Printing?

[Brownbear]

Thank you Manfred. Your explanation is wonderfully simple and especially helpful to me to know, learn from and eventually put into practice. I will try printing one of my images with a white border.

Thank you.

[JohnRostron]

I have to say that I have only had a few of my images commercially printed, mostly in albums. I used Photobox (www.photobox.co.uk). They are cheap and cheerful. I did not see anything on their site that would indicate a special or more refined service. I used them to print out a couple of A2 images, including one of my Avatar, and I was very please with them. Try them and see if you are happy with the quality that they offer.

John

[george013]

I stopped printing myself. It's more expensive and the print quality of a commercial service is better. My prints disappear after a while. I've done some test. Printing a photo on glossy and on mat and put them behind the window. Both are disappearing after a while. The glossy first and the mat later, much later.
With a wet finger I can wipe away the ink. I'm using a HP printer.
I'm not sure, but what I understood is that consumer ink is waterbased, quick drying. And that prof ink is oil based. Again, I'm not sure.
George

[george013]

I just found some info.
http://www.mitsubishi-paper.com/en/s...ntquality.html

George

[Manfred M]

George - your printing experience seems to have been with a consumer printer, rather than a decent photo printer (so far as I know, HP was never a real player in the photo printer / ink business); this is largely the preserve of Epson and to a lesser extent Canon.

Proper photo printers use pigment rather than the dye based inks that you are referring to. The pigment inks have a much longer life than dye based inks (although the gap has been closing lately with improvements in dye based ink technology). Pigments have a resistance to water, once dry, but have a higher risk of abrasion damage versus dye based inks.

Archival life (when printing on acid-free photo paper) with photo inks is in the 100-year range for colours and in the 200-year range with B&W.

Cost wise, I my per print cost is lower than if I go to a professional photo printer (rather than a consumer photo printer). This includes cost of the actual printer.

[DanK]

Proper photo printers use pigment rather than the dye based inks that you are referring to. The pigment inks have a much longer life than dye based inks (although the gap has been closing lately with improvements in dye based ink technology). Pigments have a resistance to water, once dry, but have a higher risk of abrasion damage versus dye based inks.

I think this a bit of an overstatement. It is unquestionably true that pigment inks are more durable than dye-based inks. However, modern dye-based dedicated photo printers produce prints that are very high quality, if less durable. They are every bit as good as the few prints I have had done by a professional lab. I've hung dye-based prints in lots of places, and no one has ever commented negatively on the print quality.

I intentionally selected dye-based printers. Good dye-based printers simply don't clog, even if left unused for months on end. I print very erratically, often leaving my printers unused for long periods of time. I have used three different Canon dye-based printers over the past 6 or 7 years, and I have never even had to execute a manual cleaning cycle. They just print. For me personally, it was worth the shorter life of dye inks to get trouble-free intermittent use of a printer. If I were selling, I would buy a pigment printer for the archival qualities.

All of which is not to advise anyone to opt for dye. There are clear tradeoffs, and the decision that worked for me doesn't work for many other people. My point is that the real cost of dye is durability, not quality, if you opt for a high-quality dye printer.

[Manfred M]

Dan - I have not used my pigment based printer (Epson 3880) since last summer. There were just too many things going on between work, retiring, traveling for a couple of months, getting home again for Christmas, etc. The printer has been sitting in a very dry environment (a.k.a. a Canadian winter, where the relative humidity is very low).

I've just finished running off my first print and it worked perfectly. No cleaning, nozzle alignment, etc.

I do think to a large extent, clogged nozzles is related to the printer design, and the higher end ones just seem to not have the issues found in the mass market ones.

