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PC Photo Printers Challenge Pros
zebadee writes "A survey carried out by PC Pro magazine looked at which of 100 home photo printers offered a better deal than handing your snaps to a photo lab.
The tests found that images from top PC printers kept their colour longer than professionally produced photographs.
In the report at the BBC it claims that the new generation of printers produced images with brighter colours and that were less likely to fade than many High Street developers or even some professional wedding photographers."
This article looks like a slashvertisment for PC Pro Magazine. I see nothing of substance -- you have to buy the magazine to see any of the results.
Extensive testing by PC Pro's labs has revealed that photographs produced by inkjet printers can be both far more expensive than those from traditional photo processors and fade far more quickly. But not if you choose the right combination of printer, ink and paper.
The test gives a great boost to the idea of buying very expensive ink cartridges from the manufacturers.
Oh yeah, print is dead. Just look what happened to the 'paperless office' idea.
Generally, people like having something physical to deal with.
Plus, once a picture is printed out it requires no maintenance. I'm buggered if I'm going to dedicate a PC to showing a photo on my wall.
"You heard the man, Tubbs.. get undressed."
Disclaimer: I work for a company, but I don't speak for them.
I have to agree with this... I am a semi-professional photographer and I've never seen anything from a home printer compare to what you could get done at a service bureau (or select photo stores, sometimes costco[which uses fuji crystal archive] which offers a 11x14 for $3). Also, I've moved on from the 8x10 prints to larger prints (11x14 or 16x20) and if you want a printer to do that then it's gonna cost a whole lot more money.
I wonder how the comparison with the "high street" stores was done. What paper was used by them and what printing machines did they use? That's a big factor... perhaps the article says, but I don't care to purchase the magazine to find out.
Question everything that you've accepted without thinking.
The article sais, pictures were printed on various printers. After 12 months
they were examined, and some were found OK while others faded away excessively.
All this was done at normal daylight/temperature - no accelerated tests were
made.
I cant see how this can be compared to professionally printed photographs or
wedding photos. They surely wont fade within 12 months of normal in-house
daylight.
An inkjet picture that doesnt fade noticably within 12 months is remarkable,
but not necessarily "better than professionally made photographs".
you want substance? I'll give you substance: http://www.wilhelm-research.com/4x6/4x6_permanence _preview.html
This is a report done by the Wilhelm Imaging Research labs. All they do is test stuff to see how long it will last. You're not going to find "and it's still good enough to print grnadma's album" - you'll find a real scientific analysis.
Enjoy the substance.
Plus all printers seem designed to screw up two out of every three pieces of photo paper, so each successful print costs about £5. Why is this stuff so expensive anyway?
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
Speaking as someone who spent four years working with digital photo printers, you will always get better results from a store (Ritz, Proex, Wal-mart etc) than you will ever get with a home printer. Reason? They buy a $750,000 digital printer, you buy a $200 printer. More accurately, save for some of the higher end dye-sublimation stuff, you are typically spraying ink onto a piece of paper which inevitably fades over time as it oxidizes. They have gotten better, but you're usually looking at about a 20 shelf life for the average home printed print. Fuji guarantees it's crystal archive prints not to fade for 100 years (Although, in all fairness let's see you try to get a reprint on a faded image in 50 years!) and Kodak guarantees its paper for 75. Maybe it won't make a difference, but you'd be surprised how much a 20 year old non-faded picture can mean to someone. The modern mini-lab digital printers are using good old fashioned (Well, old in the relative sense.) light sensitive color emulsion photo paper, exposed to a laser and then sealed in photo chemicals to produce their results. Lasting far longer than a simple dye could. Yeah, I know, I sound like an ad for a photo mini-lab, but I'm really sick of enlarging prints from a crappy faded inkjet printer, and people wondering why it looks so horrible. Oh yeah, and one other note, when you take your pictures in, make sure they're getting printed on the giant mini-lab in the back of the store, and not some POS dorm fridge sized printer on the counter. Because I know for a fact that certain stores *coughritzcough* lie about how long the photos coming off a Fuji PrintPix printer will last.
It could also be the readers faults. Those of us with slashdot ads disabled get to see the articles early and mention to the mods if their is a problem before the general public sees it. However With the number of subscribers being alot lower then the normal amount of slashdot readers that means less of us to hit the website to catch an article before it goes out. We have the ability to comment and have links/titles fixed. As for content though I assume that link is just as good as a broken link.
So readers loose because their aren't alot of subscribers I get and we see more crap then.
There exists some positive integer N that you are the Nth person to read this signature.
I'm not sure I care how long the print lasts? If it fades, or the quality isn't perfect, you can always print it again in 5, 10, 20 years, with presumably better technology. That is, if we still use printers.
To be fair, a lot of the ideals of the 'paperless office' are here and in common use already. Many of the things which used to be on paper are sometimes, mostly, or completely in electronic form: phone lists, agendas, memos, directories, accounts, correspondence, ledgers, catalogues, manuals, brochures -- even source code is almost exclusively online.
It's true that there's still a lot of paper about in offices, but its nature has changed -- a fair proportion consists of things which simply weren't possible in the old days.
It's the same at home and elsewhere, too, of course. In my case, for instance, as most of my reading is now on the screen of my Mac or my palmtop, I can probably get away without buying another bookshelf in the near future. And my printer tends to get used for things like printing sheet music -- still just as vital (you can't have a choir singing over the tops of monitors!), but it's now fairly easy to engrave (typeset) your own arrangements and compositions, which would previously have involved publishers (and lots of money), or paper, ink, and photocopier (and lots of time).
In short, many of the 'paperless office's goals have already been met -- it's just that we've found new uses for paper that we couldn't have before. (Whether you consider that 'progress' is up to you, of course...)
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
While I agree you can most definitely learn quite a bit from books, one of the most helpful things I got out of PHOT101 wasn't any kind of technical or factual education but rather the feedback of an experienced photographer on what I was and wasn't doing right and what I needed to do to make my work go from "pictures" to "photographs" - the sorts of intangible aspect that you can't get from a book no matter how good at self-teaching you are.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley