Hi again: Need advice and recommendations as to what make/model colour printer would be best for print photographic quality images of architectural models (interior/exterior views). I am currently using an older inkjet HP Photosmart and the blacks are “inky” (5 colours plus black). Wanting to print different sizes from tabloid (ledger), letter size, 5x7, 4x6 - depending on requirements from clients.
Do you use photoshop to get better quality photos? What file format do you use?
Wandering if its a waste of money if you buy a colour printer with more than 5 colours and black (example Epson P800). Can you save images in Sketchup to have the 250,000 RGB colour profiles for printing. Perhaps I am missing something on how to save your images in order to get the most colour capabilities. Was saving images as jpegs. Do I need to save as TIFs or another format. I use nxtRender and has only jpeg, png, native nxt image, hdri or exr image formats - high quality, high resolution, 1500 pixel texture size.
Would like to be able to print the best photographs possible for my clients. Your help is very much appreciated. Thank you in advance.
Hi: yes did read the review - thank you. still wandering though if a printer of of 5 plus black colours is a good as one with 9 or more colours; and if SU rgb colour profiles are supported by having more colours with the printer. Barb
Depends on the ratio of your requirements. I Have 95% B&W and 5% color requirements. I print B&W from my office and I go to Staples and use their 10,000 $ color laser printer. Costs me a few bucks per page for an infinitely superior result compared to what I could afford.
Owning a printer is like owning a boat, it’s breaking/clogging/jamming/streaking/sinking from the day you buy it. Even if by some miracle it actually prints, it’s guzzling color ink made from unicorn blood that costs more than liquid gold. As you might guess, l’ve had some bad experiences. Seriously I feel like it’s go big or go home here, unless you can afford to get a pro level office serving laser color it’s not worth it. I actually save money getting everything pro printed vs buying ink these days, and filing something to print digitally from home to the printers Ian pretty easy. You do have to be careful in checking the doc for mistakes because you won’t see it till it’s printed. Honestly I so rarely print these days, almost everyone can take a digital format, and construction docs are large format and need a plotter anyway.
JPEG only supports 256 levels of each red, green, and blue (this is termed 8-bit color depth). This can cause noticeable banding in areas with smooth gradients. Also, JPEG is inherently a lossy compression format. If you set the “quality” metric to its best (highest) setting you probably won’t notice little glitches in areas of sharp detail, but there will be artifacts. Be sure NOT to load a JPEG into an editor, do something to it, and re-save it as a new JPEG file. Each time you do the cycle of load and re-save, more lossy-compresison artifacts are being introduced into the image.
TIFF is a container for image data (possibly stored in multiple individual formats within the container), not so much a specific format of image data. TIFF files can have lossless data with greater color depth (e.g., 16 bits or 32,768 levels per color channel), depending exactly on how the TIFF is created.
Images in 16-bit color depth are the professional standard. Pro photographers have been using it for decades via medium format cameras.
To end up with pro quality prints, you need what’s called an end to end 16-bit pipeline. Your images must be captured in 16 bit (or similar) and stay in 16 bit through to print (in .psd, .tiff, etc).
There are excellent 16-bit color printers on the market from Epson, etc.