Printing and Dispersing

Just about everyone who has a computer also owns a printer. Desktop color printers have improved by leaps and bounds in the past couple of years. You can buy a high-quality color printer for the price of a couple nights out on the town. Epson and Hewlett-Packard have low-end printers that sell for the ridiculously low price of about $50. Both reputable manufacturers also have other printer models offering various features that cost anywhere from $100 to $1,000. My own Epson 1280 offers six color, photo-quality, border-free printing on up to 13 x 44 inch paper. And I forked over only $450 to buy it.

If you want to go one notch above a color inkjet printer, try the new personal dye-sublimation printers that are coming on the scene. A dye-sub printer creates images that look just like photographs — no little dots like you see in newspaper photos, just smooth-tone colors. For around $500, Olympus offers a continuous tone dye-sub printer that spits out a full-color print in 90 seconds.

Invest in some nice, glossy paper. It costs anywhere from 20 cents to $2 per sheet. Many printer manufacturers make their own paper, which is specially formulated to work well with their particular printer. Olympus offers a fantastic paper called Pictorico that sports a proprietary ceramic coating. Pictorico paper is smudge free, water resistant, and works with just about any inkjet printer. If you can’t find Pictorico paper, any generic glossy paper works fine.

Tip

When printing on glossy paper, make sure that you print your image at the highest resolution your printer offers. You may want to take a look at the manual that came with your printer for settings.