January 19, 2006 by Frank
Lexmark were the innovators when it came to the huge all-in-one market, they were the first to mass market inkjet multifunctions. Now they have come up with a new innovation – a photo printer with inbuilt CD burner! The Lexmark P450 is also unique in another way – it cannot be hooked up to a computer and has no printer drivers available.
This has to be a revolution in the printer industry at it’s most basic. There are many people who only use their printer for printing digital photos, so why do they need a computer? This can only expand the digital photo industry. This printer, and the others that follow it, will bring more and more people into the digital photo realm.
The P450 is roughly 15cm x 28cm x 23cm, so has quite a small footprint. It comes with a 2.4″ LCD screen for previewing photos. It prints onto photo size paper using a tricolour 18C0033A or 18C0035A cartridge. Photos can printed from all major camera memory cards, USB flash, PictBridge, CD (of course) and optional Bluetooth. You cannot print from your computer to this printer! Prints are borderless. Photos can be burnt to CD on the inbuilt CD burner. The CDs can continue to be burnt to until they are full, over several sessions if need be.
The only thing to watch is that this is a strictly home use printer – it is not a rugged machine and has a duty cycle of only 500 pages per month.
Looks like Lexmark are onto a winner with this class of printer – watch out for similar products from the other manufacturers if this printer experiences strong sales. Look for the Lexmark P450 in a computer store near you.
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January 14, 2006 by Frank
Well, we got an Epson R350 to use at home, we bought it just before Xmas. It is a very nice looking printer and it took up little room on our desk. After we unpacked it we realised we didn’t have a USB cable lying around so we couldn’t install it on the computer. Had a read through the manual and found out we could print straight from the SmartMedia card (or just about any card!) from a digital camera . The printer came with a sheet explaining how to do just that. We tried it and it was TOO easy! Whipped the SmartMedia card out of our Fuji camera and slotted it into the card reader on the printer and printed out an index sheet. It was easy to choose photos to print off the index card and enter the details into the R310 control panel.
Print quality was great. The 5760 x 1440 resolution meant photos were crisp and clear, and the borderfree looks really good. After Xmas we went out and bought a USB cable and hooked up the printer to the computer. The instruction sheet made it quite straightforward and we installed very quickly on Windows XP. Software installed was the printer driver and various other little programs and utilities. We couldn’t wait to print on some DVDs as we had a stack we had burnt and they looked pretty ordinary just plain white. Of course they were printable DVDs. We were a little disappointed with the printed DVDs, they weren’t as bright and vibrant as printing on paper but I suspect that has more to do with the printable surface on the DVD rather than the printers capabilities. Well, it was easy to print on the DVDs using the Epson CD Print Designer program that came with the printer.
Straight black text printing is extremely fast and looks good even though we always use draft mode for text to save on ink.
I will give an update on how long the Epson R350 cartridges last, but after 3 weeks of printing the levels are still at abot 85% on the indicators.
Overall we are very happy with the Epson R350, a great printer for everyday home or small office use but versatile enough to do digital photos and printable CDs and DVDs.
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July 13, 2005 by Frank
HP has announced new printheads which will be blisteringly fast, and have 3,900 nozzles per printhead. The new printheads are made using a lithographic process so they do not have to be welded during manufacture, resulting in way more accurate placement of ink drops on the page. It has taken 5 years and US$1.4 billion to produce. Initially the new printheads will only be available in high-end printers but will filter down to low end printers after a couple of years. It would be welcome especially for photo printing, which can be agonisingly slow on some printers. HP will be able to deliver more colours through one printhead with so many nozzles, speeding things up alot.
Category Inks, Printers, Printing Digital Photos | Tags: | No Comments
June 22, 2005 by Frank
Do you think it would be easy to refill colour toners for a colour laser? Most people do! There are, however, several hurdles to overcome. First, think about plain black printing. If a page is printed in black, it doesn’t matter if it is comes out dark grey, jet black, or any shade in between. Our brain still sees it as “black”. Consider now colour printing. You can tell if something about the colour in a colour picture is not quite right. If the colour looks washed out, or too rich, or too yellow or blue, we can always tell. The human eye is particularly sensitive to different colours – in fact the human eye can distinguish between tens of thousands of different hues. That’s why our printer monitors have moved on from 256 colours to 32 million colours! So, the first hurdle to overcome when trying to refill color toner is to match exactly the colour that the genuine manufacturer has. Not easy at all, as they have spent millions of dollars developing that toner for that machine and have stringent steps in their manufacturing plant to ensure there are no variations from batch to batch, and that the last cartridge to come out of the plant is exactly the same colour as the first. The companies that try to copy the genuine toner haven’t got a hope of matching the original manufacturers toner colour as the formula is patented and a closely guarded secret. If the colour of the refill toner isn’t going to match, the colours are going to be wacky!
