at for printing Maps.. http://www.superwarehouse.com/HP_DesignJet_500_(42)_Plotter/C7770B/p/119671   It does a good job but is slow at fuck.. a little pricey but i will print banners or anything else you need.. That only major problem is trying to find good software to fully use the abilities of this printer...

Probably cost you a billion dollars, but



http://www.ganson.com/OldGanson010810/F32.htm



!!!!!!!!!!

Every other week and I have to be able to print my own banner in the field.





Basically what I'm doing now is printing off 30 sheets (2 full reports) and using a razor and tape to splice it all together.





Being able to print anywhere from 3-15 sheets continuous would make life much easier and would allow me to provide better analysis to my customers.





This is one page:











Continuous print banner style will keep from breaking the lines and making me have to splice it all together, resulting in a more professional result, less time, less money.





Finding a printer to do this used to be cake, now it's a pain in the ass.




 
 

I've used 20 dollar printers from HP before and dot matrix style paper, just peel off the perforated feed alignment stuff on the side. It's finding a printer that will continuously print that is the problem.



 

double tap. Can't believe that it's really this hard to find a modern printer (not a plotter) that will allow me to print field copies of my log in banner form.






 

 
 

canon large format printer

http://www.google.com/products/catalog?hl=en&biw=1916&bih=1046&q=HP+DesignJet+110+Plus+24&um=1&ie=UTF-8&cid=4238167306570884658&sa=X&ei=GsppTZb_OoL7lwfWxoD_AQ&ved=0CEMQ8wIwAw#

?

900 dollars?





All i need is regular sized legal paper, nothing crazy. Banner used to be offered on every printer, it was a non-issue....




 
 

Use a Canon IPF500 like I've got sitting in front of me



























 

I used a big epson when I was working for a photographer.  The printer was like $2k, ink refills were like $35 a pop and it used 8.  Paper was anywhere from $25 to $200+ a roll, depending on what kind of quality we were doing.

I think it worked out to about 35 cents each for a print with 100% coverage.  That is just ink and paper cost, though the length and quality of the paper escape me right now.

I could set up 17x20 inch prints of an entire senior class and just hit the print button.  I would end up with an 80 to 100 foot roll that I had to cut into singles.



It might be a little overkill for what you are looking for, but when I would crank out the occasional banner it looked awesome.

You'd have to create the banner, and then save it as an image, but http://homokaasu.org/rasterbator/ works.

The Design Jet 850 series didn't seem much faster than the 650 or 750 series, however it was easier to load an align the paper rolls in.  We print drawings on 24", 30", and 36" wide rolls.

Lexmark Z1300 ...  29.99 from ebay



Problem SHOULD be solved!

Be prepared to spend almost as much for a single black ink cartridge.  I couldn't find it for less than around $20 online.

That seems expensive to me, but my last inkjet used Staples-brand ink that was about $7/cartridge.

I'll refill them or something. It's all business expense in the end, but I've refilled cartridges before.

So, what are you going to be printing on?  I haven't even thought about banner printing for 15 years, so I'm not familiar with the paper available for such things.

Could you use the old-fashioned, fan-fold paper with tear-off sides, the kind made for dot matrix printers?

Rolls of thermal paper for continuous-feed faxes are probably available, but I'm not sure inkjets will print well on thermal paper.

bingo