Consider your needs
Passing prints around hands on viewing – Dye Sub
For this type of printing the best printer to buy would be a DyeSub as the prints are durable and can be wiped clean, the ink is hard to scratch and would stand up to a lot of handling. They can also be inserted into a photo album or put on the wall. They are dye fast and have good fade resistance
Inserting into a folder or album – Ink Jet
Ink jets allow cheap large prints that can be put on a wall but the ink is not very durable and would not stand up to much handling, as the ink is on the surface of the paper and will be directly affected by moisture and dirt. This type of print should be in an album or on the wall.
On the wall in a frame – Ink Jet
Ink jets can produce up to A3 prints that are ideal for framing and mounting on the wall. They have low resistance to moisture and handling and should be mounted or kept in a folder.
Print Process: Dye Sub vs Ink Jet
Dye Sub
While ink jet printers currently dominate the photo printing marketplace, Dye-sublimation (Dye-sub) printers are an interesting specialist printer used for a variety of purposes.
Dye-sublimation printers have been widely used in demanding graphic arts and photographic applications. A true dye-sub printer works by heating the ink so that it turns from a solid into a gas. The heating element can be set to different temperatures, thus controlling the amount of ink laid down in one spot. The difference between a dye-sub and an ink jet printer is that colour is applied as a continuous tone, rather than in dots.
One colour is laid over the whole of one sheet of paper at a time, starting with yellow and ending with cyan as a colour. The ink is impregnated on rolls of cellophane-like film that contains sheets of each CMY colour, so for an A4 print there is an A4 size sheet of yellow, followed by a sheet of magenta and cyan film. In good printers (such as Olympus P-400ID) is additional protective coating to ensure longer life and durability of prints.
A thermal print head consisting of thousands of heating elements, and capable of precise temperature variations moves across the film. Heat from the heating elements causes the colour on the film to vaporise and diffuse onto the surface of the specially coated paper. Precise temperature variations are responsible for the varying densities of colour.
Dye sublimation requires particularly specialised paper, as the dyes are designed to diffuse into the paper surface, mixing to create precise colour shades. The hotter the heating element, the more dye is vaporised and diffused onto the paper’s surface.
Dye-sub printers generally deliver better quality than ink jet printers because they are not printing an image using dots of ink. The advantage is that a dye-sub printer allows for the reproduction of subtle tone and continuous tone images. Also colours are printed on top of each other (ink jets only print one colour at one place). Because of the film and the special paper required, dye-sub print systems are usually more expensive to buy and maintain than ink jet printers. However, because they have less moving parts than ink jet printers, dye-sub printers can be a fraction of the size.
Ink Jet
An inkjet printer creates an image by spraying a combination of four to six coloured inks on to paper. Liquid ink, stored in a reservoir, is channelled through tiny jets in a movable print head and sprayed on to the paper. With today’s printers you can add more than 7 inks. For example in some an extra black is also included for black and white images with a lot of gradation.
The picture is composed of millions of tiny ink dots of varying sizes and distances from each other. The ink is distributed in a dot pattern called “dithering” which creates the illusion of different colour combinations. The ink dots are merged by the human eye to create the impression of photographic colour and shapes.
Of course, not all colour ink jet printers are created equal. Some are made to handle printing text and graphics as well as photos. Obviously, what you gain in versatility you lose in photo performance.
If you are primarily concerned with image quality then you need to focus on a Photo Quality or Photo Realistic ink jet printer. These usually use six colour ink tanks to create accurate colour rendition of difficult skin tones and photographic colours.
A step up again is the professional ink jet printer. These printers are aimed at professional photographers and for graphic artwork. The printer is capable of printing at extremely high resolutions above 2,880 dpi, making its output equivalent to a photographic print.
The quality of the output print on any ink jet printer depends on a combination of factors such as the printer’s settings and resolution, the performance of the inks, the paper and the manipulation of the picture prior to printing from your image editing software. The biggest factor in determining which photo printer to buy is your own personal taste. The prints from various manufacturers do look subtly different, and the best way to assess this is to get your hands on some print samples.
