Printer/paper suggestions to print A4 good quality university work

Turtles · 12 Oct 2010 at 15:49

Hey!

I'm new to photography, 1st year of a film & photography course and decided I'll invest in a decent printer for printing my university work but also general printing of essays, etc. Scanning & copying would also be useful but not essential. A4 will be the size of my printing most of the time I imagine.

Budget....maybe £100? Not really sure on the value of these kind of printers but being a student best value for money definitely has to be considered!

Now onto paper. Don't know the advantages/disadvantages of those available but glossy looks pretty cool from what I've seen. Tried printing up some photos of a graffiti wall onto matte paper and it made the image seem a lot duller.

But yeah, any advice much appreciated

Messiah Khan · 12 Oct 2010 at 16:53

I am not going to recommend a printer, as the ones I work with and would recommend will severely stretch your budget (But personally I would suggest a second hand Epson 3800 or 7800. Very big and expensive but both produce great results and can be used for exhibition sized prints).

However in terms of paper it depends on what look you are trying to achieve. You could pick up paper swatches from the larger manufacturers (Ilford, Hahnemuhle, Permajet, Photospeed, Fuji etc) so you can have a look and feel at the range they provide. The papers I recommend for use in our photographic department are Ilford smooth pearl, which is a nice pearl type paper (A coated paper somewhere in between gloss and matte). Epson archival matte which is a cheapish but not too shabby matte paper. And for the fine art prints; Hahnemuhle Fine Art Photo Rag. A very nice and tactile paper but also very expensive.

More important that your choice of printer and paper though is to make sure that you understand the fundamentals of colour management. Make sure you calibrate your monitor and produce a paper profile to match your printer/ink/paper combination. If you don't then all your time and equipment will be wasted as prints are unlikely to match your monitor.

Also as you have found out, matte papers are often difficult to provide dense blacks on. Gloss or Lustre/Pearl papers are much easier to achieve good contrast and dense blacks. The only black I have been really pleased with on a matte paper was using dye inks on Hahnemuhle Fine Art Photo Rag. The pigment ink looked ok, until I compared it side by side. The pigment then just looked grey and the dye looked velvety black. Really beautiful print. The downside to dye inks is they tend to break down in less time than pigment inks, so aren't suitable for archival prints. Having said that, 'archival dye' prints are appearing on the market, so it remains to be seen if they live up to their claim.

Anyway, if you have any specific questions please ask as this is what I do for a job.

john_s · 13 Oct 2010 at 10:03

Some of the Canon Pixma printers turn out superb photo prints (and I don't just mean the 9000 / 9500 pro models).

As MK mentioned above... I really like the results Ilford's smooth pearl paper gives.

MK > A quick question about large format printers, if you don't mind. You mentioned second hand Epson 7800... how does the 7600 compare? I've seen those up for sale a few times.

Messiah Khan · 13 Oct 2010 at 10:36

john_s said:
Some of the Canon Pixma printers turn out superb photo prints (and I don't just mean the 9000 / 9500 pro models).

As MK mentioned above... I really like the results Ilford's smooth pearl paper gives.

MK > A quick question about large format printers, if you don't mind. You mentioned second hand Epson 7800... how does the 7600 compare? I've seen those up for sale a few times.

Yeah, the Pixma printers can be pretty decent, although I found the drivers very flakey (although this was about 3 years ago).

Yeah, the 7600 is again a good printer (I run a 7600, 9600, 7800 & 9800). the main problem with the 7600 though is that it doesn't take K3 inks that the newer printers do. The older inks tend to suffer more from metamerism (Colour shifting under different colour temperature lights) and bronzing (Gloss differential between paper and ink) than the newer inks.

Having said that, the bronzing can be overcome by running through a decent RIP (I use imageprint) that actually lays a tiny amount of ink down on white areas of the paper, so the gloss is more closely matched. And the metamerism may not be a huge issue depending on your viewing conditions.

