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Making this thread just because I got a photo printer recently, have learned a lot from the process and there isn't currently a thread specifically about printing which is kinda weird in a photography forum. I'm going to talk specifically about inkjet printing, but feel free to go hog-wild about any alternative processes or darkroom printing because I'd be super interested in reading about it! I've been taking a lot of photos over the last year or so on film, mostly 4x5 large format these days, and I started to feel like I wanted to see them larger than my screen could display and share them without any lovely website compression. Also some friends of mine wanted to buy prints of some of my pictures, so I thought that it was about time to get myself a dedicated photo printer. Just as a warning right at the start, proper photo printing can be either relatively painless or an enormous hassle depending on how you approach it, but either way if you're looking for something worthy of being sold or framed it's pretty expensive!
All of the above said, it is nice to have a physical image that you can give to people, sell or mount and hang on your wall. So if all of the above doesn't daunt you then here's the direction I went down, and what to avoid doing. I bought an Epson P400, which is a 13" wide pigment-ink printer, pretty much on the cheaper and smaller end of what you'd call a printer good enough for 'fine art' photo printing. It can handle good thick paper (media), has a set of 8 inks for a reasonable colour gamut (at least for colour photos), can take rolls of paper (if you can find any so small) and was fairly cheap. I started running the printer on the OEM cartridges it ships with and using Ilford gold fibre silk paper, which is semi-glossy baryta paper with a very light texture, nice and thick, cotton base and OBA free. Using that setup my results were pretty much perfect out of the box, although before I calibrated my monitor I noticed my prints were coming out darker and slightly warmer than what was displayed on my screen. I almost immediately decided that I wanted to use 3rd party inks as soon as the OEM cartridges that came with the printer ran low, I was aware that 3rd party inks were generally not rated to last as long before fading (e.g. 80 years rather than 200 years for the OEM ink) but I was ok with that given the relative 'value' of my photos and the hopes of saving up to about 80% on my ink costs. I went with a CISS (continuous ink supply system) from Marrutt, basically some large stationary ink tanks connected to the printer via some long silicone tubes. The idea being that you never need to change cartridges on the machine and just occasionally refill the large tanks as you print, sounds really easy right?? Well unfortunately that led me into a world of hurt, NEVER believe what the companies say about these systems, they're generally generic Chinese tank designs that have been around for decades hooked up to some dummy cartridges and are absolutely not specifically designed for your model of printer. I installed the system no problems and everything fit well and looked like it should work, however try as I might I just couldn't get the system to supply an adequate flow of ink to all of the nozzles during printing. Long story short I spent several weeks, a few hundred sheets of paper and maybe 20 of my 60mL of ink per colour working with the people who sold the system to me and eventually gave up, it simply did not work. To put it simply this printer was never designed to suck ink along long thin tubes from storage tanks at some arbitrary height, and the storage tanks were not designed for my particular printer, so it was never going to work. What I was able to do was remove the bulk ink supply system and just run 'normal' cartridges with the 3rd party ink, this instantly worked perfectly, because that was how the printer was designed to run in the first place and I would strongly encourage anybody thinking about a CISS to forget it and just run normal cartridges. BUT that wasn't the end of my problems. Again, the supplier of the ink claimed a negligible difference in colour between their ink and the OEM, but that was bullshit. When I used the colour profiles supplied by the paper manufacturer for OEM ink with the 3rd party ink my prints had a disgusting dark cyan cast and were completely unusable. The ink supplier will generate you a custom profile to solve this for free, but you have to print off a calibration page on each and every kind of paper you want to print on and mail it to them for scanning (which is quite hard in a global lockdown). So I had to buy a spectrophotometer so that I could generate my own colour profiles for the 3rd party ink and whatever paper I want to use. I got a 2nd hand model but they're still not cheap, AND you need to print two A4 sized calibration pages on every type of paper you want to use, which again costs money in paper and ink. Ultimately I'm now at the point where I'm very happy with the results I'm getting with the 3rd party ink, but it was definitely a nightmare getting to this point. My suggestion is definitely to stick with OEM ink unless you're a masochist or you're going to be printing a shitload of something onto one type of paper. So, who else has a printer or has printed their photos off!