The next point is the density of the toner. Did you know that genuine toner is ground up more finely? If you could look at toner under a microscope, the original genuine toner granules look small and spherical, whereas refill toner looks large, chunky and uneven. This affects the way toner is laid onto a page – genuine toner is laid on evenly and looks sharp and refill color toner looks fuzzy and there is some ‘bleed’ evident under a loupe. This also affects how adjoining colours look, not to mention extra wear and tear on printer components such as drums and fuser units.
If you want clear, sharp prints from your colour laser make sure you use genuine toner cartridges. If the colours on your printouts look strange or washed out, check to see that someone hasn’t refilled the toners with non-genuine toner or that generic toners haven’t been used.
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June 9, 2005 by Frank
Ever wondered what the prices per page are for inkjet photo paper? Choice has an inkjet photo paper cost calculator on their site. Prices shown are manufacturers recommended retail prices which you will easily beat by shopping online (maybe even using some of the photo paper ad links on the right – shameless plug!). Of course, as always, we recommend using the same brand paper as your printer – however Celcast, Ilford and Kodak are also quite good photo papers. Cheaper photo papers may react with the ink and cause rapid fading.
To go to the Choice Magazine calculator, click here.
To see the accompanying article, click here.
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June 2, 2005 by Frank
If things are getting stressed in the office and we need a bit of a laugh we always head off to Spamusement to cheer ourselves up. We are sometimes in tears of laughter over this site, basically how it works is Steven Franks takes spam email subject lines and draws cartoons about them – the results are usually very very funny. Even the ones about toner (heh heh).
Category Inks, Photo Paper, Printers, Printing Digital Photos, Toners | Tags: | No Comments
June 1, 2005 by Frank
One of my favourite sites is Wilhelm Imaging Research. Henry Wilhelm has spent many years researching image permanence. Now he almost exclusively focuses on digital image permanence (photos printed on desktop and wide format printers). On his site you will find way too much information on different ways to measure image permanence, but there are several useful sections, especially extracts from popular magazines written so that people like us can understand it. Especially interesting is an extract from PC World which compared brand name inks with no name inks. After extensive testing using his methods, he found the cheap ink printed almost as well as the genuine ink, however the no name ink would have faded after 6 months whereas the Epson ink will last for around 92 years!
Also on the site are the results of tests on many printers, with amazing results. Prints done on the Epson R800 will last up to 400 years! Of course, and this is a point made over and over again on Henry’s site – you will only achieve long lived prints by using the genuine ink and the genuine paper made by the manufacturer of your printer. Think about it when you want to print photos that last.
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May 18, 2005 by Frank
Last year Epson stopped making their excellent panoramic photo paper leaving a big hole in the market. Now none of the major vendors are supplying photo paper for printing panorama style. But all is not lost! There are still a couple of options for printing panoramic photos:
1) Printing on A4 or A3 photo paper and then trimming to shape; or
2) Printing using an Epson printer that takes roll paper
1) is relatively easy – make your panoramic photo using a series of shots and stitching them together (there is an excellent tutorial on PCWorld’s site), then print onto an A4 or A3 sheet. If your software or printer driver allows it, print along the top or bottom of the page then flip the paper around 180 degrees and print another panoramic photo on the other half of the paper. What you will need is a way to crop the photos after they have been printed – either a steel rule, sharp hobby knife and a steady hand; or a small guillotine or paper trimmer from your local office supply store.
2) requires one of the Epson papers which takes Epson roll paper. Epson roll paper is photo paper on a roll – it comes in various sizes but the one to use for panoramic photos would be part number S041302, Epson’s 100mm x 8 metre Premium Glossy Photo Paper. This will give you panoramic photos roughly the width of a normal photo (and whatever length you want which is within the printer driver’s capabilities). A couple of Epson printers which take the roll paper are the R800 and the R1800.
Category Photo Paper, Printing Digital Photos | Tags: | 1 Comment