dmr
Registered Abuser
... things please. 🙂
Let me try to make this concise and ask a few questions, but it's a bit confusing ...
To make a long story long ... 🙂
Here at home I've got a HP 720C printer. It's several years old, and a hand-me-down from my ex. I would guess it dates from 1999 or so. I've always considered it a "near photo quality" printer. It's ok for maybe some test prints, but it's never really done what I call true photo quality. "Rough" and "dirty" is the way I describe it.
At work we have a newer HP model {mumble, forget what} but it has the 6 color inks (mine at home is just CMYK) and it makes beautiful prints. When I want a good about-8x10 I use this and it's almost as good as a wet optical print from a non-custom mass-production lab.
Saturday night I was chatting on "another network" and I was talking to this guy about printers and such. He was saying that mine, the 720C was actually a very good printer, and that it should do much better. He dcc'd (sent) me a file, a test print that they use for QA-ing the Fuji Frontier printers (the ones they use at Wally World and lots of other places) and told me to print it out. I was expecting a rough print with blotchy solids and dithered lines, but what I got was the most awesome print, clean and clear, very detailed, with four test photos, grayscale, RGBCMY blocks and I was just astonished, still am, that this printer did that! This is a plain old .JPG file, 300dpi.
Anyway, when I have my photos processed, they are done two ways, depending on how serious I think it is, where I am, and the phase of the moon. 🙂 The good stuff I'll take to a smaller independent photo shop, one of the last remaining real photo shops in the area. They charge about $9 for DO-CD, next day service, and each shot comes out to about 3 megabytes in size. When I print these on the new HP at work, they are usually spectacular. When I do them at home they are so-so. I have no clue as to what kind of scanner they use.
The stuff I'm not so serious about I take over to Wally World. I finally "trained" them to do DO-CD but every so often somebody says they don't do that until I explain that I have it done there all the time. 🙂 This is one-hour service, each photo comes out to right around one megabyte. When I print them at work, they are anywhere from so-so to spectacular, but when I print them at home, they are anywhere from mediocre to downright nasty. They do these on a Fuji mini lab system and charge about $5.
So anyway, having proof in my hand that the printer could do spectacular work, I started playing around. I do know enough to be dangerous about resolution and such. I found out that if I print either the Wally World or indy lab scans right at 300dpi, they do come out great. Very detailed, no crud. If I change this to 150, as I'll need to in order to make them come out about 8x10, there's a very noticable loss in quality. However, this is what I do at work. If I want an about-8x10 I'll scale without resampling to 150dpi and then scale to size.
I looked at the Wally World and indy CDs. Wally World images are scanned at 1678x1109 pixels and the indy lab ones are at 1818x1228, not that mich difference I can see. Both of them I have to scale to 150dpi to make an about-8x10 print, but the indy lab ones come consistently clearer. Also, the difference is night and day between what my printer does with these 150dpi files and what the one at work does.
Sorry for the long diatribe, here are my questions:
1. If the pixel count is not that much more from the indie lab, why are the files so much bigger, and the prints better?
2. Anybody know why the HP 720C does such a vile job on the 150dpi files while the newer HP does so much better?
3. What resolution should a good 35mm scan of a negative be? I keep hearing 2400 and 2700 being said, but the way I figure it, both of these are about half that.
Any ideas or comments, gang?
Thanks in advance. 🙂
Let me try to make this concise and ask a few questions, but it's a bit confusing ...
To make a long story long ... 🙂
Here at home I've got a HP 720C printer. It's several years old, and a hand-me-down from my ex. I would guess it dates from 1999 or so. I've always considered it a "near photo quality" printer. It's ok for maybe some test prints, but it's never really done what I call true photo quality. "Rough" and "dirty" is the way I describe it.
At work we have a newer HP model {mumble, forget what} but it has the 6 color inks (mine at home is just CMYK) and it makes beautiful prints. When I want a good about-8x10 I use this and it's almost as good as a wet optical print from a non-custom mass-production lab.
Saturday night I was chatting on "another network" and I was talking to this guy about printers and such. He was saying that mine, the 720C was actually a very good printer, and that it should do much better. He dcc'd (sent) me a file, a test print that they use for QA-ing the Fuji Frontier printers (the ones they use at Wally World and lots of other places) and told me to print it out. I was expecting a rough print with blotchy solids and dithered lines, but what I got was the most awesome print, clean and clear, very detailed, with four test photos, grayscale, RGBCMY blocks and I was just astonished, still am, that this printer did that! This is a plain old .JPG file, 300dpi.
Anyway, when I have my photos processed, they are done two ways, depending on how serious I think it is, where I am, and the phase of the moon. 🙂 The good stuff I'll take to a smaller independent photo shop, one of the last remaining real photo shops in the area. They charge about $9 for DO-CD, next day service, and each shot comes out to about 3 megabytes in size. When I print these on the new HP at work, they are usually spectacular. When I do them at home they are so-so. I have no clue as to what kind of scanner they use.
The stuff I'm not so serious about I take over to Wally World. I finally "trained" them to do DO-CD but every so often somebody says they don't do that until I explain that I have it done there all the time. 🙂 This is one-hour service, each photo comes out to right around one megabyte. When I print them at work, they are anywhere from so-so to spectacular, but when I print them at home, they are anywhere from mediocre to downright nasty. They do these on a Fuji mini lab system and charge about $5.
So anyway, having proof in my hand that the printer could do spectacular work, I started playing around. I do know enough to be dangerous about resolution and such. I found out that if I print either the Wally World or indy lab scans right at 300dpi, they do come out great. Very detailed, no crud. If I change this to 150, as I'll need to in order to make them come out about 8x10, there's a very noticable loss in quality. However, this is what I do at work. If I want an about-8x10 I'll scale without resampling to 150dpi and then scale to size.
I looked at the Wally World and indy CDs. Wally World images are scanned at 1678x1109 pixels and the indy lab ones are at 1818x1228, not that mich difference I can see. Both of them I have to scale to 150dpi to make an about-8x10 print, but the indy lab ones come consistently clearer. Also, the difference is night and day between what my printer does with these 150dpi files and what the one at work does.
Sorry for the long diatribe, here are my questions:
1. If the pixel count is not that much more from the indie lab, why are the files so much bigger, and the prints better?
2. Anybody know why the HP 720C does such a vile job on the 150dpi files while the newer HP does so much better?
3. What resolution should a good 35mm scan of a negative be? I keep hearing 2400 and 2700 being said, but the way I figure it, both of these are about half that.
Any ideas or comments, gang?
Thanks in advance. 🙂
