Photo Printers - How To Enjoy Them

Photo printers are for printing photos. Photo printers are a great buy. Nearly everyone has a digital camera, and while it's easy to share digital photos online, there are still lots of good reasons to print out your photos. Photo printers are a valuable investment for any company that wants to print high-resolution images for marketing materials, presentations and inter-office publications with ease.

Photo printers often print with smaller “dots” - the droplets of ink that help give inkjet s their name - than plain text printers. And many come with more colors of ink. Photo printers are printing machines that are capable of generating a printed copy of your images. Investing in a wide format photo printer can make it easy to mange the costs of these extensive printing projects when you regularly need to create large-scale documents.

Photo printers are not known for their speed, because the nature of the quality of printing that it is designed to accomplish necessitates a little patience. The slowest print speed is reportedly about a minute and a half. Photo printers use one of two print methods: inkjet or dye-sublimation (called dye-sub for short). Dye-sub photos are touch dry as soon as they're produced, but tend to make more noise when printing.

These are some tips to derive great value from your photo printer:

1. Save your Originals
Don not save the images you plan to print as JPEGs or in any other compressed file format. Each time you compress an image, you lose some data. Before working with an image, make sure it is unaltered and in the TIFF format.

2. Enhance the Image
Experiment with your image-editing program's functions such as cropping, contrast, brightness, and other controls until you're entirely satisfied with the image's composition. Remember to always save the altered file with a new name.

3. Plan Your Print Drafts
If you plan to make test prints that you will discard later, reduce the image size and load the printer with plain inexpensive paper. Your printer software may allow you to print multiple images on one sheet.

Use matte-finish photo cards instead of glossy photo paper when printing 4 X 6-inch images. These cards have a nice look and feel, and they cost almost half as much as full-size photo paper. Place the images that you print on 8 X 10-inch glossy photo paper behind glass for added protection from ultraviolet light, and hang them away from direct sunlight.

4. Save on your ink
Special photo inks can provide your printer with a more refined colour palette. Unfortunately, these come with specific models, and if such ink didn't come with your model, you may have to buy it separately and install it in place of the standard ink cartridges.

In some cases, photos printed using general-purpose cartridges look almost as good as ones printed using photo ink. Another effective trick is to print your black-and-white photos in colour mode (with standard colour cartridges). This makes the printer use all of its inks to create the tones in your picture, and the resultant prints can be as subtle and precise as pictures printed with photo inks.

5. Get your Cartridges in Line
Use your printer's controls to realign your cartridges--especially if you see vertical or horizontal bands, unwanted lines, gaps, or bleeding colours in your prints. Right-click the printer's entry in Control Panel's "Printers and Faxes" or "Printers" applet, click Properties, and search for a cartridge maintenance option. If aligning your cartridges does not solve the problem, clean the cartridges with a cotton swab dipped in isopropyl alcohol. Use water merely as a solvent, and clean just the cartridge itself, never the print head or the nozzle plate. Always align new cartridges.

6. Practice Good Housekeeping
By keeping your printer's mechanisms clean, you will ensure that the device runs at its best. An occasional blast from a can of compressed air (easily available at electronics stores) will keep dust and bits of paper from clogging the paper path and other moving parts.

Make sure that the small ink nozzles on your print heads are clear of dried ink. Leaving any inkjet idle for even a week or two leads the ink in the tiny tubes that feed the nozzles to dry. Many inkjet printers have a cleaning program in their settings that can handle partially clogged nozzles. Unfortunately these programs use a lot of ink, so use them judiciously. If the tubes are badly blocked, then you will need the services of a professional or an inkjet cleaning kit.

7. Raise the Resolution
Any digital camera that is less than three years old can capture at least 1 megapixel of data with each shot. This is sufficient to print a good-quality 4 X 6-inch photo; a 2-megapixel image holds enough information to output a higher-quality print of the same dimensions. To generate an 8 X 10-inch print worth framing, you'll need a resolution of at least 3 megapixels. You're in a good position if you have a new camera as most new models offer from 4 to 8.1 megapixels.

Adjust your camera to its highest resolution when taking shots that you might want to print. Some newer cameras, depending on the manufacturer's menu setup, make it very simple to change resolution.