I’m looking for opinions, advice, and tips about how best to get prints of my digital photos. I have a massive stash of photos of young Whatsit Jr., and the relatives are champing (chomping?) at the bit to get their grubby hands on some actual physical pictures of the lad.
I know nothing about printing out digital photos. What do I need to know? I have a color printer; can I do it at home? Do I need to go to Kinko’s? Even if I can print them out at home, would it be better to go to Kinko’s anyway? What do I need to know about resizing the picture to make it fit on a particular size of paper?
Also, is the quality of the print going to be the same as what I’d get if I just took a regular picture with a regular camera? How expensive does the paper usually run?
I am totally clueless. Help me out here, folks? The Whatsit family would be most appreciative.
I use a HP 8xx (ink-jet) printer and top-of-line paper (actually, Epson S041141-100). Don’t remember exact price - somewhere $.50 - $1.00/page.
I use Adobe Photoshop (an entire book can be written on how to tweak images for a given printer/paper combination)
I also have pro-grade emulsion equipment (incl. darkroom) - if I want a good image, it’s back to the enlarger - digital is closing in, but unless you’re looking to spend $1000’s, it ain’t close.
So - try MS paint (comes with Win-crap) and good paper.
If the results are acceptable, fine.
Otherwise - pay someone to print them for you, or price out the hardware/software needed.
One of the major concerns in print quality is your paper. The “glossy” style sheets will give a much better print than ordinary paper, though at a cost.
A good rule of thumb is to scan an image at twice the resolution that you will eventually print it with. Any inkjet printer can do 300 dots per inch, so if you want to print a 5x7 image, you should scan your image at 600dpi, if possible. If you want to print at 600dpi, you should scan at 1200dpi. How far you go depends on the abilities of your computer and keep in mind that beyond 600dpi, the difference in print quality might be pretty negligible, so don’t go for higher quality than you need, because you’ll only waste time and ink.
You didn’t say if you had a scanner or not, but you can pick one up for about $100. Check your computer first to make sure you have a USB socket available (search the web for “USB” and you’ll find pictures of what the sockets look like). If your machine has no USB at all, you might consider upgrading, since a machine that old may not be able to process digitial images quickly or well. You can add USB capability by installing an upgrade if you don’t want to buy a new computer. Search the web for “USB card” for information on this.
The scanner will include software for editing photos, including adjusting brightness and contrast and cropping.
When buying a scanner, be wary of inflated resolution values. A scanner that claims to be able to read 9600dpi is probably only reading 1200 or 2400 and “interpolating”, or estimating, the rest. 9600dpi is a ridiculously huge amount (LIFE is barely 9600dpi) and if you were to scan an 5x7 photo at 9600dpi, you would need more computer memory than the guys who made Toy Story. As above, scan at twice the resolution you plan to print at.
I’ll need some additional technical information about your current setup to advise further.
happyheathen is right, though. If your “massive stash” is only 30 or 40 images, it might be a lot easier to let the Kinko’s guy do it. On the other hand, if your stash is several hundred images and you plan to keep adding more, and you want to build up whole albums, you might find it less expensive and more interesting to try it yourself.
I speak from a geek perspective, of course, where every computer problem is downright fascinating.
Oops, I should have mentioned that these are not scanned pictures; they’re pictures that I have taken with my digital camera.
I looked at a couple of representative photos and it looks like they’re all 300 pixels per inch; should I adjust the camera so it’s taking pictures at a higher resolution? Am I going to have crappy quality on the pictures I already took at 300 dpi?
Another option is to upload all or a selection of your photos to an internet service that prints photos. You can create your own album on the internet, and send the address and password of the album to your relatives. Then they can order any or all of the prints they want - at their cost. One such service is Kodak Photo Net, but their are many more available.
300dpi is fine, you just won’t get any better print quality if you crank your printer up to 600dpi or beyond. Your best bet might be to print at 300dpi, but print 4 or 6 images on the same sheet of paper, preferably all that adhere to a particular theme (i.e. “the birthday party”). Trying to stretch a single 300dpi image to fill a sheet of 8.5x11 paper will make it all look all jagged and crappy. To assemble four or six images on a single sheet will require some basic graphic software. MS-Paint could do it, though not nicely. There are plenty of shareware graphic editing programs around, and your camera probably came with one.
