Photoshop | My printer has started printing slightly oversize

…never dreamt that 'Borderless' did anything but remove an inhibition on printing to the very edge of the sheet.

By @Eric the gray

The technical problem with “borderless” printing, regardless of brand or model, is this: How do you guarantee edge to edge printing?

In traditional press-based printing, edge-to-edge printing is done by setting up the document with a “bleed” (the image size includes an outer buffer area beyond the final paper size and the design is extended into that), it is printed on a larger sheet than the final required paper size, and then after printing, the bleed is trimmed with a blade so that there is no gap between image and paper edge and it’s the correct size and scale. It looks great.

The problem with doing borderless on affordable inkjet printers is the precision of the paper transport. At the low price point these things are sold at (and yes, I mean “low” even for $1200 printers because a press can cost a million dollars), there is no option to trim all edges, and sufficiently precise paper transport cannot be guaranteed at this price point. If you try to say “Print me an A2 print on an A2 sheet, edge to edge, no scaling,” there is a high chance the paper transport will off by juuuuuust slightly enough that there will be a paper-colored hairline on one side or the other.

So on affordable inkjet printers, the only reliable way to achieve “borderless” prints is to slightly enlarge or “expand” (scale) the image, resulting in overspray. That can be slightly messy at the bottom of the printer…but you do get edge-to-edge ink coverage.

That works great for photos, because nobody notices if a photo got scaled up by 1%. But for a document that must be exactly to scale, a 1% expansion is a disaster. This goes back to these devices being designed and marketed as photo printers, not technical plotters.

A workaround is to do what the press people do: Design with a bleed, turn on trim marks, print on a larger paper size with “Borderless” disabled (no expansion, to maintain the scale), and then after printing, trim your smaller edge-to-edge image from the larger sheet by cutting along the trim marks. Of course, this works only if you own a printer that can feed a paper size that is larger than your final paper size.