A study of colour - Part 3: Printing colours

I made a print of this and sold it to the owner.  I used a pigment-based multi-cartridge printer.

If you have a photo you want to print, there are numerous options.  You can send it out to be printed or print it at home.  There is the traditional photo print with light-sensitive paper, using a colour laser printer, ink/bubble jet, or the dye-sublimation printer.  Each of these has its own advantages and disadvantages, including cost, quality, colour gamut, and convenience.

Light-sensitive print:  With few people doing their own darkroom work, traditional photo printing is now done throughout labs.  You print digital images through web-based photo services such as Nations Photo Lab, or you can take your images directly to a store that allows you to upload to a print service, usually in the building, like London Drugs.  The colour gamut tends to be less than what you can get out of a good home printer.  The advantage is that you don't need any equipment at home other than a way to upload images online or to a memory stick.  Printing online may be the cheapest option, especially if you don't have to invest in a good colour printer.  

Colour laser print:  I have owned a few colour laser printers over the years.  The quality is excellent for non-photo jobs, but is somewhat lacking for photo prints.  Finding the right paper for laser prints is also difficul,t as there are many papers out there with wide results.  My research indicates that HP's business paper is perhaps the best, although results on searches vary.  Laser printing is expensive in that colour laser printers are pricey as is cartridge replacement.  Most people don't have a colour laser.  The gamut of colour laser prints is relatively small.

Inkjet/bubblejet print:  The range of quality and longevity varies widely with prints made with these kinds of printers, but good photo printers produce some of the best prints in the business.  The key is to use photo-quality printers that have multiple ink/pigment tanks.  The very minimum is a CMYK-based ink set that provides 3 coloured inks (cyan, magenta, yellow) and one black (K).  The colour gamut of these prints is very low and can be used for school projects or office work, but not for photographs.  Photos are best done on photo-quality printers that have 6 inks or more (CMYK + light magenta and light cyan).  The very best prints are done on pigment-based printers that use 11 or so cartridges having a wide range of colours.  All photo prints made on these benefit from using high-quality paper.  I use professional luster photo paper in my pigment printers and high-quality glossy paper in my ink-based machines.  Pigments differ from inks in that they are longer lasting (200 year archival), more water resistant, and produce good gamuts.  They are also more expensive than ink-based printers and typically print slower.  

Dye sublimation print:  Dye subs are interesting devices.  Each print is made by having three different coloured panels pass over it, the amount of sublimation (heat causing solid pigments to sublimate into a gaseous state and resublimate onto the print media) is related to the density of colour for each of the three layers.  The print that is formed results from the three colours working together; black is the value of all three at its maximum density, and white is the absence of any colour at all.  The print colour tends to be excellent with a gamut surpassing most other print types.  Colour is also continuous and not an artificial series of dots the way that inkjet prints are made.  The great issue with dye sublimation prints is that they are very expensive and few places have the devices, let alone the ability to print anything very large.

I print my own stuff using an Epson P800 pigment printer but will sometimes use an Epson XP-8800 printer to do smaller jobs.  I also have an Xerox colour laser printer that can produce a decent image in a pinch, as long as you don't look too close.

Thanks for reading.

Eric Svendsen     www.ericspix.com

A good read on photo printer gamuts:  https://www.rtings.com/printer/tests/photo/color-gamut