Photo Printers

Photo printers and digital pictures are replacing yesterday’s film and lab photograph development. It is cheaper and much more convenient to be able to simply push a button or two on your photo printer and have a lab quality photo instantly available.

Photo printers today produce true photo quality prints that are so advanced that you literally can’t tell the difference between a photo printed on a digital photo printer and one processed from film. And you can get high tech prints from your photo printer for under a hundred bucks.

No matter which type of photo printer you choose, weather it is a Canon digital photo printer, an HP ink jet photo printer or an all in one printer, each model will provide you with nice quality photo print results. Less expensive photo printers produce nice quality photos that are great for everyday pictures, but if you want to turn your memories into digital masterpieces, you’ll want to check out the higher quality photo printers.

Here is PC Printer Review’s List of the Top 5 Photo Printers based on price, performance, features and design:

The HP Photosmart D7360 is rated the number one photo printer because of its super fast color page printing speed of 31, high 4800-by-1200 DPI color quality prints, user friendly touch screen and low price of just $200. With a simple tap of a button the HP's Photosmart D7360 screen, you can alter and print color photos in a snap. Insert your camera's media card in one of its reader's four slots, and the on-screen wizard will walk you through the entire printing process.

The number two ranked photo printer is also an HP, the 8250 photo printer costs about the same at $199 and offers an amazing color dpi of: 4800 by 1200 pixels which generates high quality, clear prints. This full-featured photo printer is fast and well designed yet is a departure for HP printers with six ink cartridges on a permanent print head.

The HP Photosmart 8050 photo printer takes third position with its 4800-by-1200 DPI, impressive software and lower price tag of $149, but it does employ multi-ink cartridges which may be a drawback for some. Like the 8250, the 8050 has a color LCD, four media card slots, and a direct-print port. However, the 8050's LCD is smaller, at 1.8 inches, and it can be difficult to see because it sits vertically on the front panel and doesn't tilt.

Number four on our list of top photo printers is the Canon Pixma iP6700D offering two sided 9600 by 2400 DPI printing, high quality prints and a medium price tag. The $200 Canon iP6700D is first and foremost a photo printer, and produces clear prints on high grade photo paper. However, although the images looked sharp and vibrant, skin tones often appear a little too bronzed.

Holding fifth position the $229 Canon Pixma iP5200R comes well equipped with built-in connections, letting you print wirelessly from Wi-Fi equipped PCs, laptops and digital cameras with Wi-Fi. It is a versatile photo printer with 9600-by-2400 DPI print quality and fast print speeds of 24 color pages per minute.

Now that you have chosen the perfect photo printer, let me help you turn your ordinary photographs into memorable masterpieces by giving you 27 Tricks to Printing Picture Perfect Prints.

Improve Your Images by saving them correctly. Most digital cameras use JPEG format, which looses some detail to save space when storing images. If you plan to edit your photo and print it later on a photo printer, save the edited image in Tagged Image File Format (TIFF), which doesn't compromise image quality.

Many digital shots come out looking soft or out of focus after you print them on your digital photo printer. Use your image editor's sharpen tool to emphasize the detail in your image before printing. If you work with Paint Shop Pro, use the Unsharp Mask tool (click Effects, Sharpen, Unsharp Mask). This tool runs automatically each time you select it.

The program that you use, however, may not have an Unsharp Mask tool. If you can't find a tool by that name in your program, use the Help option to search for the term sharpen. But take it easy with Unsharp Mask and Sharpen: If end up with a grainy or distorted image, after photo printing, undo a few levels and print again.

The best photo printers know to draw attention to the main element in your photo by softening the background. Select the entire subject with your image editor's magic wand (found in Paint Shop Pro's tool palette). If your first click doesn't select the whole subject, hold down the Shift key and click to add more area. Then, reverse the selection to select the whole background. After that, run the Soften tool a few times to blur the background to your satisfaction.

It's a fact of life--dark images print poorly on most photo printers. You should use your program's gamma correction tool, rather than the brightness tool, to add life to your picture. Increasing brightness can turn shadows into mud or make whites look radioactive. Gamma concentrates its brightening power on the middle tones in your image more than on the extreme blacks and whites which makes it easy for photo printers to read and print in better quality.

In Paint Shop Pro, click Colors, Adjust, Gamma Correction and drag the color sliders slightly to the right (no more than three notches). Most pictures won't benefit from a change of more than 30 percent; beyond that, images begin to look bleached out.

Crop your images wisely for best photo printer results. Use the crop tool from your tool palette to make your photos more appealing, instead of positioning your main subject smack dab in the middle of the frame, offset it about a third of the way to the left or right of center.

Don't crop the image too severely, however. The finished image needs a sharp enough resolution for the photo printer to read and print without showing the jagged edges that come from having too few pixels.

When it's time to print your snapshots, be sure to check how many pixels your photo printer can handle. Most ink jet printers are optimized for images with 200 pixels per inch. If you're producing an 8-by-10-inch print, use your editing program to verify that your image is no less than 1600 by 2000 pixels. If you start your photo printer with a lower-resolution image, the result may be blurry.

In general, digital images taken with a 2-megapixel camera yield good 5-by-7-inch prints, and images from a 3-megapixel camera are better for 8-by-10-inch prints. Don't worry if your image has an overabundance of pixels--you can still create excellent prints of 3-megapixel images in 5-by-7 format.

Enjoy your new photo printers and have fun producing your digital memories.