Luminous Landscape Forum
Raw & Post Processing, Printing => Printing: Printers, Papers and Inks => Topic started by: wmchauncey on August 23, 2016, 07:22:43 am
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Televisions/monitors are improving on a daily basis in terms of HDR/4K/whatnot...why are we not seeing a comparable improvement in printers?
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I'm not sure what kind of improvements you're looking for.
I only print for my own work but over the last 15 years I've seen tremendous improvements. From my Epson 2200 to my HP Z3100 to my Epson SC P800 I think the advances in printers, inks and paper have been very significant.
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I'm not sure what kind of improvements you're looking for.
I only print for my own work but over the last 15 years I've seen tremendous improvements. From my Epson 2200 to my HP Z3100 to my Epson SC P800 I think the advances in printers, inks and paper have been very significant.
I'd agree with that. I'd also mention that the latest 4K monitors in the 27-30 inch size range still lag behind 15 year old printers in terms of maximum possible resolution. At the same time, given human sight capabilities there's not much point in increasing printer resolution, so they have improved in other areas like color gamut and things like gloss differential and bronzing that apply exclusively to reflective media.
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Once you've seen an 80" 4K monitor, you might wonder about the future necessity of printers. 8)
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Once you've seen an 80" 4K monitor, you might wonder about the future necessity of printers. 8)
For certain things perhaps.
From my perspective my prints will last much longer and be viewed by my surviving relatives and friends much longer than a monitor.
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Once you've seen an 80" 4K monitor, you might wonder about the future necessity of printers. 8)
I don't get the point. Was I supposed to think print was dead when I first saw a jumbotron at the stadium?
The printer will become more valuable, or, at least the ability to produce a fine print, as the screen becomes more and more ubiquitous. Millions are taking pictures and viewing them on small screens, and losing the experience of seeing photos on a piece of paper.
Remember that little device that one could buy and display a little 5x7 digital slideshow of your snapshots, framed, on a desk or side table? You would think that thing would have sold millions, and would be everywhere these days, if you follow the logic that printing is dead. Funny, though, haven't seen one in a few years, but, still see framed photos everywhere.
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Current printers are awesome devices and produces high quality results with incredible detail and color gamut. A print has it's own characteristics and flair which is, for me, not reached by any display.
A print is a valuable presentation of an image and differs completely from any display. The message is different you transport with a print - it's well decided which image gets presented on which media etc and not arbitrary.
Besides prints can be an awesome present and I haven't seen anybody who wasn't impressed getting a bigger print :)
From a technical perspective the most displays may be impressive in resolution. But color wise only a few devices (compared to all displays) are capable to show much more than sRGB which isn't much compared many good printers can print. With 4K a bigger color space comes along and this is awesome, because proper color management will come more important and gets better. Besides some exceptions the most programs aren't capable of current color management and the complete Windows Universal Apps stack is broken in this regard. But that's a different topic.
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Unlike image files displayed on a monitor, prints are a physical thing. Each has individual physical properties like surface sheen and texture, and display choices like matting, framing, glazing (or not), face mounting on plexi, and the like. With visual properties independent of everything except a light source and a person's eyes they can be held, passed down through decades or centuries, and viewed as the author intended without regard for calibrations, the monitor resolution of the day, and the viability of a given electronic storage media type and file format. Prints also cannot be produced instantaneously in thousands or millions. Their individual physical uniqueness and greater immutability give prints a value, whether sentimental or monetary, that images on electronic media cannot have. It's a bit similar to the first edition of a rare book complete with dust jacket being worth gobs more than an e-book of the same title, or a note written on a slip of paper by your late mother being sentimentally more valuable than a picture of it on your iPad.
edit: Just to be clear, I think electronic display of images has its place and there are obviously countless applications. I just don't think either type of display supplants the other. I think each will continue to have its place for a very long time.
