Best Digital Painting Printers for High Quality Prints: Top Picks

Pigment ink, not dye

Dye based inks give bright colour on glossy photo paper and fade noticeably within a few years in normal room light. Pigment inks sit on the surface as solid particles, hold their colour for decades under glass, and are what every print studio selling artwork uses. If you intend to sell prints, pigment is the only sensible choice, and it is the single specification worth paying for.

Count the ink channels

A basic four ink printer mixes every colour from cyan, magenta, yellow and black. Photo and art printers add channels such as light cyan, light magenta, grey and matte black. Those extra channels are what remove the coarse grain in pale skies and skin tones, and what let a printer produce a genuinely neutral black and white. Eight channels or more is the usual threshold for fine art work.

Matte black and photo black

Matte black ink is formulated for cotton rag and other uncoated art papers; photo black is for glossy and lustre surfaces. Some printers carry both and switch automatically, some carry both and waste ink switching, and some carry only one. If your paintings will be printed on textured rag paper, confirm the printer has a matte black channel before anything else.

Paper handling and width

Check the maximum width and, separately, whether there is a rear or straight through feed path. Heavy art papers above roughly 300gsm will not bend around a tight roller and need a flat feed. A printer that takes A3+ or 13 inch media covers most print sales; roll feed matters only if you plan long panoramas or want to cut your own sizes.

Colour management support

A good art printer ships with ICC profiles for its own papers and lets you install profiles supplied by third party paper makers. Without profile support you are guessing, and the print will not match the screen. Soft proofing in your editor against the paper profile, before you print, is what turns a costly trial and error process into a predictable one.

Getting the File Right Before You Print

Resolution is where most disappointing prints begin. Aim for around 300 pixels per inch at the final print size, which means a 16 by 20 inch print wants roughly 4800 by 6000 pixels. Upscaling a small canvas after the fact softens every edge, so set the canvas size correctly at the start of the painting rather than fixing it later.

Work in a wide gamut RGB space such as Adobe RGB or ProPhoto RGB if your software supports it, and convert only at print time. Calibrate your monitor with a hardware device; a screen that is too bright is the reason prints so often come back looking dark. And always print a small test strip of the most difficult area, usually the deepest shadows, before committing a full sheet of expensive rag paper.