Photo Printer

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Photo Printer

Postby Schiehallion » Thu Jan 05, 2006 4:31 pm

Can anyone recommend a good photo printer? Ideally able to print both photo size and like 10x8 type of size.

Able to print from PC as well as camera?

I've heard you want one with a black ink cartridge and grey if you want to print a lot in black and white to get the right greyscale?

Cost about £100 - £200 or so.

Any advice greatfully received.
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Postby AlanM » Thu Jan 05, 2006 10:26 pm

For printing 6x4's you can't beat a dye-sublimation printer (one of the wee photo printers) probably the Canon Selphy range, expensive to run but top quality prints. For a general inkjet that is also good at photos I would recommend an HP, even the cheap ones produce decent quality prints (with the right ink and paper)

HTH

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Postby mrlipring » Fri Jan 06, 2006 10:15 am

look at the relative costs of printing at jessops. You'll probably find that, asuming you have a stack to print at once, it'll be way quicker.
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Postby ladylabobo » Sat Jan 07, 2006 11:17 pm

Epson get all the best reviews in the magazines andfrom what ive seen their photoprinters can do an excellent job at colour reproduction.

I have an HP (have used their printers for years) but to be honest its not that great and always makes the prints considerably darker than the screen version even after lots of tweaking.

Whatever you do stay away from lexmark. theyre crap and extremely expensive
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Postby Apollo » Sun Jan 08, 2006 1:29 am

You can't go by the appearance of the image on the screen unless the monitor gamma is calibrated. This is a very common mistake unfortunately. Here's why:-

Basically you can fiddle with your monitor's brightness and contrast, and tweak the image's brightness and contrast until you have an image that looks superb to your eye, but what you see on the screen has no relation to what you send to your printer, as the monitor settings you make are completely arbitrary and unknown to the printer. Tweaking the image to compensate for the appearance on the monitor simply destroys the exposure values the image should be sending to the printer.

Bear in mind that unless there is a fault in your camera, the images will be correctly exposed, unless there's been a metering error. If they appear dark on your monitor, then that's because the monitor's brightness and contrast have been set so that correctly exposed images appear dark, not because the image are dark.

You must calibrate the gamma of your monitor by setting the brightness and contrtast to a known reference before tweaking images. At its most basic, this can mean setting the monitor's brightness and contrast (NOT the image's) until the display appears similar to the print, but it can be done a bit more scientifically with gamma calibration software.

Try this link http://quickgamma.de/indexen.html for some free software to help with the process, and provide a more detailed explanation than can be offered in here.
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Postby Schiehallion » Sun Jan 08, 2006 2:29 pm

Thanks troops. I've heard that Epson is getting good write-ups. Best to do a bit of homework before I throw myself at the mercy of......

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