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What makes a good photo printer? Do you need PictBridge? Is it
really necessary to have a photo printer that will accept images
from your PC? How many colours should the printer support? Which
size of paper? Do you need different paper types? Everything
depends on what you are going to do with your photo printer.
In this article I will specifically focus on quality elements,
both in terms of mechanics and results. I carry with me an
experience as a reviewer of high-end printers of over ten years.
Let's start with the quality of the components.
Photo printer quality
These days, you can buy an inkjet photo printer for less than
200 Euros. Although you always get quality in relation to what
you pay, most inkjet photo printers --even the cheap ones-- have
a decent quality of build.
The problem with very cheap photo printers is that the
manufacturer cannot make a profit from them, and therefore has
to find a way to generate money through other means than
directly from selling the hardware. The easiest and most obvious
way to do that is to sell ink cartridges that get depleted soon.
Most cheap inkjet photo printers are therefore expensive in
terms of ink consumption.
Many people will replace the manufacturer's ink with third-party
ink. This is a viable strategy provided you don't care much for
the longevity of your prints and the replacement ink that you
buy is of a decent quality. Most replacement inks of good
quality are just as expensive as the manufacturer's.
Lyson in the UK sells fine quality inkjet inks that come in bulk
packaging (www.lyson.com).
Some ink manufacturers will make larger ink bottles, so that the
price per unit decreases. This is actually the only way to get
acceptable quality for a decent price. However, a cheap inkjet
photo printer is not built to support intensive printing, so if
that is why you buy those large ink bottles, then be prepared to
replace your photo printer every 3 months instead of every two
years. If you're printing many prints, the life span of a cheap
photo printer may be much less than a year.
Better quality photo printers
If you have a bit of a larger budget, there are somewhat more
expensive photo printers (between 300 and 700 Euros) on the
market that have much better quality components, which last
longer and which are capable of much better quality prints. More
importantly, these printers consume less ink.
What should you ask a vendor of such higher-quality photo
printer? For starters, such a photo printer should come with
built-in calibration. Calibration is a technique that makes sure
the printer is put into a known state. We use that state to make
sure the colours and output quality we get from the photo
printer are consistently the same. This also means we can create
colour profiles for the printer, and have it print without
colour streaks or gaps in the output.
Another issue that you must take into account is the ink
spillage that occurs because of cleaning cycles. Every inkjet
photo printer, including the cheap ones (I should say especially
the cheap ones) have to clean their print heads from time to
time. Some brands are notorious for wasting large amounts of ink
during this process.
Cleaning the print heads involves flushing the head with a small
amount of ink, in order to get the print heads firing their tiny
bubbles of ink correctly. Ink tends to clog inside the heads,
hence the need for cleaning. Epson photo printers waste a lot of
ink on this process. Up to 20% of an ink cartridge can go to
waste, especially when a shallow cleaning cycle is not enough
for the heads to unclog.
HP has the lowest cleaning waste in its newest top-range photo
printer, the Photosmart Pro B9180. Only 1% goes to waste with
every other deep cleaning cycle. I reviewed the Photosmart Pro
B9180 on www.IT-Enquirer.com. I also covered this printer's
capabilities in depth, as it represents a whole new generation
photo printer.
With more expensive photo printers usually also comes the
ability to drive them through a Raster Image Processor (RIP),
which is a sophisticated printer driver that enables you to save
paper and control the ink density (the amount of ink splashed
onto the paper) for each colour. RIPs are usually reserved for
the larger photo printers.
Output quality of photo printers
The output quality of a photo printer depends on a number of
factors, but colour accuracy and the ability to fill a patch
uniformly with colour must be among the determining ones. Your
photo printer should be capable of printing accurate colours.
Most entry-level photo printers will allow you to print your
photos directly from the camera. That's fine, but if the photo
wasn't perfect or near-perfect, the odds are that you will want
to fine-tune the photo.
This involves downloading the photo to your PC, editing it, and
then printing it through a printer driver. The crux here is the
part where I said "through a driver". If you don't have a
printer colour profile for the paper you are using, chances are
the photo will come out in a whole different way than what you
expected.
Colour management will remedy this, but that's a topic out of
scope for this article. Remember that you need good colour
profiles that come with the printer in order to get the most out
of it. From all the manufacturers that I have reviewed photo
printers from for the different magazines that I write for, only
Canon and HP have excellent colour profiles. Epson's profiles
are mediocre to say the least.
If you don't know what a colour profile is, Wikipedia's article
on color management may clarify.
Conclusion
If you're serious about photo printing, and your budget allows,
don't buy the cheapest model. It will cost you more in ink
consumption and will output mediocre quality. If you have the
budget and you're a serious amateur or even a semi-pro, then a
high-end photo printer will be a pleasure to use. Canon and HP
are both excellent choices. Although many professional
photographers use large format Epson photo printers, and while
their output quality is certainly good, Epson has less appeal in
the lower ends of the market than the two other brands I
mentioned earlier.
There are yet other brands of photo printers. However, those are
all aimed at low-end consumer usage. Erik Vlietinck is
journalist and reviewer who specialised in document publishing
and graphic design technology some 10 years ago. He has his own
web magazine, http://www.IT-Enquirer.com where you can find lots
of information on creative technologies.
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