I have a lot of sticker rxperience at this point. Cricut maker is a great machine for home projects and small to medium scale. If youre making more than say 50 2-3 inch stickers per batch youre going to maybe want a bigger machine. The prep process is still very manual and a 8.5x11 sticker paper only prints 6-8 depending on shape and if youre good at tetris. It also generates a lot of waste as it needs pretty big margins. Overall its a really really good machine for what it CAN do, just know the limitations. Takes some getting used to but once you've got it dialed in its pretty reliable for small scale production. I also have an ecotank but a lower model (ET8300 or someting. super cheap). The fact it was so cheap and can hold so much ink and not use cartridges is mostly worth the rest of the shittyness of the printer. High quality prints but its slow, has trouble printing like 4 or 5 full color pages back to back without splotching, and prints "wet" (nature of ink jet and better paper probably would help). It jams a lot with sticker paper and build quality is meh at best. For stickers a one sided laminating machine is very time saving (est 30-40% saved). I do it manually with contact lamination and rollers but it takes WAY too long. Haven't found a good one sided laminator so lmk if you do...

@Stackchainmag @John52 what you suing for stickers/zines.

Ahh thanks for the info, seems like you've a similar setup. I mainly want to experiment and try out different materials, and possibly save some money in the long run. I'm not planning on producing real art prints, but maybe I'll do runs of 20 zines, or 50 stickers. I'm mostly worried about the printer, since all my previous printers were pretty bad and needed lots of maintanance...

Yeah...unfortunately the ecotank Ive got has been a maintenence nightmare, but its better than other inkjets because tank vs cart. The tank is incredible and by far the best part of the printer. Maybe the only good part lol. But honestly every other aspect is just as shitty as any other printer. I find that the printer tends to break before I get through my second set of ink. So YMMV on the cost savings over cartridges. Ive yet to find a reasonably priced inkjet with good build quality...

BTW I printed out a bunch of your nostr zines to give out at my meetups picnic (tool them to a printer cause I can't do A3). A stack is going to Chicago and Columbus (and maybe PA?) I forget exactly... But great work as always!

Ohhh nice! You mean the foldable ones? Love it! :)

Yes sir! The printer was very confused abt how to fold them though haha. Ended up doing them myself. Forced the meetup to help so hopefully they read it as they were going!

Just remember to make sure the printer can't lock you out of using whatever ink and paper you want. Same goes for any cutting machine you might look up. Don't shy away from used models ~

I use an Epson Artisan 1430, but only because my husband had it for work. Don't recommend, it doesn't print double sided. And the ink dries out if you dont constantly use it. If you're just cutting straight edges get a solid guillotine paper cutter

Yeah that's the main reason why I'm considering an ecotank, it doesn't use cartridges, and I think you can buy any ink brand.

The ET-8550 prints most colors in dye ink, which wants real moisture protection, ideally lamination for anything that gets wet. Run a water, rub, and sunlight test before selling any sticker.

I never made stickers at home 😅

If you want A3 sheets for the zines, the ET-8550 doesn’t support automatic double-sided printing at that size. You’d need to flip them by hand.

Just saw this. Wait, dont you have a physical magazine you created or something? Thats why i tagged you. Maybe im mistaken lmao