How to Print Your Own Posters Using Your Inkjet Printer

Everyone loves a good poster, whether it’s a 14 year-old girl with a fixation on teen pop scamps One Direction or a 30-something man displaying their love for ‘Star Wars’ with a poster in a very classy display case.

Unfortunately, posters don’t always come cheap. A poster of your favourite band or movie can set you back quite a bit of money while the ill effects of time can leave your beloved wall art looking tatty and dog-eared. If only there was a way you could get your hands on a poster that doesn’t cost too much and is easily replaceable should it get damaged...

Enter your trusty old pal, the inkjet printer. That’s right, your printer – the one you thought was only good for printing out holiday snaps and school reports. And what’s more, you don’t need to have a special printer to produce your very own posters – just a bog standard inkjet, some paper and (admittedly) quite a few ink cartridges.

Printing Your Own Posters

So how does it work? Surely an inkjet printer can’t print out an actual poster as most printers are only capable of printing, at most, A4 sheets? Well, the bad news is you won’t be able to print out the kind of poster you can buy in the shops. The good news, however, is that you print something much more unique – a tile print poster.

Tile printing is essentially printing out a large image across many sheets of paper and assembling it into a full size image. It sounds ridiculously simple and, in all honesty, it is. That doesn’t mean that the results can’t be stunning though.

Tile printing has been popular ever since printers entered the home and people realised that they were actually quite fun. Although it took a drop in popularity, the advent of the internet saw an explosion in the number of programmes allowing people to indulge in a bit of tile printing in their own home.

How to Set Up a Poster

The most primitive way of printing your own tile poster is to alter your print settings to stretch an image across multiple pages. This method can be quite effective for smaller posters (think 3 pages x 3 pages) but won’t allow you to adjust where an image appears, so faces and other important details can be split by breaks in a page. You’ll also need to use a fairly large high quality image to avoid ugly blocks appearing on your brand new poster.

A more effective way of printing a poster is to use one of the many free tile printing applications available online. In the interests of impartiality, we’re not going to pick a favourite but popular apps include (read it twice) The Rasterbator, Block Posters, Posterazor and Posteriza.

These apps essentially break down any image you upload into printable chunks ready to be assembled again as a poster in a size of your choosing. This can be any image of more or less any size, although it’s worth choosing the largest possible image you can find as smaller images blown up will appear pixelated.

Once you’ve uploaded your image, the app you’ve chosen will output the various parts of the poster as separate files for you to print out. Once printed, you can either choose to cut off the white edges or leave them on.

Assembling Your Poster

You can assemble the final poster in more or less anyway you see fit; one way to do it would be to buy a piece of white card and use double sided tape to affix your ‘tiles’ to the card. You could also choose whether to overlap various parts of the image for a unique effect or have a mosaic-style poster. The choice really is yours!

And that’s it – a simple yet beautiful way of producing your own posters at home using your inkjet printer!

Oh, and don’t forget to check out our range of compatible ink cartridges online or visit your local Cartridge World store for all the ink you’ll need to print your poster too!