You can try snapping photos at higher resolution, which means you’ll be able to make larger prints before crappiness sets in. The tradeoff is in the amount of memory your camera has. Higher resolution means fewer shots can be stored on the memory stick.
One thought; if you plan to send these out to a lot of relatives, skip the printing and get yourself a CD-burner. You can distribute disks instead of pages to your relatives who have computers. These disks can hold thousands of high-quality images and you’ll save yourself a lot of printing expenses. Copying a disk is also a heck of a lot cheaper and faster than making second printouts.
IIRC most digital cameras have a fixed resolution, something to do with the density of the CCDs in the back
The best way to print them out, I think, is to crank the printer to the max resolution, use the glossy type paper, and put as many as one can on a sheet of paper.
Far and away, the best photo printers on the market are those in the Epson Stylus Photo line. The 785 runs around $100 and delivers amazing quality photos from digital images. There are good HP photo printers as well, but Epson delivers higher quality at lower cost right now.
You’ll also need to buy the proper paper. If you are using Epson inks (which you should with an Epson printer) you’ll get the best results with Epson paper. The company actually spends a lot of time and money matching the papers and the inks. It shows, but if you use high quality photo paper from other manufactures you’ll still get pretty good results.
Ideally, you’ll send images to the printer at 300 dpi. Anything greater will not show up in the image and you’ll just slow down the printing. You can get pretty high quality images with anything above 200 dpi, but 300 will give best results.
I use PhotoShop, then the Epson Photo Quicker printing software, but there are lots of good printing software packages out there.
Always take photos at the highest resolution. That has little to do with the dpi of the final image because that will depend on the size of the print you are sending to the printer. The larger your original image the larger print you can make, and you can also crop and modify the image more before creating the final image. A 2 megapixel image is great for 5x7, passable for 8x10. With 3 megapixel you can get nice 8x10s.
The best online source of info that I’ve found is http://www.dcresource.com, check out the message board there.
You can register for free at http://photos.msn.com/ & they have a ‘photo bar’ that lets you know what size prints you can use with your pictures you got.
I don’t like Epson printers, they don’t let you know how much ink you get in the cart & they use a lot of ink & they have special chips on the carts so you can’t refill some of them. HP printers are nice & accept Refil kits.
Frankly, I like to put the photos on a vcd with Nero 5.5.6. They look terrific on the tv that way playing through a dvd player & you can get more than 1,500 images on a cd.
I’m not sure what you’re saying, but I always know how much ink is left in the carts, there’s a readout from the printer software. Having put Epson and HP prints side by side, I think the Epson prints are noticably better. The color cart is only $22 for my printer, and I haven’t used it up yet.
I’m not saying that they are perfect, but for print quality and cost, they are the current leaders.
I have used both Shutterfly and Ofoto to print my digital photos…they both were acceptable in terms of quality (although others have different opinions). There is a good review of the different options for printing digital photos here (TidBits is a Mac oriented news site…but this article is relevant to all platforms).
Lately, I have used the Kodak PictureMaker at WalMart. I usually only print 4x6 prints, and not all Picturemakers include the 4x6 printer (most just print full size 8x11 sheets for $6 or so). At WalMart, I can print each 4x6 for 49 cents…and the software includes the standard editing features (crop, red eye reduction, sepia/b&w printing) plus a lot of seasonal themed borders as options. I have seen the same printer at K-Mart, but they charge $2 for the same damn 4x6 print…unreal! Anyway, the PictureMaker will read PC formatted floppies, Photo CDs or the SmartMedia/Compact Flash cards that are used in digital cameras.
“I don’t like Epson printers, they don’t let you know how much ink you get in the cart”
On a HP cart there should be an indication of how much ink you get, 2 fluid oz, but on Epsons they don’t do that. This might be old & they might have changed it by now. At least on my HP’s I can refill them easily.
IMHO Printers are usually sold at about what the ink costs because the manf tries to make the money back on those expensive ink carts.
