All content copyright 2002-2004, Michael Papet. All rights reserved.
Essential information for printers by:
All content copyright 2002-2004 Michael Papet.
Desktop printers come in a variety of different methods to put ink on paper. Ink jet, laser and dye-sublimation (dye-sub) printers are three different technologies used in desktop printers. Ink jet printer are by far the most popular. Laser and dye-sublimation are the two others with the former being the more popular alternative.
All printers convert pixels to drops of ink on a page. It is a very complex process with the basic concepts borrowed from offset printing. These printers create many colors from just a few inks by putting the inks very close to each other. Your brain thinks it is one color, but it is really a combination of four or more colors put next to each other simulating a very wide range of color. The problem is this tends to make images look a little fuzzy.
Printers that print less detail: Ink jet printers (including $15,000 wide-format)
Printers that print the least detail: Laser printers (cheap per page though!)
This is ranked based on how the printers put ink on paper. Your eyes may tell you something else, but that is part of the psychology of sight and color!
Ink jet printers are the most widely used kind of consumer printer on the market today. They have a motor that moves the ink cartridge(s) across the page. Information regarding how much ink to spray onto the paper is sent to the ink cartridge which has a mechanism for spraying tiny (and I mean TINY!) drops of ink onto the paper to recreate digital images. More expensive ink jet printers tend to be faster, with larger ink cartridges and tend to reproduce images better than lower cost printers. Ink jet printers consume ink, lots of it, when printing photos. But, sometimes the convenience of using your printer is far better than taking them out to have them reproduced for you. There are so many different kinds of paper for printing using ink jets, it makes them quite useful in the home at some expense to image quality.
Laser printers are very economical to operate, but priced significantly higher than ink jet printers. Color laser printers tend to be quite large, straining the definition of "desktop" printer a bit. The image quality is great if your printing needs are for small runs of documents, newsletters, and marketing communications materials. There is a general lack of variation in paper stock other than some heavier papers limiting the uses of laser printers. They aren't very good for photos for many reasons. Those reasons can be generalized as they are designed for printing single, well-defined graphics, not photos, with their numerous shades and textures. If you buy my scanning and printing book, it shows you the special settings inside printer software for creating photo quality images.
Dye-sublimation printers are not as well known as ink jet printers. They are without a doubt, the best printer for reproducing photos with their amazing sharpness, detail and color reproduction. They use small film cartridges with different color dyes on them. The dyes are transferred to the paper using heat and placed on top of each other to create a wider range of colors. This is done with a great deal of precision. It is a much better method of creating a wide range of color. Their great weakness is that they are not well equipped for printing anything other than pictures. Olympus makes an exceptional dye-sub printer. If your passion is printing your own pictures, there is nothing better for your digital darkroom than a dye-sub printer.
All content copyright 2002-2004 Michael Papet.