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edit: Just to be clear, I think electronic display of images has its place and there are obviously countless applications. I just don't think either type of display supplants the other. I think each will continue to have its place for a very long time.
I'm with you, Dean.
There is a very significant difference in viewing a print and viewing a monitor. Reflected light vs emitted light.
I'm happy to see a restaurant's menu on a monitor or watch a movie on my 4K TV but I doubt I'd ever go to a museum or gallery to view still photographs on a monitor on a wall.
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Wow. A firestorm I've created. :'(
Of course, the print will never die. I just spent $2K to ensure that my Epson 9800 continues to satisfy that requirement.
I merely suggested that prints might find their display space a little more crowded nowadays and in the future.
Monitors can display an ever-changing print-like viewing experience. I have one that does exactly that and it's every bit as enjoyable as the 60" canvas prints in the next room. Not the same, but just as enjoyable. Especially for visitors, who see far more of my work than just a few prints.
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Wait for this stuff to become cheap enough to made into printer ink (given that inkjet pigment costs about as much as gold, it doesn't have to be that cheap).
http://mentalfloss.com/article/77190/6-facts-about-vantablack-darkest-material-ever-made (http://mentalfloss.com/article/77190/6-facts-about-vantablack-darkest-material-ever-made)
It'll give you a Dmax of 5 or 6 even on matte paper and make the best monitors - or even reality itself - look washed out and low-DR.
I've seen a sphere coated in the stuff. It's so dark it looks unnatural - more like a hole in the universe than a simple black sphere.
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Let's talk "Wow" factor...let's say that you've got 6-8 of your bestest prints hanging in your living room and a group of friends are visiting, sipping beers or whatever.
Are they going to be more impressed with those prints or...fifty or so images scrolling across that big screen HDR television.
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Depends how big you can print. Also, for a lasting impression, the print is likely to make more impact. Things on a screen tend to be received as far more temporary and passing and also tend to be associated with less impact or "I could do that" thinking. Large prints, not so much.
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tend to be associated with less impact or "I could do that" thinking.
The beliefs of those plebeians, that wouldn't be allowed in my LR, concern me not a whit.
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Restricting the discussion to only those people you deem worthy of viewing the images does limit the field somewhat.
As a broad discussion, my points stands.
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I think that Jeff Schewe indicated in his book "The Digital Print" that inkjet technology had just about reached its physical limits. (Apologies if it was not Jeff!)
But, I'm not sure that is a problem. I'm not sure what there is left to be desired in high end, large format printers that use light fast inks that won't fade for many decades.
It seems to me that the technology breakthrough would be that inks become cheaper (they are astronomically expensive) and that the high end print process becomes more approachable. I've had an Epson R2400 (not pro level) printer for years and I've still not mastered the whole beginning to end process of making a fine print. I'm not saying that it needs to be easy or simple to make a fine art print, that's part of the craft.................but it certainly does not need to be as expensive or complex as it is now. If you consider a high end camera and lens combo, a high end printer, high end software, high end computer and monitor, expensive inks, expensive papers, multi thousand dollar calibration and measuring equipment it can take 10s of thousands of dollars just to reach the baseline of making fine art prints. It would be nice, but probably unrealistic, to see the cost and complexity come down.
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Monitors can display an ever-changing print-like viewing experience. I have one that does exactly that and it's every bit as enjoyable as the 60" canvas prints in the next room. Not the same, but just as enjoyable.
Certainly the much greater dynamic range available from a transmissive display device offers a different viewing experience than a print.
I was looking at a collection of still images on a 60-inch, 4K ultra-high-definition TV in a big-box store recently and I must say the monitor technology is getting pretty good at the high end. Still, some things I'd like to see in a dedicated transmissive display device for photography:
- More resolution. I don't know what the appropriate metric is: 128 px/inch? 256? ... 1440? But the 60-inch TV in the store didn't have enough pixels. Maybe an 8K monitor of that size would be sufficient, but even there I have my doubts.
