Printing

Home - Small Office Ink-jet:
There are many makes and types of printer, but the most common are inkjets.
Many of the manufacturers produce 2 ranges of printer, those designed for general purpose use and others specifically for photographic prints. In the Epson range, the photo printers are called photostylus. Photo printers generally have high resolution and often have additional ink cartridges. All colour ink-jets have at least three colour inks, cyan, magenta and yellow, most also have black. By combining these colours any colour can be mixed and printed.
Photo stylus printers often have additional inks, usually light magenta and light cyan, some have grey ink. This enables a greater range of tones to be printed.
Advantages:
Relatively cheap to buy.
Enables prints to be made from your own computer.
A wide range of different papers and surfaces are available.
When used with good quality paper, prints are photographic quality.

Disadvantages:
High cost of ink.
Images from some inkjet printers are not as light-fast as a photographic print.
Digital Photographic Printing:
The alternative to printing you own images is to write them to disk, and have them printed photographically. In the past 10 years digital photo labs have been replacing traditional processing equipment. A 'digi-lab' scans negatives and sends a file to the printer which exposes it on to photographic paper which is processed in traditional chemistry. The result is a photograph. Because they print from file these labs can also take an image from disk and print it.
The files on disk can be pictures, but can also be graphic designs and composite images.
Increasingly light sensitive paper and chemical printers are being replaced by inkjet printers in print labs.

Advantages:
High quality, durable prints.
Reasonable cost per print.

Disadvantages:
You need to take images to a lab.
Wide Format ink-jet:
Really just large versions of the best photostylus inkjets. Prints on these printers can be up to 6 feet wide and as long as you like.
Most of these printers use pigment based ink which offers a far greater resistance to fading.
Files to be printed need to be quite large, but the printers work using rip software. which can resize the image up to 4 times the area without loss of quality.