What You Should Understand About A Photo Printer

Photographs are meant to be enjoyed, this is the simple truth of any image capturing. Be it the portraits of old that were hand painted for days, or the polaroids, or today’s cell phone selfies, image capturing is about celebrating a moment of beauty.

As such, beauty should not be trapped in the metal and plastic box that is your phone or camera, it should be printed and hang on a wall to enchant all who walk by it. Walmart brings you the technology to make it happen.

To move your images from the digital media that is supposed to save them forever, you have to print them. However, the office printer will not do. Unless you want a dull rendering of a vibrant sunshine, that is only fit to be pinned to a cardboard notice board.

No, what you need is a photo printer dedicated to the task of recreating what you saw and captured in true color and with all textures. What Should You Be Aware Of?

1. The Type Of Printer

The two printer technologies that promise exact replicas of what you saw, are the dye-sublimation printers and the inkjet printers. Dye-sub printers utilize heat to mix the dyes onto a uniquely coated paper. This produces a print that has continuity of tone. When the process is done, a clear layer is added over the image to protect it from mechanical forces that may scratch or smear the dyes.

Inkjet printers on the other hand as the name suggest, use jets which spray the ink onto special paper. The ink is sprayed in minute but separate droplets, by a machine which goes over the paper severally. To achieve the beautiful variations in tone, the machines use algorithms known as dithering together with the special paper. Inkjet printers are far more common than dye-sublimation printers.

2. How The Ink Meets The Paper

Printheads are what make the inkjet printer what it is. They spray ink onto the paper as they move across from side to side. Their nozzles fire when areas without ink come into view. Printheads come as piezoelectric or thermal, both of which produce very high quality images.

3. How Do We See The Dots

As the dots are minute, the question begged is, how do we see them? In inkjet printers, the little drops are spaced depending on the darkness or lightness of that part of the image. Light areas are spaced far apart, whereas dark areas have the dots much closer together. To keep people from seeing the spaces between dots in lighter images, secondary inks are used together with the primary inks to achieve lightness.

4. The Type of Ink

Printer ink comes as either dyes or pigments. Dyes have greater range in terms of the color that can be portrayed in an image. However, they fade much faster than pigments. Pigments are limited in range but they last longer. This is not the only determining factor of durability of color, the paper an image is printed on will greatly determine how long the image will last.

With an idea of what to inquire about at your next Walmart run, head down there and take advantage of the amazing prices for such high quality products.