How to Make Borderless Greetings Cards using an Epson ET 8550

I may be a bit thick but it has taken me over year to figure out how to make borderless greetings cards from home with an Epson ET 8550. This is harder than you might think because the ET 8550 doesn’t print borderless anything! Y’know, I think I might have been able to cope with the white frame it insists on leaving around any print if that white frame was reliably equal all around. But it really wasn’t. That and the fact the very same printer also struggled to print A5 card of 300gsm or above caused me to start looking for different options.

The Two Problems in Creating Borderless Greetings Cards

• Epson ET 8550 doesn’t print card of 300gsm or thicker using the normal front feeder or the rear feeder. Only the manual feeder right at the back of machine takes card that thick, but only A4 or larger. The card I have used up until now has been A5 350 gsm.
• Epson ET 8550 doesn’t print all the way to the edges, otherwise known as borderless printing.

The Answer

I knew I didn’t want substantially thinner card because I like a robust greetings card. I decided 300 gsm was as low as I would go, which is still too thick for the printer. Actually the printer blurb says it takes up to 300 gsm but I’m telling you, it does not do so reliably. By this, I mean that the printer rejects 300 gsm 8 out of 10 times when printing from the main tray or the rear tray. The manual tray at the back of the printer will take very very thick card, so 300 gsm is a given. However, the back manual tray does not take card less than A4.

Taking this into consideration, I knew I needed to figure out how to use A4 300gsm. The video below shows you how 😊

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