THE NEWS IN PRINT

The age of exposing films using an optical camera has seen the door; maybe forever. Digital cameras have revolutionized the photo industry by its ease of capturing pictures and the simplicity involved in printing them. Printing digital photos mostly takes place at homes where professional quality is achieved by the printers available in the market. Cliff Smith from Trusted Reviews has written an excellent guide / tutorial that explain briefly about digital photo printers, techniques it involves, preservation and the print sizes for digital prints.

As I read the article, I felt a need to write an abridged version for our readers. I feel that the sections covered below are helpful to most.

There are two main types of photo printers; inkjet printers and dye sublimation printers. Inkjet printers have existed for quite a long time now and it contains ink cartridges containing several colours. The process of ink flow from the cartridge to photo paper differs from one manufacturer to another. Epson, Canon, HP and Lexmark are some examples of inkjet photo printers. Dye sublimation printers have a ribbon that carries colour panels. Ink is transferred from the ribbon onto the photo paper by the application of heat. Kodak printers use this technology on their digital photo printers. It has been observed that the quality between the two types of printers is similar although dye sublimation printers offer cheaper prints and are fade resistant.

The most popular photo size is perhaps 6 X 4 inches. This size worked the best with snapshot cameras as they had an aspect ratio of 3:2. But digital cameras work on a different aspect ratio of 4:3 and the 6 X 4 inches photo size is far from ideal. But, manufacturers are not manufacturing photo size papers that suits digital cameras the best, as they fear that setting a new standard in the industry might not work to their advantage.

How big is big enough?

For perfect photo quality, your digital images should be printed at a resolution of around 300 pixels per inch, or 120 pixels per centimetre. This means that if you want a photo quality 6 x 4in (15 x 10cm) print, your digital image needs to be at least 1800 x 1200 pixels, which is roughly 2.2 megapixels. A4 paper is 21.0cm x 29.7cm, so for perfect photo quality A4 prints your digital image needs to be at least 2520 x 3564 pixels, which is just under nine megapixels. Even if you routinely print all your photos out at A4 size, you still don't need a 12-megapixel camera.