Cheapish printer to do greeting & artist cards?

Can anyone recommend a good cheap printer to do photo cards/artist cards/business cards. I want to do these as a sideline to my partners canvas printing business so that we have a cheap line to sell when out and about promoting the main part of the business.
Have looked at the Red River range of cards and they recommend a quite cheap Canon printer , I think it was the Pixma 4600 which seems to be out of production. I was getting interested in the Epson Artisan 730 but this seems to only take paper to about 90gsm - useless for heavier card stock whereas all the Canon printers seem able to take up to about 300gsm max. Just to confuse the matter further, I believe I am going to be Santa at years end (seriously, no joke) as my son in law wants to promote a meet santa and have your photo taken event. He is in the exhibition event industry, currently just organizing setup/pulldown, and this seems to be a trial to getting into the promotions area. My wife is a proconsumer photographer, as am I, and we have all the gear to handle the photography side, EXCEPT, that our Epson 9890 is hardly transportable for doing shoot/print/sale on the spot work. It would be good to have a good enough photo printer for immediate sale of the shots.
Any suggestions at say the dirt cheap $100 or so area, and also say the $250 price point.

Thanks

Hal55

You can often find the Pixma Pro 9000II around the latter price point, either with periodic specials from Canon or new in box from people who got them bundled. I have one. It does a wonderful job with Red River matte and fine art card stock. (I have not tried the others.) The drawbacks are (1) it's big, and (2) it requires that you load heavy stock from the front, one piece at a time. Not a problem if you are printing a few cards, but it would be slow to print a bunch.

Went looking at printers today and saw a sample photo book from one of the A3+ Canon Pro printers, and utterly spectacular they were. Sadly, in Australia, these are expensive items retailing at well over $1000 so outside of budget, although you can do an import from Ebay merchants with a landed price of under $500 even including Fedex shipping. Seems crazy.
Epson's definitely seem to be out owing to 90gsm being the max on the cheaper models. Anyone have any recommendations for an A4 Canon with image quality close to the pro models - if such a thing exists.
Thanks for the input, we have a 10 year old Canon i9950 sitting downstairs that has been a tremendous workhorse.Unfortunatel it can no longer print without leaving smudges on the edges of the paper and is getting a bit creaky sounding in operation. Still does a great photo though and I'll be sorry to retire it shortly.

Hal55