[george013]

I use a HP Photosmart Premium C309a all-in-one printer. It uses vivera ink, that seems to be a pigment ink. I stopped experimenting with it after a while. It became to expensive. That ink costs €2625 per liter. , sold in cartridges of 6 ml. An alternative ink was €597 per liter, sold in cartridges of 16ml. And that was good enough for general printing if I want colors. Normally I use the laserprinter, cheaper and more longlasting.
Maybe I give it a try again.
George

[Manfred M]

I use a HP Photosmart Premium C309a all-in-one printer. It uses vivera ink, that seems to be a pigment ink. I stopped experimenting with it after a while. It became to expensive. That ink costs €2625 per liter. , sold in cartridges of 6 ml. An alternative ink was €597 per liter, sold in cartridges of 16ml. And that was good enough for general printing if I want colors. Normally I use the laserprinter, cheaper and more longlasting.
Maybe I give it a try again.
George

The small ink cartridges are quite pricey and the cost/ml goes down drastically (still not inexpensive) as cartridge size increases. My Epson StylusPro 3880 uses 80ml cartridges, which are currently running at $65CAD each. Ink cost was one of my primary considerations when I went to that particular model.

[DanK]

Dan - I have not used my pigment based printer (Epson 3880) since last summer. There were just too many things going on between work, retiring, traveling for a couple of months, getting home again for Christmas, etc. The printer has been sitting in a very dry environment (a.k.a. a Canadian winter, where the relative humidity is very low).

I've just finished running off my first print and it worked perfectly. No cleaning, nozzle alignment, etc.

I do think to a large extent, clogged nozzles is related to the printer design, and the higher end ones just seem to not have the issues found in the mass market ones.

Manfred,

Thanks. That's good to know, as at some point, in order to sell things, I will have to switch to pigment. However, I still think that for people who don't have to worry about archival properties, dedicated dye printers are a reasonable option for many people, given the quality of their output and their very low cost. My current one I paid exactly $0 for (it came bundled with my 5D3), and I think I bought my previous one for around $250 on a special.

Dan

[george013]

Manfred,

Thanks. That's good to know, as at some point, in order to sell things, I will have to switch to pigment. However, I still think that for people who don't have to worry about archival properties, dedicated dye printers are a reasonable option for many people, given the quality of their output and their very low cost. My current one I paid exactly $0 for (it came bundled with my 5D3), and I think I bought my previous one for around $250 on a special.

Dan

Printer is free, but the ink you've to buy. That's where they make the profit.

I'm busy with a photo album, my first, and was looking for the specs. The album is printed on photochemical paper, not digital. Wider color range etc. it said. Don't ask me how that works.

George

[DanK]

Yes, but the cost of ink is less than many people think. Check out this page:

http://www.redrivercatalog.com/cost-...-printing.html

Unfortunately, it is in the English measures that we, almost alone in the world, continue to use, but it is easy to convert. On my printer, an 8 x 10 (a bit smaller than A4) costs on average 0.88 dollars, or about 0.81 Euros, for ink. The Epson 3880 is cheaper in this respect.

[Manfred M]

The album is printed on photochemical paper, not digital. Wider color range etc. it said. Don't ask me how that works.

Other than inkjet, there are two other fairly common commercial colour printing types; photochemical, which is the same way photos were made for decades except rather than using an enlarger the image is exposed using digital technology and the paper is then processed in chemicals.

The second way is dye sublimation where heat is used to sublimate dyes using heat onto a paper base.

[george013]

Dan,
Here in Holland I pay about 3 3.5x as much for the HP ink as what Manfred pays for his ink per ml. That's quite a difference. The price of that Epson ink is about the same here and in Canada.

Manfred,
I just found out of photochemcal printing. At the site I'm using now it's mentioned only with the albums. I don't know what they do with normal photo's. I'll call them tomorrow and ask. If so I will have a photo printed by them and the same photo by another printservice.

George

[tommcana]

Keep it up man that's be good printing given better work.

[Rebel]

Matt... I hope you don't mind me asking these questions on your thread. I'm asking because this is a subject I need to learn more about.

Not at all Christina, there is some really good info on this thread.