- Square form-factor to accommodate both horizontal and vertical formats.
- Wide gamut. I think this is important. Maybe it's just that most sRGB devices are used without color calibration. The colors in photos displayed on my wife's iMac monitor look pretty good after I calibrate it, as long as I don't compare them with the same images on my wide-gamut NECs. (The samples in the store mostly looked over-saturated to me, but I suspect they were processed that way intentionally.)
- Color stability. Apropos of calibration, if I hang a large monitor on a wall it really would be nice if it could retain its colors for at least six months and preferably a year between calibrations. Again, I'm not certain this is a requirement since I wouldn't be using the wall-mounted monitor for soft-proofing; maybe the color slew wouldn't be objectionable as long as the monitor was used just for display purposes.
I'm inclined to add a fifth point, which is that such a device should be affordable. But that's more of a wish than a requirement.
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Certainly the much greater dynamic range available from a transmissive display device offers a different viewing experience than a print.
I was looking at a collection of still images on a 60-inch, 4K ultra-high-definition TV in a big-box store recently and I must say the monitor technology is getting pretty good at the high end. Still, some things I'd like to see in a dedicated transmissive display device for photography:
- More resolution. I don't know what the appropriate metric is: 128 px/inch? 256? ... 1440? But the 60-inch TV in the store didn't have enough pixels. Maybe an 8K monitor of that size would be sufficient, but even there I have my doubts.
- Square form-factor to accommodate both horizontal and vertical formats.
- Wide gamut. I think this is important. Maybe it's just that most sRGB devices are used without color calibration. The colors in photos displayed on my wife's iMac monitor look pretty good after I calibrate it, as long as I don't compare them with the same images on my wide-gamut NECs. (The samples in the store mostly looked over-saturated to me, but I suspect they were processed that way intentionally.)
- Color stability. Apropos of calibration, if I hang a large monitor on a wall it really would be nice if it could retain its colors for at least six months and preferably a year between calibrations. Again, I'm not certain this is a requirement since I wouldn't be using the wall-mounted monitor for soft-proofing; maybe the color slew wouldn't be objectionable as long as the monitor was used just for display purposes.
I'm inclined to add a fifth point, which is that such a device should be affordable. But that's more of a wish than a requirement.
Unless I screwed something up, 4K UHD has a resolution of 3840 pixels × 2160 lines, which makes a pixel density of only 73.4 ppi on a 60" diagonal monitor. 8K UHD has a resolution of 7680 pixels × 4320 lines, which gets the pixel density up to 146.9 ppi on a 60" monitor. Both are far short of typical printer resolutions. If you view the monitor from a far enough distance the angular displacement between pixels gets too small to see and they look great, but a monitor that large will not stand up to close up inspection. To get print-like resolution with current technologies the monitor has to be smaller. 8K resolution on a 30" diagonal monitor gives you 293.7 ppi. That's quite respectable but still short of the maximum resolution of a typical printer.
I totally agree with your comment on square form factor. The wide (16:9, I think) aspect ratio of HD/UHD screens makes them best suited to display horizontal images with a panoramic aspect ratio. They are fairly useless for vertical images. Even common horizontal still image formats like 3:2 waste lots of of pixels unless you want your images stretched or cropped to fit the display area.
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An inkjet printer has a max resolution of 2880 dots per inch. The resilution of the digital file needed is then 730 pixels per inch.
How to relateren this with displays? Is the dots per inch the measure or the pixels per inch?
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One thing that needs to be mentioned with displaying prints is proper lighting...makes a huge difference.
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An inkjet printer has a max resolution of 2880 dots per inch. The resilution of the digital file needed is then 730 pixels per inch.
How to relateren this with displays? Is the dots per inch the measure or the pixels per inch?
I think in this context we're looking at pixels per inch (PPI), not the density of the single-colored dots on a print or R, G, and B sub-pixels on a monitor.
