DeeDoo's Digital Do's and Don'ts - Number 3

This week's topic is printers, with next week's article continuing with inks and papers. Again, I won't be talking about what brand to buy. Instead, I'll be discussing what the different types of printer, ink, and paper options are for the digital scrapper. I'll also provide some useful links for you to do some further research.

What are the printer options?

Inkjet, dye-sub, laser, wide format, all-in-one, photo - there's a lot of formats to choose from. Let's take a quick look at what each has to offer.

Let's start with the most familiar, the inkjet. Inkjet printers work by spraying ink onto a sheet of paper. There are a couple of ways this is done, depending on the printer manufacturer. The two major ones are bubble jet used by Canon®, HP®, and others, and piezoelectric developed by Epson®. Bubble jet printers are generally easier to maintain and have faster print speeds than piezoelectric printers. Piezoelectric printers generally have finer image detail and can print to a wider variety of media, but repair is more expensive.

Dye sub printers work by heating dye from a ribbon as it passes by a heater which vaporizes the ink. As the ink cools, it re-solidifies on the paper. Instead of using dots to fool the eye into seeing a particular color like inkjets, the exact color is placed on the paper so the print is dot free. Dye subs used to be the only way to get good photo quality prints, but today's inkjet technology has in many cases surpassed dye sub quality. The advantages of dye sub printers is speed, smoothness of the print since no dot pattern is visible, and the look and feel is closer to an actual photograph. Many of the portable printers that are advertised as photo printers are dye subs for these reasons. However, prints from dye subs are generally not archival (some now have an extra pass to add an overcoat which aids longevity), paper and ribbon is more expensive than inkjet supplies, paper selection is limited, and they generally do not handle text well.

Laser printers use a laser beam to create an image on a drum which is then rolled through toner. The toner is transferred to the paper by a combination of heat and pressure. Color laser printers use four separate toner cartridges in cyan, magenta, yellow, and black to achieve color prints. Color lasers used to be prohibitively expensive. Some can be found now for the price of a very good inkjet printer. Laser printers have the advantage of not using ink, and the prints are more smudge and water resistent than inkjet prints. There is also the advantage of toner not drying up and clogging printer nozzles like the cartridges of inkjet printers are capable of doing. Laser printers are also known for handling large volumes of prints. While it is much more expensive to buy toner cartridges than inkjet cartridges, in the long run they are much cheaper because the laser printer will print thousands more pages with that toner, bringing the per page costs way down. If you are going to be doing high volume printing, a color laser printer might be something to consider.

An all-in-one printer is a copier, scanner, and printer rolled into one machine. The output of the parts of an all-in-ones can be quite good, but usually not as good as the comparable stand alones. It's a trade off between lower price and space savings of an all-in-one versus the slightly more expensive but better quality stand alone. If your scanning and copying needs are not demanding, then buying an all-in-one that does good photo quality prints could be an option. Otherwise, you might be money ahead to buy a separate scanner and printer.

Photo printers are printers designed to produce photo quality output. They can be inkjet or dye-sub. The typical inkjet photo printer will have extra ink cartridges. Many will add light cyan and light magenta. If you are going to do much black and white printing, you will want one with more than one type of black ink. A second black ink cartridge or gray ink cartridge makes suble shading easier, creating smoother gradients between the blacks and white. Remember, though, that more ink colors doesn't necessarily mean better output. Good four color printers can outperform poor six color printers. But usually having more ink cartridges means smoother gradients and more realistic tones of color. Printers can also be labeled photo by the extra features they have such as PictBridge support. With this you can connect your camera (if it supports it) directly to the printer to output photos. Some of the photo printers have card slots that will allow you to insert your camera's memory card into the printer and print directly from the cards. These often also allow some simple photo editing from the printer. Photo quality printers are much faster today and could be used for all around printing purposes. If you do a lot of document printing or are considering archival inks (discussed next week), you might want a separate regular inkjet printer for your general purpose printing.

For digital scrapbookers, wide format printers mean those that are A3 - that is, they will print 13" x 17" so those 12 x 12 scrapbook albums can be used. There are much wider format printers available, but they are also much more expensive and outside the scope of this article. Wide format printers have been dropping in price, but they are still several times more expensive than standard or A4 printers. Paper for these printers is also more expensive than A4 standard or photo printers. It is nice to be able to print at 12 x 12 or larger, but most digital kits and elements can be resized to 8 x 8 and printed on standard A4 size printers without any problems. You can print a lot of 8 x 8 prints for the difference in cost for a wide format printer!

Wrap Up

As you can see, there are lots of choices. What type and size you get will depend largely on the uses you have planned for your printer. Other factors that will influence your printer choice would include the type of paper and inks you hope to use. We'll take up the topic of inks and papers next week.

Useful Links

Here are some links to a few of the sites we think you might find useful.

Steve's Digicams is more than a camera site. Good articles, reviews, and forums concerning printers are also found here.

CNET has a printer buyer guide you might find useful for deciding what type of printer to get.

Epinions has a large list of printers with price comparisons and user reviews.

We hope this article has answered many of the questions you may have had about printers, inks, and papers. If you have further questions, don't hesitate to contact us! See you next week with another DeeDoo's Digital Do's and Don'ts!

© 2005 Dee Doo's Digital Scrapbooking. All Rights Reserved. Dee Doo's Digital Scrapbooking , your source for unique digital scrapbooking items. This article may be included on your website or in email, provided it is published in its entirety, including this credit and link.

Be sure to read the articles from previous weeks! You can find them listed on the Articles page and in the column on the left.