If you love creating photo prints, and lots of them, then look for a printer that’s made especially for printing photographs. A photo printer is optimised for this purpose – the prints are of better quality and it’s much easier to produce them. No matter how much you pay, the latest generation of digital printers provides a wide range of smoother, more realistic colours for beautiful, true-to-life images.
Inkjet Printer Features
Colour Ink Cartridges
When buying ink cartridges, you need to factor-in elements such as the number of prints an ink cartridge will produce, whether individual colour cartridges can be replaced, the cost of replacement cartridges and the expected maintenance cycles for the printer before purchase.
Cheaper printers use colour ink cartridges that contain three or more colours in a single cartridge. When one of the three colours runs out, you have to replace the whole cartridge.
More expensive printers use separate cartridges for each colour, so that when one colour runs out it’s a simple matter of replacing the empty cartridge without throwing out any ink.
Dithering
Dithering is a common function in all inkjet printers. As each printer only has 3, or in some cases 6 colour inks, to recreate the vast range of colour we see around us, the printer needs to place very small dots of different colours together to create more shades. Yellow and blue dots together would make green for instance. Dithering is just the graininess created by using this technique. The smaller the droplets of ink are, the less noticeable dithering is.
Speed
Photo printers have speeds similar to other inkjet printers. They can print up to 12 pages per minute (ppm) in black and white, and up to 10 ppm in colour. For everyday printing, keep in mind that, since they are optimised for photos, photo printers sometimes tend to be sluggish
with text compared with conventional inkjets. As anyone who works with digital images on their PC will tell you, one of the most important aspects of hard copy out put is the paper. Similar to the paper used by photo labs, photo paper is specifically designed to produce high quality, colour rich images that are hard to distinguish from traditionally developed photographs. Most photo papers come in a choice of matte or glossy finishes and in a variety of print sizes, including convenient 15 x 10 cm for affordable everyday prints, and large portrait size papers for studio-quality enlargements.
Glossy Paper
Glossy paper produces vibrant colours but is susceptible to fingerprints. This paper has a shiny, coated surface on one or both sides, and is ideal when you need a polished printout. For brochures, flyers, report covers and special presentations, glossy papers produce colourful images and crisp text equal to professional printing.
Craft Papers
Specialty papers offer a wide range of possibilities to the crafts person. Iron-on transfers make it easy to create your own T-Shirts, photo pillows and much more. Or you can also get your message out loud and clear with banner paper. Other craft papers specially formulated for printers, such as vellum and parchment, printable sheets of fabric like felt and canvas, printable Mylar, shrink-wrap plastic, and window clings, making the world of printing practically limitless. With some photo printers you can also print on rolls edge to edge and some photo printers have in-built cutters, so you can print all of your photo’s just like you get from a photo lab.
Web/Retail Printing Services
Many of the well known developers/ retailers allow you to upload digital image from your PC to their Web sites. Alternatively you can bring your digital storage media to the retailer to get this process. Here you can select the print size you want, pay and opt to pick your prints up
from your local processing lab, retailer or have them mailed to you. These services make digital photo printing easier than it has ever been. Another option is to create an online album, upload your images and e-mail them. Web address and password to friends and family. They can order the prints and either pick them up or have them mailed from their local lab. Digital photo files that you or your photo lab upload are stored in a high resolution format to ensure your photos are as clear as possible.
Third Party Inks
The manufacturer recommends you use their inks of course but there are many outlets / companies making and providing third party inks. They vary in price and properties and a lot and most guarantee their compatibility and they can be as little as a third of the price. You may want to wait until the 1 year manufacturers warranty is up before you experiment or you may not. If you don’t wait then you can save a lot of money, there are outlets that refill your cartridges as well which keep costs down. The inks may give you a marginally different tone to the manufacturers ink but you can compensate if needed and once you match your new inks with a third party paper you can make further savings.
Third party papers
Experimentation is the key here. Most papers that are labelled as Photo Ink Jet paper will probably work, just check that the weight of the paper does not exceed the printers capability. They come in varying finishes and weights and sizes but do not all produce the same result. In my own personal experience some papers do not accept the ink as well as others and its best just to buy a small quantity first and test.
