Tips

While it may be relatively easy to make a digital photo look good on your monitor screen, translating this to a printer can be difficult. For starters, your computer monitor may not display colours correctly. If it doesn’t, there’s no guarantee the image you see on the screen will print out with the correct colour balance.

The durability of digital prints is an important issue, with many paper manufacturers making claims about the longevity of prints on their media. This issue is vital if you want prints for display or to hand on to future generations because some ink/paper combinations are even more prone to discolouration than traditional photo prints.

All printers come with software for producing prints. This bundled software always includes the printer driver and often adds editing application. An online instruction manual is sometimes provided. The functionality of the software usually reflects the price and complexity of the printer, with entry-level printers providing very simple editors.

In this article we’ll focus on meeting your output needs; in other words, choosing a printer. It’s essential to choose a printer that matches your output requirements in terms of print size, quality and longevity and also, perhaps, versatility and printing speed. Different photographers will place different priorities on these characteristics because no printer on the current market can provide an all-in-one solution for every camera user.

Inkjet prints will last longest when they are protected from direct sunlight, heat, humidity and airborne chemicals. Storing them in ø¢â‚¬Ëœarchival’ albums provides the very best protection but, with today’s long-lasting inks and papers there’s no reason not to put prints out on display – as long as you consider these issues.

Although home-based inkjet printing is far more efficient and cost-effective than the silver halide-based darkroom systems used by photographers in the past, many photo enthusiasts still complain about the high costs of printing their photographs. Fortunately, there are ways of reducing many of these costs and getting more ‘bang for your buck’ from your printer. In this feature we outline some of the strategies you can adopt.

You don’t need to pay top dollars for a printer that can make black and white (B&W) prints. It’s easy to make acceptable monochrome prints from a low-priced printer – as long as you understand how the printer driver works. By ‘acceptable’ we don’t mean ‘exceptional’. Exceptional monochrome prints require an advanced driver and three levels of black ink density. Such printers cost more than $1000. But even a $100 photo printer can make B&W prints that look better than many prints from photolabs if you go about it the right way.

We’ve covered one cost-effective printing strategy in printing multiple images on a single sheet of paper. But this isn’t the only way to keep your printing costs low.