After you know that you need to print your photo, it's time to decide how to print it. If you have only one printer and no money for or access to another printer, the decision is already made - you'll use your one and only printer. If you have the cash for the perfect printer for your particular photo, that's great. If you don't have the cash but have access to a variety of printers, that's great, too. With the assumption that you have some choices available to you, consider the list of printing possibilities found in Table 1.
Table 1: Printer Options
|
Type of Printer |
Price Range |
Comments |
|
Inkjet |
$75-$250 |
Great for color prints; good text quality, too |
|
Laser |
$400-$3,000 |
Fast, economical for text; not the best choice for images |
|
Dye-sublimation |
$150-$500 (and up) |
Best color print quality, but can't handle text |
Inkjet printers
The name inkjet gives you an idea of how the inkjet printer works - assuming that the word jet makes you think of the water jets in a whirlpool bath or spa. The way these printers work is rather simple. Piezoelectric crystals make the ink cartridges vibrate (the crystals are sandwiched between two electrodes, which make the crystals dance). Different levels of voltage cause the crystals to vibrate differently, which adjusts the colors and the amount of color sprayed through a nozzle onto the paper.
Color inkjet printers can create photo-quality images, assuming that you use good-quality photo paper for the output. Price isn't necessarily an indication of print quality, and you should print a test page before making a purchase or follow the recommendation of someone who owns the same model.
Laser printers
Laser printers work very much like photocopiers. A laser beam is aimed at a photoelectric belt or drum, building an electrical charge. This happens four times, once for each of the four colors used to make all the colors in your image - cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. The electric charge makes the colored toner stick to the belt, and then the belt transfers the toner to the drum. The paper rolls along the drum as it moves through the printer, which transfers the toner from the drum to the paper. Then, either pressure or heat (or both) makes the toner stick to the paper.
Color laser printers are more expensive than inkjets and black-and-white laser printers and are more expensive to operate. Indeed, now that the prices for color laser printers have dipped to affordable levels, many users are complaining that they easily spend more on toner in the first few months they own these devices than they spent on the printers themselves! If you're creating camera-ready art for very important, detailed publications, you probably want a color laser printer (assuming that the images are in color) rather than an inkjet, but the image quality is not as good as what you'd get with a dye-sublimation printer.
Dye-sublimation printers
Here, the name of the printer doesn't tell you much about the way the printer works. Despite their cryptic name, dye-sublimation printers work in a relatively straightforward way. A strip of plastic film, called a transfer ribbon, is coated with cyan, magenta, and yellow dye. When a print job is sent to the printer, a thermal print head heats the paper-sized (4-x-6-inch or 8-1/2-x-10-inch) panel of plastic transfer ribbon. Variations in temperature control what colors and the amount of color that are applied to the paper. Because the paper has a special coating on it, the dye sticks.
Dye-sublimation printers produce an excellent image, especially for color photos. The subtle results are great for professional designers, artists, and photographers. The expense for full-sized dye-sub printers may be prohibitive for small businesses and home users, but the lower-priced models that produce only snapshot-sized prints and cost less than $150 (plus about 30 cents per print for paper and ribbon) may be within reach.
