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Photo printers

by Jamie Nicholson

When you buy a digital camera, at the time you may not be thinking about the printer that you will be using. A lot of course use the local photo kiosk. But some want their own printer. So what are the printer options that should be considered?
If you are going to print photos you definitely want a printer with photo capabilities and that is determined by a few simple things the terms you will want to be familiar with are:
• CMYK – this is an acronym for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black. These are your ink colors. Cyan is a shade blue, Magenta is a shade of red and the others speak for themselves. An inkjet printer can come in a single tank or multiple tank style. This is important to secede since multiple tank printers are known to give you crisper prints than single tank. There are several types of multiple ink printers. Some separate the black cartridge from the color and you have 2 tanks and some printers even separate the colors giving you up to 6 tanks. Multiple tank printers have a tendency to cost more with the multiple ink tanks. But in the long run buying the separate inks will save you money since you are only replacing the color you run out of. If you print a lot of black and white text, you do not want to throw away your colored inks just because you are out of black
• Ink Cartridge – This is the disposable tank that holds your ink. If you were to break this cartridge YES you would get ink all over yourself. As I stated above some manufactures put sub tanks in one cartridge giving you the convenience of buying just on cartridge for your printer or the flexibility of buying only the color you need. Deciding which is best for you should be determined how much you will print and what you will be printing. For the school student to do homework then a single tank is best. For the photographer ad full color printing I have an HP 1700 which is a 4 tank wide format printer.
• DPI – this is an acronym for dots per inch. This is how your printer puts the ink on the paper. Depending on the DPI will depend on the quality of the printed photo. If you want good quality prints then you want your printer to print the best that it can. Most printers have multiple print settings that allow you adjust the print quality. Remember the higher the DPI the better the final print.
• USB – this is the acronym for Universal Serial Bus. Most of the new printers these days use this instead up the bulky printer cables.

PHOTO of the DAY

Camera Olympus E-500
314 DPI original file size 3264 X 2448
uploaded file size 350 X 263

P4140950a.jpg


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Digital shutters will attempt to make sense of the tech talk about digital cameras explaining the different terms used and what they really mean. Give tips on what you should do with all those pictures you take, and the newest releases from the manufactures.

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