I’m late to the party, but I want to second @DanMcL 's recommendation to use the 3m medical tape. It has fibers in it, so it can be bent to kingdom come and still keep its integrity. It is great, cheap, and easy to come by, since every big store with a pharmacy department has it. For some really heavy-duty stuff, I even use the actual silk cloth kind. It is thicker, but they are actual cloth fibers, rather than just synthetic ones, so they can really take abuse.
For fancy / archival projects, I use abaca.sa hemp fiber tape, or even Linen hinging tape from Lineco. They are acid free, archival-quality tapes. You pay for the privilege, but they are worth the expense IMHO. The linen hinging tape is perfection itself for this type of work. I use artist tape to reinforce edges that will be hole punched or have a comb put on, but I do not like it for hinging because it is too stiff.
As for printers, Laser is the only option to get really professional quality results. There may be some high-end inkjet printers that present nicely, but those scores cannot get wet even a little, and they do not hold up to abuse and marking/erasure the same as laser printed scores can. We really are talking apples and oranges. Laser printers literally bond pure-black plastic to the paper making them both perfectly crisp and durable.
Also, if you want to do some booklet stapling but aren’t ready to commit to one of the larger heavy-duty clamp-on units that @benwiggy linked above, “long reach” staplers are pretty easy to come by these days too. I use one of these for my 11x17 booklets.
Completely agree, inkjet is best for photo and laser for symbolic, but either can be used for the other of course. If you work with pencil still laser isn’t good as it’ll erase away, for that you need traditional print stave paper like from Judy Green in Hollywood.
I wonder if there’s a finishing you could to do laser to make it even better, like a gloss over spray or something? Overkill … anyhow FWIW I’m pretty sure not all lasers are created equal. I have a Brother laser for general household stuff (just letter), and it doesn’t deliver the quality and steadfastness of the HP linked above.
I had no idea a printer would be so expensive. If $1.8k isn’t “megabucks”, I shutter at the thought of what the bigger machines would cost. I didn’t think I’d have to spend more than $500 on a printer. How wrong I was. It’s an entry barrier for sure.
“Large format” printers (.e.g A3 or similar) are certainly well over the $£€ 1000 mark, because the market for them is mainly commercial. Everything inside has to be twice the width – laser engine, fuser, duplexer – and if you’re doing that kind of work, it needs to be reliable at 10,000 impressions a month.
As soon as you go down to an A4/Letter-sized engine, then prices fall off to a couple of hundred or so.
Alternatively, you can go up to tens of thousands for something like a Xerox Docutech.
We have a “used/seconds” office supply store in my area. I was able to get a 5k Samsung copy machine for $600. It was a brand new machine that had been returned because the document feeder didn’t work, but all the print functions did, and the machine (which prints up to 12x18) had all of 100 impressions upon the drum. I have now printed over 45,000 times with it.
There are also people who sell older copy machines on Craigslist. That might be worth checking into as well.
Yeah I found that printer above on Craigslist for half price - barely used. Small business bought one but found they didn’t use it much. It was a four hour drive though so in the end I just ordered new.
But yeah if you want to do professional prints you’ve got to pay to play.
We have some parishioners who own a professional print shop. I send special projects to them because they will do jobs for the church at cost, and they gave me a tour a few months ago. We recently purchased a new organ for the church and I was surprised to learn that their digital press cost over 100k more than our organ did. It was wild.
It looked like a fancier/newer version of what Ben shows above. It was bigger than my car (and just as loud lol). As I recall it was basically a full-color laser printer on steroids. It took toner by the gallon (all colors). They had 2 or 3 large machines that looked like that and I think one took ink. Don’t remember now because this was a few months ago.
The DT(135) is a very old machine. Most printers use HP Indigo and similar today for more efficient large-format printing. I have printed a lot on the DTP 135 in the 1990s but it was a problematic machine that did not ready all PS well with low precision. In the end, it reduced it to 600 dpi TIF and then it was more reliable.
