The line between home and commercial color photo printers for technology is becoming thinner all the time as home printers increase in quality and commercial printers come down in price. As digital cameras plummet in price, and as digital SLR cameras come more into the mainstream, there’s more call for high quality color photo printing than ever, both at home and commercially. There are three basic types of printers for photo printing: inkjet, laser, and dye sublimation printers.
Most of us are familiar with laser and inkjet printers. Laser printers use principles of static electricity and ionization to create images, while inkjet printers are self-descriptive: they shoot tiny dots of ink onto the photo printing paper or other medium, which are blended in such a way that they create realistic colors and in resolutions high enough that they do justice to a high quality photograph.
Dye sublimation
Dye sublimation may be unfamiliar to many people, however, even though they’re well within the price range of many shoppers. Dye sublimation printers let you print pictures at home that have the same quality as commercial photo lab prints. The colors are not put on the medium as individual dots. Rather, dye sublimation printers use rolls of transparent film resembling sheets of colored cellophane connected end to end. The films have solid dyes embedded in them that correspond to the four colors that color photo printers use: cyan, yellow, magenta, and black. As the print head passes over the film, it heats up, causing the dye in the sheets to vaporize onto the paper surface before returning to a solid state.
With dye sublimation printers, the colors deposit onto the photo printing paper in such a way that there is no sharp drop off at the edge of every pixel, but rather a subtle gradation. This means there is no conspicuous border between the dye and the paper like you get with inkjet photo printers. And because the inks in dye sublimation printers infuse the paper, they tend to distort and fade less over the long term.
Photo book printing services
Some people who want professional quality prints without having to buy the equipment use photo book printing services that operate online. In general, they work like this. A site will offer a basic 10 (or some other number) page book for a flat price. The pages are printed on both sides, so the customer has 20 printed pages to work with. Each page can have up to a pre-defined number of pictures along with minimal text. In most cases, extra pages can be added if needed, and there are a number of choices of cover materials for creating heavy soft covers to leather hardcover end products.
When the book of digital photos is finished, the customer does a proof check and clicks “Order.” The printer will send an email confirmation, and another email when the book is about to ship. The problem with these sites is that the colors you see on your computer screen may or may not match up to the colors seen in the final book. Shutterfly.com‘s service has been rated as having pleasing, warm, yet somewhat saturated colors that may not always be accurate. SharedInk.com has been reviewed as having better color accuracy, as well as the choice of photo printing paper stock, and top quality binding choices.
While SharedInk.com‘s photo book printing service costs a little more than its competitors, it has a reputation for outstanding reproduction on high quality materials. Joining SharedInk’s Photographer Program for a one-time $129 fee gives photographers access to larger book photo print sizes, more online storage, and goodies like private-label branding and special end papers. Photographers also get a hard copy press proof to check for color, quality of paper, contrast, and other qualities so that they can adjust files if necessary before the final printing. During the printing and binding, there is more frequent press cleaning and additional quality checks, which result in a top notch end product.
As satisfying as photo book printing can be, it is generally not a long term solution to digital photo printing needs. That is why most small businesses and some devoted amateurs buy photo printers that are flexible enough to do printing in various photo print sizes and on various media.
Some good photo printers
Canon Pixma printers are a popular brand of commercial color printers for photography. They’re fast and flexible, and give excellent photo quality, according to various online reviews. For about $800, the Canon Pro9500 Mark II is designed for archival quality photos. It uses an ink pigment system called LUCIA which is made for longevity. IT uses a range of fine art photo printing papers and can print up to 13 x 19 inch sheets of photo paper.
The Pro9500 Mark II is among the best color ink jet printers, with 4800 x 2400 dpi capability and drop volumes as small as two picoliters, for outstanding levels of detail. There are even three black inks: gray, matte black, and black, which give extra range to black and white digital photo printing. Though heavier fine art papers require a border, with some media prints up to 13 x 19 can be borderless. Photographers like the ink tank system, where users can replace only the color that runs out rather than replacing an entire cartridge that might contain valuable unused ink.