You can still get some great prints out of a 7600, and the 220ml cartridges it take last forever! It may seem like a lot of money for a 24" printer, paper, ink and RIP, but if you use it a lot then the actual unit cost of a print works out very cheap. Also the convenience of being able to print your own exhibition grade prints is great.

Ps, here is some data from a spreadsheet I made, working out the cost of prints on different paper;

Make Model GSM Width Length Price (inc vat) Price per Gram Price per Metre Roll Area (m2) Ink cost per roll Total cost per roll Total cost per Metre
Fujifilm Pearl Photo Paper 290 gsm 44'' 30m £243.00 £0.03 £8.10 33.53 £99.36 £342.36 £11.41
Fujifilm Pearl Photo Paper 290 gsm 24'' 30m £132.58 £0.02 £4.42 18.29 £54.20 £186.78 £6.23
Hahnemuhle Photo Rag 308 gsm 24'' 12m £133.71 £0.04 £11.14 7.32 £21.68 £155.39 £12.95
Hahnemuhle Photo Rag 308 gsm 44'' 12m £246.55 £0.07 £20.55 13.41 £39.74 £286.29 £23.86

Sorry about the jumble of numbers, but as you can see it works out at about £6.23 per metre on a 24" roll of Fujifilm Pearl Photo Paper, which is what I use the most. Which I don't think is too bad really.

TheBigCheese · 13 Oct 2010 at 21:24

Really interesting thread for me as I have an Epson 9900 and have been blown away with it. I can certainly recommend the Epson range, I upgraded from a Stylus Pro 4800 which was good in itself, the first of the range to use the K3 inkset.

But be aware that you need to keep printing fairly consistantly, every few days otherwise the nozels clog and you spend a fortune cleaning the little swines. The only other problem with them is swapping between printing with gloss or matt black ink. If you are printing onto matt paper you will need to swap over to the matt ink and because they use the same part of the print head it involves a lot of head cleaning to flush out the photo black...you literally flush money away doing that.

So much so that when the printers were popular pros would have two of the printers, one setup with photo black and one setup with matt black ink.

Having said that, they are problems that can be worked around and you shouldn't be put off looking at them, they are fantastic pieces of kit!

Thankfully with the new printers (7900/9900) those problems have been pretty much fixed, the head doesn't clog hardly at all and it just uses a couple of ml when changing blacks which you can spare with 700ml cartridges! :eek:

Messiah I'd be really interested in your opinion on optical brighteners, I've used Hahnemuhle papers with OBAs in them and have worried a bit about them in the long term...how have you found them to be?

Messiah Khan · 14 Oct 2010 at 12:32

TheBigCheese said:
Really interesting thread for me as I have an Epson 9900 and have been blown away with it. I can certainly recommend the Epson range, I upgraded from a Stylus Pro 4800 which was good in itself, the first of the range to use the K3 inkset.

But be aware that you need to keep printing fairly consistantly, every few days otherwise the nozels clog and you spend a fortune cleaning the little swines. The only other problem with them is swapping between printing with gloss or matt black ink. If you are printing onto matt paper you will need to swap over to the matt ink and because they use the same part of the print head it involves a lot of head cleaning to flush out the photo black...you literally flush money away doing that.

So much so that when the printers were popular pros would have two of the printers, one setup with photo black and one setup with matt black ink.

Having said that, they are problems that can be worked around and you shouldn't be put off looking at them, they are fantastic pieces of kit!

Thankfully with the new printers (7900/9900) those problems have been pretty much fixed, the head doesn't clog hardly at all and it just uses a couple of ml when changing blacks which you can spare with 700ml cartridges!

Messiah I'd be really interested in your opinion on optical brighteners, I've used Hahnemuhle papers with OBAs in them and have worried a bit about them in the long term...how have you found them to be?

Very jealous of your 9900. That must have set you back a fair mint. What paper you run through it? Do you run it through a RIP?

As for papers using OBAs, I must admit I haven't done too much research into them. There are however a few issues arising from the use of OABs in that they artificially shift the colour of the paper. So if you create a paper profile, there is unlikely to be as much UV light emitted from the Photo spectrometer as you would get from say daylight. This in turn will results in profile being generated that differs from what you see when you view the finished print.

