Welcome to Photo Printers resource site!

If you haven't seen photographs printed on color printers, you are in for a big surprise. The output you can get from printers costing a few hundred dollars will shock you. The results may not be the same as prints made with traditional photography, but in many ways they have a look and feel all their own. Because of the wide choice of papers, inks, and technologies available, printed images vary a lot. Two types of printers stand out, ink-jets for low cost and dye subs for high quality.

Photo Printers

In camera stores, you may have seen Kodak Picture Makers. These easy to operate, self-service printers make prints from prints, slides, negatives, photo CD discs, Digital camera memory cards, and JPEG and FlashPix-format floppy diskettes. To do this, the station has integrated drives, scanners, printers, and a display monitor. Before making a print, you can zoom and crop, use red-eye reduction, adjust color and density, and add mattes and borders. You do all of this by making simple choices displayed on a touch-sensitive screen.

Halftoning has long been used in the conventional printing industry and you can see it by looking at a magazine photo with a magnifying glass. It is also embedded in page description languages such as Adobe's PostScript Level 2. However, printer manufactures try to improve on these standards with their own proprietary systems that are better matched to their printers.

Until recently, the computer was a digital photography gatekeeper. To go anywhere, the image had to first be transferred to the computer. This is changing as advances make it possible to send images to the Internet directly from the camera and to a printer. There are two models for this independence. In one model, the printer has built-in slots into which you can plug flash-memory cards. In the other model, a photo device is used to connect the camera to the printer. Some printers now have slots in them for flash memory cards so they can make prints without a computer. Each printer has it's own unique features.

Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black color sticks (solid bricks-a bit like colored bars of soap) are installed in the printer. Solid ink printers can print on nearly any kind of paper stock, an important feature if you make color proofs. For example; if you are a package designer, you can simulate the appearance of a new design for your client by outputting the proof on the same stock as the final packaging. Solid ink printers work well with colored stock. These printers apply extremely vibrant and opaque color and are ideal for graphics.

When reproducing colors on the screen or printed page, we use what are called color models. One model, called Lab, has the largest gamut. Within the color model can be found all of the colors of the two most popular color models: RGB and CMYK. The RGB gamut includes only those colors that can be displayed on a computer screen. Some colors, such as pure cyan or pure yellow, can't be displayed accurately on a monitor. The CMYK model, used for printing, has the smallest gamut. When colors in an image can not be displayed or printed because they aren't in a device's gamut, they are called out-of-gamut colors.