It connects to computers by a USB 2.0 Hi-Speed cable or PictBridge and is Energy Star qualified. It works with Windows Vista, XP, and 2000, and Mac OS X 10.3.9 to 10.5.7.
When it comes to color laser printers, HP color laser printers are considered among the best. One example is the Color LaserJet CP2025n HP Color Laser Printer. It is a reasonably priced commercial color printer for photography both in home and for businesses. For around $400, it puts color laser printing into more places than ever. While the speed may be middle-of-the-pack, the print quality has been very favorably reviewed. The text is crisp and the colors are faithfully reproduced for the most part. It is not, however, known for making good grayscale prints. Reviewers have judged them as grainy and greenish tinted. It can print on legal sized media.
A quality that is well-appreciated among buyers of the CP2025n is that it doesn’t put buyers into the low cost printer / high cost ink trap. Though it comes with only “starter sized” cartridges, once the customer replaces them with full sized cartridges (which cost around $120 each for a black cartridge or a color cartridge), the cost per page drops to about 3.5 cents per black and white page, 4.3 cents per color per page, or just under 17 cents for a four-color page.
For those interested in going the dye-sublimation printer route, The FujiFilm ASK 2000 Dye Sublimation Thermal Photo Printer, at $1,300, is a workhorse model priced for small businesses. And it gets positive reviews. It can print many sizes of photos with no upgrades required. Though it is heavy (because it is made of steel), it has been favorably reviewed for in-the-field work, such as production of on-site photo prints at events. Though the instructions have taken hits for not being very clear, setup is reasonably straightforward. Calibrating the machine for faithful color reproduction involves playing with ICC output profiles (on photo editing software) for professional results. This is, however, required for best performance on any printer. Dye sublimation printers have a reputation for being noisy, and this one is no exception. It makes about four prints per minute and one roll of 5 x 7 photo printing paper will make 308 prints at that size.
One of the Brother color laser printers, the MFC-9320CW, can be had for under $500, and falls into the class of “multifunction printers.” It prints, copies, scans, and faxes and has high quality color output, suitable for flyers, brochures and many standard business documents. It can be installed wired or wirelessly and does stand alone copying and copy reduction and enlargement. It prints letter or legal size. People who want an all-in-one machine that can double as a commercial color printer for photography should check this one out. It is reviewed as being highly competent for the price tag, offering up to 600 x 2,400 dpi print resolution.
Commercial color printers for photography is a category that is fairly broad at the moment. Commercial may mean anything from the one-person home-based operation to a buzzing office environment, and photography may mean anything from an art photograph at high resolution to head shots that go in a company newsletter. Like any piece of computer or office equipment, the features the user wants and the price range will be the prime determinants of which device is chosen. Inkjet, laser, and dye sublimation printers for photo printing all have their advantages and drawbacks.
Inkjet printers are generally the most cost effective, but photo quality will often depend heavily on price, meaning that the ultra-cheap inkjet printer probably won’t do the work to commercial quality. Commercial color printers for photography include laser printers, which make high quality color photographs (but which may not do well with grayscale prints) and which generally don’t use up resources as quickly as inkjet printers do. Dye sublimation printers work great in specialized applications, but they can be expensive and somewhat limited in their applications. And all-in-one printers / scanners / copiers / faxes may make the compromise of doing all those things moderately well without being exceptional in any aspect. However, this is exactly what some commercial operations need.
Commercial color printers for photography that aren’t used for other printing may need to be quite specialized, and if this is the case: the business is professional photo printing or photo poster printing, then dye sublimation printers are well worth looking into, particularly models like the Fujifilm ASK 2000. But for non-photography businesses that simply need occasional good quality photo printing, then the other types of printers for photo printing may serve quite well.