Printing and Paper
For the black and white minizines I have used my Brother laser printer and my Canon inkjet and I was surprised to see that I liked the inkjet better. So I am recommending using an inkjet printer for printing mini zines. For printing black and white I use the high brightness inkjet paper that costs about $10 a ream or 2 cents a sheet. Copy paper also works well for less than 1 cent a sheet.
The inkjet paper does a pretty good job on the color mini zines but Epson Presentation Paper is noticeably brighter with better colors and stronger contrast. The Presentation Paper costs about $10 for 100 sheets or 10 cents a sheet.
I have made photo mini zines of family events with photos on the front and back covers and three 4×5 photos as two page spreads on the internal pages. So it’s a cute little book with two small photos and three standard size prints all for a cost of between 10 and 15 cents depending on the price of your ink. The photo quality on the presentation paper competes favorably with the matte photo paper. I use the plain paper setting so the printer uses less ink than it does printing to photo paper.
I use EZ-Ink for my Canon ink jets. There are cheaper generic cartridges available but not enough cheaper to tempt me away from EZ-Ink. I cannot tell the difference between EZ-Ink and Canon brand and I have never had trouble with one of their cartridges.
If you print a mini zine and it does not fold correctly try adjusting the margins on your printer. My son made a mini zine in Word and he had to set his margins to zero to get it to fold right.
This post is licensed CC BY.