Another issue is that exhibition/archival grade framing glass contains UV cutting layers. So a print behind the glass will look warmer (or less bright/blue) due to OABs not being activated than you would have with a glassless print or on your proofing monitor.

A final issue that I am aware of is that some OABs (Although I am sure they are getting better all the time) arn't 100% stable, so may break down over the years. This will result in older prints becoming yellowed due to the reduction of blue reflectance. Not something you would want for an archival print.

On the flip side, a lot of traditional papers that Ansel Adams used contained OABs. So if it is good enough for him it is good enough for the rest of us?

ps. Good article here btw; http://www.aardenburg-imaging.com/news.18.html

bigredshark · 14 Oct 2010 at 13:13

To be honest I don't feel anything at that price is going to produce acceptable results for a photography course. Buy a £30 inkjet for documents and treat it as replaceable, get photos printed by a decent lab (or even online). I also doubt A4 will cut it for too long for a photography course, so you'll end up doing this anyway for some things...

TheBigCheese · 14 Oct 2010 at 17:13

Messiah Khan said:
Very jealous of your 9900. That must have set you back a fair mint. What paper you run through it? Do you run it through a RIP?

As for papers using OBAs, I must admit I haven't done too much research into them. There are however a few issues arising from the use of OABs in that they artificially shift the colour of the paper. So if you create a paper profile, there is unlikely to be as much UV light emitted from the Photo spectrometer as you would get from say daylight. This in turn will results in profile being generated that differs from what you see when you view the finished print.

Another issue is that exhibition/archival grade framing glass contains UV cutting layers. So a print behind the glass will look warmer (or less bright/blue) due to OABs not being activated than you would have with a glassless print or on your proofing monitor.

A final issue that I am aware of is that some OABs (Although I am sure they are getting better all the time) arn't 100% stable, so may break down over the years. This will result in older prints becoming yellowed due to the reduction of blue reflectance. Not something you would want for an archival print.

On the flip side, a lot of traditional papers that Ansel Adams used contained OABs. So if it is good enough for him it is good enough for the rest of us?

ps. Good article here btw; http://www.aardenburg-imaging.com/news.18.html

It did indeed cost a few bob, but I was very lucky with it. I bought it when it was shown off at Focus for the first time and there were some offers going on it for the show, coupled with the fact that I bought it before all the crazy price rises came into effect...looking at the prices now it was a veritable bargain!

I use Epson 44" rolls for my everyday work and Hahnemuhle for all the fine art work...I used sugar cane the other day for the first time to reproduce a copy of a coloured pencil artwork...the results were amazing printed onto a 16x24" cut sheet it almost looked the same texture as the original.

I looked into using a RIP and decided against it in the end partly due to not being able to see many benefits for my work and partly on price, I think prices started at £800 + VAT.

I asked about it where I got the printer from and they offered one from Fuji (and another company I can't remember who though), but for my specialist more sporadic needs it didn't seem to warrant it.

I set up everything in Photoshop, check that the colour profiles are correct and away it all goes...works like a charm mostly...having said that I've had a couple of issues lately, I think I need to reprofile everything, some of the fine art stuff isn't printing the same as it is on screen.

I profile all my Epson papers but for the Hahnemuhle after experimenting I've found the downloadable profiles are great, I can't tell a difference between them and my own.

Thanks for the link, that looks like a superb article!

lol, I didn't know Ansel Adams papers contained OABs...I guess we should all use them then!

It is difficult though...I want to be able to say that we use the best papers available but when the best papers use OABs it's difficult to marry the two together...

Answering the OP...

I think that finding a lab you like might be the best option for you...

You don't just buy the printer and away you go, you have to get the papers, spend a fortune on ink and buy a profiler to make sure that what you see on screen has the same colours as what is printed, otherwise you have to print it two or three times to get it right and the costs soar.

You do get an absolute thrill from printing your own work – from pressing the shutter, to processing and printing it all yourself is a great feeling but being a student I'm sure budget is a concern.