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Apr 3, 2020 05:42
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| # ¿ May 17, 2024 01:21 |
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Helen Highwater posted:I have a lovely photo printer (Canon Pixma E3170) which is definitely not a high-end printer at all, but as I mostly just wanted it for printing monochrome transparencies with the occasional A4 colour print on glossy paper to give to friends, it's fine for that. Yeah I've had some prints done by print shops too, definitely the best option I think if you're not printing a lot and don't want to spend a bunch of time and money fiddling around with things. Also that cyanotype tutorial is awesome thanks! I really would love to do some sort of alternative process print, like I was thinking at some point I could print a large negative using my inkjet and some transparency film for doing a contact print like platinum-palladium. But on the other hand I've generally hated or been disappointed with all of the B&W shots I've taken and much prefer colour film, so it would probably be pointless unless I took a shot that I really loved in B&W...
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Apr 4, 2020 00:03
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Here are two photos I've printed recently, the photos I've taken of them are kinda lovely but you get the idea. I've mounted both on 5mm thick self-adhesive foam board so I could prop them up around the house, they were just test prints so I didn't give them any kind of border or matt even so mounting them on the foamboard makes them much nicer to look at . 
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Apr 5, 2020 02:31
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BetterLekNextTime posted:Those are cool. I think that 3:1 is a somewhat standard pano ratio? The only specific product I've seen for printing panoramas is this paper: https://www.fotospeed.com/Fotospeed-Panoramic-Paper/products/1145/ Not sure about mats though, I bought myself a 45 degree mat cutter and have used that to make my own of whatever size I want, it's a ton of work and tricky to get looking perfect though. I still haven't tried framing anything of mine yet but I'm 90% of the way there. refleks posted:So I'll start off with beginner questions: You probably don't need any kind of calibrator if you use the OEM inks for the printer and get colour profiles from whatever paper manufacturer you use, the calibrator is really only essential if you want to use 3rd party inks IMO, I was doing well enough without one before I swapped ink. I don't have any experience with them but the Canon Pro-100 can apparently be had for absurdly low prices, especially during sales and cashbacks. It's a dye ink printer rather than pigment ink, dye inks can give a better range and more vibrant colour but they're not as fade-resistant as pigment inks.
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Apr 6, 2020 20:45
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refleks posted:I'm in Yurop (Denmark) which means everything is about 60x more expensive, so 100 dollar Pro-100 are not really here yet I visited Denmark about two years ago, you have no idea how expensive a coffee is there when converted into New Zealand dollars... I feel your pain about pricing though, everything costs more down here than the USA too. It really depends what you want to do with the prints I guess? A4 is pretty small for a print unless it's a snapshot. I'm using a large format film camera so I'd feel like I was wasting my time unless i was printing at least A3, might as well save myself the time and money and stick to 35mm (or my phone camera).
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Apr 7, 2020 11:20
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Redriver seems to think that the XP-15000 is approximately equivalent to the Pro-100: https://www.redrivercatalog.com/infocenter/13iwijpg-epson-xp-15000.html Seems like it could be fine for your purposes, although I did see something about its colour management being limited to ICC profiles for Epson brand papers only, which if true doesn't mean you can't use other brands of paper, just that you might get slight colour and density shifts which you'd have to manually correct for. Also it doesn't seem capable of taking media above ~285 gsm, which again is only really an issue if you want to print heavy fine art paper, which may not be a limitation to you in your case.
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Apr 7, 2020 20:23
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The Ilford paper I've been using up until now is 310 GSM and it doesn't feel crazy-thick. I also have a 13" wide roll of some cheaper paper which is 265 GSM. Both are fine but the thicker paper has a more 'quality's feel to it I think.
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Apr 10, 2020 20:17
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refleks posted:Had some time to print up some stuff - both my own and some other things I found online to test it. drat that sucks :S The Epson drivers and utilities are janky and look like they were made for windows 95 but at least they didn't break my computer.
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May 5, 2020 20:07
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Another thing that I'm noticing with the 3rd party ink I'm using vs. OEM is some 'bronzing' in dark areas of my prints. Bronzing in the case of printing refers to some areas of the print (typically darker areas with lots of ink coverage) reflecting a somewhat colourful (typically red or bronze) light instead of white when viewed at very shallow angles under specific lighting conditions. It's not an enormous problem because you'd never actually look at a framed print from an extremely strange angle specifically at a reflection unless you knew what you were looking for, but it's something the OEM inks didn't show at all. I'm working with the ink supplier to try to figure it out because the test print they sent me using the same ink and paper doesn't show as much bronzing as what I see, then again it was printed on a different printer so who knows. Still a pain though because I'm a perfectionist and once I see something I'm never going to be able to ignore it. EDIT: Bronzing is way less of/not a problem when using matt papers because there's less/no reflection to appear oddly coloured, so one thing I could do is print on matt paper instead of lustre, I just don't currently have any to try out.
