Of Photography and Printing
Some of my sabbatical work this term has gone into the professional development of my digital photography. And, I’ve learned a lot of new things, especially in regard to printing. I’ll describe more about that later in the post, but first I want to underscore the importance of the medium in photography. Of course we all know the impact that the medium plays in the quality of the final image; but working through all these photos (about 6000) over the past few months has helped me appreciate all over again the differences between imagery presented electronically from imagery produced for print. I suppose I am still in some way surprised at how certain imagery will work wonderfully electronically and not in print - and vice versa.
I’ve also come to recognize that I’ve underestimated the importance of Depth of Field - particularly for large prints. I was specifically working on that with this series of images, but failed to give it enough emphasis. I’ll look forward to getting back into the field to correct that! But I’ve digressed from the printing issue…
Over the past year I’ve had the opportunity to carefully evaluate several large format printers and consider their impact on the final results of my work. (I’ll preface these comments by saying that almost all of this imagery looks good at smaller resolutions) At larger print resolutions, color becomes more of a factor and truthfully - the quality of the print head and its ability to deliver precision points of ink, plays a large factor. So, how do you decide what you need if you want to print larger photos than the 8 x 11 that any good inkjet can do?
First, the number of inks makes a difference. In my comparisons, any printer with more, separate, ink wells gives results that are more true to the image. Aside from that, it comes down to the precision of the print-head and the quality of the software drivers and the printers color-matching abilities. You have two fine options for A3 printing - both the HP Photosmart B8550 and the Canon PIXMA Pro9000 are good printers. The quality of the Canon prints is clearly superior; but the HP is much cheaper, and in my experience, reliable. HP makes some higher-end models, but they are newer and I haven’t had the opportunity to test them. Its conceivable that the quality of these might be closer to the Canon, but for less than $200 the B8550 seems hard to beat.
But I need more precision and larger prints for my own work. That means I’ve got to move up to the next level, and of those printers I think the Epson Stylus Pro 3880 holds the most promise. You can find a good review of it here. And this blog does a nice job of identifying the strengths and potential weaknesses of the device.
Next entry: Poetaster
Previous entry: The Value of Studying Computing
One of the perks of working in IT at Miami is that I have unlimited (practically) access to our 2 student-use large format printers. I’ll have to check the brand and model details Monday. I think they are HP, but they could also be Canon or Sharp. They have 8 ink wells that last ages. We usually go through 3 full semester photography courses on one set. The thing I dislike the most about them is how much ink they waste in the cleaning process. They go through a print head cleaning routine every time the come out of standby where the have been in standby for 8 or more hours. They have a “waste tank” to collect all of this ink that gets sprayed as part of the process. Kind of disgusting to think about how much money that is. I used them to add several 8x10s to my portfolio over this past summer. The quality was pretty good. I’ll probably do some larger prints in the near future, and I’m curious to see how they turn out.