Fred Paget on fri 26 dec 97
Russel,
>> i am currently researching the purchase of an injet printer... printing
of exhibition catalogues, promo material etc etc.. <<
>> I am looking at 2 main contenders..cannon bjc 7000 and the epson stylus
800 <<
I have an Apple Color StyleWriter 2400 ( actually a Cannon BJC 4000 with
an Apple nametag and Apple software) and while it is not in the same
quality class as the newer Epsom and other new printers it does a
respectable job on photos if you get the picture properly scanned and
adjusted.
The biggest drawback is the expense since full page photos devour ink
cartriges and the special paper can cost up to one US dollar a sheet. Also
if you leave the machine idle for a few months between usages, the color
ink cartrige tends to dry up and must be replaced for about 45 US dollars.
Add to this the depreciation on the machines and software - both of which
are expensive. Considering the above the use of real photos and
enlargements might be indicated. You can paste them on pages of text and
the quality beats anything that comes out of a printer.
Ink jet pictures are not waterproof. A few drops of water on one will ruin
it. (You can waterproof it with artists spray fixitive - an acryllic
varnish). I was at a week long orchid conference two years ago where all
the name tags were printed on an ink jet and it rained. What a sorry lot of
tags those were on the people who were out in the rain for a few moments.
>- What software are people using to work with their photos and is
>there a way to improve the resolution of a photo?
For serious work nothing beats Adobe Photoshop. This software is very
expensive and gets an expensive upgrade every couple of years. I originally
got mine bundled with a scanner and have gotten the upgrades. You can
sharpen photos with it and apply so called filters - small programs that
run under the wing of the parent program - to do all kind of things to the
image. One filter called Unsharp Mask - after an old photo darkroom
technique - causes an apparent increase in resolution but it is really an
illusion. Nothing you can do really increases the actual resolution except
of course you can do hand retouching on the image in PhotoShop.
> - Does anyone have experience with Kodak's Photo CD or Pro Photo CD?
I use PhotoCDs to archive all my orchid photos . I must have about a dozen
of them. You can get about 110 photos on each CD and the quality is very
good.There are five scans at increasingly higher resolution for each image.
Each photo occupies about 4.5 megabytes on the disk as compressed. After
expansion the top resolution occupies about 18 megabytes on your computer.
You need a lot of memory and hard disk space to work with these images. I
have one PRO PhotoCD that I got because those negatives were larger than
35mm. They can scan larger films onto that format. It allows optional
larger file sizes for one step higher resolution than the regular 35mm
PhotoCDs. As long as they don't quit making the CDrom drives that are
needed to read these images the CDs are a permanent archive. They are also
a good way to get a lot of slides scanned to high resolution.Prices here
run about one to one and a half US dollars per slide for after proscessing
scans.You can have the whole roll scanned in at the time of proscessing for
less but this may give a lot of culls on the disc since you have no
opportunity to exercise quality control by throwing bad pictures away.
Here I am talking about orchids on ClayArt but you see I got into pottery
to make pots for my orchids. I am my own best customer.
Fred Paget---Mill Valley,CA,USA
Never try, never win!
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