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May 8, 2020 07:13
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Just got a box of A4 Hahnemühle ultra-smooth photo rag today, first time printing on matte paper. So far I’ve only printed a calibration page for making a profile but drat it’s insanely matte, just no change to the colour or brightness from any viewing angle. There’s also basically no texture to it so it seems to hold fine detail really well. Good lord it was expensive though...
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Jun 13, 2020 10:53
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You'll have to excuse the lovely camera phone photo but I love this new paper, hard to see why you would use a glossy paper when you can get just as much detail and colour out of a matte paper that doesn't suffer from any glare at any viewing angle.
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Jun 14, 2020 09:07
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Hey just checking in on this thread after 2 years, because I've been way too busy to even take a photo let alone print one for a long time... I dusted off my Epson P400 today after not printing anything on it for at least 6 months (if not a year) and I swapped from the Marrutt ink I was using before to some from a US company called Precision Colour. Even getting a hold of the Precision Colour ink was a pain as the guy doesn't ship internationally and the freight forwarding company I used insisted on sending it sea freight which took months. First, I'm kinda surprised that the print head wasn't clogged that badly, two cleaning cycles and it was pretty much good as new again (although I'm battling some ink splotches on the edges of the paper). Second, the precision colour ink is WAY better than the Marrutt stuff, at least in terms of being closer to OEM ink. The Marrutt stuff was way off, requiring a custom print profile, and dark colours on glossy paper showed really bad bronzing. The PC ink so far seems to show none of these issues (although I'm still going to make a custom profile for it). Definitely worth it if you're looking at using 3rd part ink in an Epson printer (although generally speaking not even having a printer is a better idea).
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Sep 26, 2022 00:21
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Forgive the terrible camera phone quality, but I recently resurrected my printer after probably more than a year of not using it at all. The strange thing is I had zero issues with the printer after all this time, the issue I've been having turns out to be more due to the age of my paper. For my semi-gloss paper I use Ilford gold fibre silk, and the boxes of paper I've had for a few years now have all curled over time and in the humid air here, resulting in the print head striking the edges of the paper during printing. If you look at the bottom right edge of that page you can see streaks of ink from where the head was hitting the edge of the page, and this is after I already tried my best to un-curl the edges of this sheet. Luckily in this case I'm going to frame this with a matt and the ink blotches didn't get onto the actual image, but I've had a few prints where the head dropped a big blob of ink in a super obvious part of the image. So yeah if you're getting ink streaking or blobs, especially on the edges of the paper, it could be because your paper isn't flat enough.
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Jul 5, 2023 05:54
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BetterLekNextTime posted:Some printers have an option to raise the print head a bit so you might see if that will help. Yeah I looked into that, I have an Epson P400 which is their bottom-tier dedicated photo printer and it seems to be missing a lot of that fine-adjustment stuff. From what I've found there's no direct way of setting head height, the only thing I've read might effect it is which of the generic paper types you chose in the print options window, but there's no information telling you exactly what each paper type actually does. Like clearly if you choose a matt paper the printer won't use the 'gloss optimiser' ink because it's not glossy paper, but there's half a dozen glossy/matt paper types with no explanation of the differences between them, so you just have to pick the one you think is closest.
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Jul 5, 2023 20:50
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Phone camera is dogshit, looks a lot better in person. Makes me wish I had some good gallery style lighting because the natural light in this spot doesn't do it much justice, but eh nobody but me is going to look at it anyway :P 
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Jul 13, 2023 05:52
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MyronMulch posted:Real nice! Have you considered doing a slight vignetting? I don't remember if I did or not, but when I do vignettes I typically try to make it so that they're subtle enough to not be noticeable anyway, so I might have. Looking at it in person I wonder if I could have gone for a darker mat board, it's very bright compared to the print, but I guess on the other hand I wouldn't want the mat board to visually blend into the print ether...
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Jul 13, 2023 21:20
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| # ¿ May 17, 2024 01:21 |
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Doing more -just print- ing
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Mar 2, 2024 04:13
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