Loading...Having spent a great deal of time and effort working on something, you want it to look as good as it possibly can when you press the print button and collect it from the print tray. After all, you’re not going to spend hours working on an essay only to have no interest whatsoever in the presentation, and in this instance you can actually lose marks for poor presentation.
When you work in a professional industry such as publishing, it’s essential that your printing is of the highest quality and that relates to everything from the type of printer you use to the materials such as the ink you put into the printer itself, right through to the kind of paper you’re printing on.
When printing pictures, you want to see them as clearly as possible and in the best quality, giving them a professional look and feel whether you’re using them as part of a portfolio, a magazine feature or just sticking them to the wall of your student flat at University.
Pictures tell a thousand words and they can be let down when you print them using a typical inkjet printer onto traditional printer paper. If you’re printing out images, make sure that you get a high quality printer, the picture is taken using a digital camera and that you use top quality ink to ensure that your image is shown in good contrast and focus.
Your printer is also key to the quality of your printing. A lot of the more modern printers will say that they’re photo quality – meaning they’re up to the challenge of producing top quality, professional standard print outs – while others couldn’t be further from this level. Quite often, the quality of the printer is explained by the number of ink cartridges it requires.
A simple rule of thumb is that the more cartridges, the higher the quality as it uses a combination of colour, black, gloss and even Nano ink in some cases to produce the kind of pictures you would pay top money for in a shop.
It’s a myth that the best printers on the market are only available to professionals. Sure, they might cost more than a traditional inkjet, but you can get industry standard printers for the home that don’t take up too much space and help you to present your work at the best possible level, something your clients, tutors or colleagues would really appreciate it.