Search for a printer for wedding invitations and you will be shown photo printers ranked by resolution. Resolution is almost never what goes wrong. A card is a small, heavy, folded sheet printed in a run of fifty, and the things that actually ruin the job are a paper path that will not take the stock, a white margin you cannot get rid of, and ink that is still wet when you want to fold. Those are the three criteria this page ranks on, and we finish by making the case for not printing them at home at all.
How we picked
Cards are different enough from paperwork that the usual ranking does not apply. These are the four questions we put to every printer here, in the order they decide the purchase.
- Where does the card stock go? A printer with one input tray means unloading plain paper every time you print a card, and a tight paper path means heavy stock jams or comes out curled. We only list machines where the manufacturer publishes a second input, a manual feed slot or a straight-through path for thick media.
- Can it print to the edge? Borderless is a printer feature, not a paper feature. Only one model in our registry publishes it. On everything else, edge-to-edge color means designing a bleed and trimming every card, which on fifty cards is a real afternoon.
- Is it dry when it comes out? Toner is fused on and finished. Liquid ink on coated card needs a moment, and a stack of freshly-printed cards is how coverage gets smudged. This is the main reason a color laser appears on an otherwise inkjet-leaning page.
- What does a run of fifty cost? Cards are heavy ink coverage, which is the single most expensive thing you can ask a cartridge printer to do. Every figure we quote is our own arithmetic on dated published supply prices, and we show the inputs.
The borderless problem, stated plainly
This is the one thing we would want a card printer to have and the one thing almost nothing publishes. Of the printers in our registry, only the EcoTank Photo ET-8550 states borderless printing, up to 13 by 19 inches. For every other machine on this page, the honest instruction is: design the card oversized with the background running past the trim line, print it, then cut it down. A guillotine or a paper trimmer costs very little and does a better job than scissors.
“Not published” is not the same as “cannot.” Some printers do more than their specification sheets say. But we are not going to tell you a $240 printer will print to the edge of your invitation on the strength of a guess, because you would find out the expensive way, fifty sheets of card in.
What a run of fifty cards actually costs in ink
Here is where a tank printer earns its place. An ISO color page is rated at 5% coverage; an invitation with a colored background is nothing like that, so treat the figures below as the floor rather than the answer. The ratio between the columns is what survives the coverage problem, and the ratio is enormous.
| Printer | Cost per ISO color page | Fifty cards |
|---|---|---|
| Canon MegaTank G3270 | ~0.8¢ | $0.40 |
| Epson EcoTank ET-2800 | ~1.1¢ | $0.56 |
| Epson EcoTank Photo ET-8550 | ~1.4¢ | $0.71 |
| Published cartridge inkjet average | ~20 cents a page | about $10.00 |
Our arithmetic: the bottle price divided by the manufacturer’s rated yield, at the prices in our sources. The cartridge row is the published industry average from Toner Buzz rather than a specific printer. All four are ISO 5% coverage figures, so a real invitation costs several times as much on every row. The method.
The point of that table is not the pennies. It is that the ink for a card run is effectively free on a bottle-fed printer and a real line item on a cartridge one — and card printing is a repeating habit. Save-the-dates, then invitations, then thank-you notes, then next year’s Christmas cards.
The paper decides more than the printer does
Two things about card stock are worth knowing before you buy any printer.
The first is that laser and inkjet want different coated papers, and they are not interchangeable. Photo and card stock sold for inkjet is coated to absorb liquid ink; laser stock is made to survive being fused with heat. Buy the stock that names your printer type on the packet, and if a sheet is sold for inkjet photo printing, do not feed it through a laser.
The second is weight. Manufacturers publish a media weight range for each paper path, and the heavy end of it is usually the manual feed or straight-through route rather than the main cassette. If you have a specific stock in mind, find its weight on the packet and check it against the paper path you intend to use on that model’s own specification page. That is a two-minute check that prevents the most common card-printing complaint there is. Our cardstock roundup goes through the published second-input options on the laser side.
Folded cards, and why automatic duplex matters here
A folded greeting card is a two-sided print on one sheet, and that makes automatic two-sided printing worth more on this page than on any other. Without it, every card is fed twice and oriented correctly by hand, and on a run of fifty the error rate is not zero. Of the picks above, the HL-L3220CDW and the HL-L5210DW publish automatic duplexing; the ET-8550 publishes it too, at the slower two-sided speed. Epson does not publish it on the ET-2800.
If you are folding, score the fold rather than creasing it cold, and fold away from the printed side. That is paper-craft advice rather than printer advice, and it does more for the look of a home-made card than any specification on this page. What duplex printing is, and when it is worth paying for.
Why the card looks wrong on the first try
The commonest disappointment with home-printed invitations has nothing to do with the printer. A screen emits light and a card reflects it, so a deep navy on a monitor comes out lighter and flatter on paper, and a pale blush can disappear entirely. Print one card before you print fifty — on the actual stock, not on plain paper, because the coating changes the color as much as the ink does.
Six-color ink sets, like the 552 set in the ET-8550, help most in the places four-color sets struggle: skin tones on a photo card, and neutral grays that otherwise drift green or magenta. For flat design work in strong colors, a four-channel tank printer is perfectly good and a quarter of the price. Our photo printing picks cover the ink-type question in more depth.
The honest alternative: don't print them
For one wedding, a print shop or an online stationery service will almost certainly beat you. They print on stock you cannot buy in a five-pack, they cut dead straight, they can emboss and foil and die-cut, and a hundred invitations is a small order rather than an afternoon. If invitations are a one-off life event, that is the better answer and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
Printing at home wins in three situations. When you are iterating — proofs, several designs, a change of date. When the run is small and repeated — a greeting card business, monthly orders, place cards for a dinner. And when you already need a printer for everything else, in which case card printing is a free capability that comes with a machine you were buying anyway. That last case is most readers, and it is why the ET-2800 is on this list.
If cards are becoming a side business rather than a hobby, the economics tip further toward owning the printer, and the pages to read next are our sticker and craft picks and the small business tank roundup.
One thing not to buy
Do not buy a subscription printer for card printing. A card is a high-coverage page, and subscription plans are priced in pages rather than ink: fifty invitations is fifty pages off your monthly allowance whether each one is a line of text or solid color edge to edge. That is the worst possible arrangement for exactly this job, and it is before the question of what happens to the printer if you stop paying. Color printers without a subscription · why page allowances suit card printing badly.