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An inkjet printer has a max resolution of 2880 dots per inch. The resilution of the digital file needed is then 730 pixels per inch.
How to relateren this with displays? Is the dots per inch the measure or the pixels per inch?
The 2880 dots is dot placement accuracy, droplets, the fineness of the dithering pattern.
Pixels Per Inch (PPI), 360 or 720 PPI for Epson printers, is what determines output size.
For 720 PPI, the "finest details" option must be used, otherwise the printer will down-sample to 360 PPI.
Cheers,
Bart
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One thing that needs to be mentioned with displaying prints is proper lighting...makes a huge difference.
+1
often forgotten
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Certainly the much greater dynamic range available from a transmissive display device offers a different viewing experience than a print.
I was looking at a collection of still images on a 60-inch, 4K ultra-high-definition TV in a big-box store recently and I must say the monitor technology is getting pretty good at the high end. Still, some things I'd like to see in a dedicated transmissive display device for photography:
- More resolution. I don't know what the appropriate metric is: 128 px/inch? 256? ... 1440? But the 60-inch TV in the store didn't have enough pixels. Maybe an 8K monitor of that size would be sufficient, but even there I have my doubts.
- Square form-factor to accommodate both horizontal and vertical formats.
- Wide gamut. I think this is important. Maybe it's just that most sRGB devices are used without color calibration. The colors in photos displayed on my wife's iMac monitor look pretty good after I calibrate it, as long as I don't compare them with the same images on my wide-gamut NECs. (The samples in the store mostly looked over-saturated to me, but I suspect they were processed that way intentionally.)
- Color stability. Apropos of calibration, if I hang a large monitor on a wall it really would be nice if it could retain its colors for at least six months and preferably a year between calibrations. Again, I'm not certain this is a requirement since I wouldn't be using the wall-mounted monitor for soft-proofing; maybe the color slew wouldn't be objectionable as long as the monitor was used just for display purposes.
I'm inclined to add a fifth point, which is that such a device should be affordable. But that's more of a wish than a requirement.
I think we can do better than that.
Monitors are great for doing lots of different things - as luminescent devices, they have a far higher contrast ratio than current prints, and, unlike a print, what they display is interchangeable many times per second. But they're expensive, require a data source and processor to tell them what to display, have less resolution than a print and are only manufactured in so many sizes and aspect ratios. For many images, that means letterboxing, as well as a great big monitor frame around them to ruin the effect.
For static images, an even better solution would be a flat, evenly-illuminated panel. A bit like a light-box used to view X-rays, but a much more sophisticated example of materials science and engineering than a fluorescent tube behind a translucent plastic sheet. Preferably a material that can be cut to the size and shape of whatever it is you want to display - whether you want a square format, a 3:1 panorama or a circle, you can get it, and with no letterboxing. With a light source on one side of the material, the other side is evenly lit - perfect for permanently or temporarily mounting a translucent, backlit print. Most likely it would take the form of a sheet of tiny LEDs on one side (probably consisting of circuitry printed onto fabric or polymer sheet, cut to size/shape), a translucent diffusive material in the middle to turn the forest of LEDs into an evenly-lit front side, and the backlit image mounted onto the front of it (or even printed directly onto the front of the diffusive material). Attach it to a power source, then you can hang it directly on a wall, put it in a frame, facemount it to glass/acrylic or even wrap it around a pillar or a corner of a building. You could potentially even print the LED circuitry directly on the back of the diffusive panel, but keeping the panel and the LEDs separate would make them easier to replace when/if some of them fail. All these materials exist - the optical materials, the sheets of LED material, etc. They just need to be put together, and made cheaper for mass production.
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Or what about a uniform, perfectly white light source like you mentioned with a color positive film over it? Of course that is the definition of a slide on a light box but I'm thinking of the slide as a printed color negative on translucent clear 'paper' that could be placed over this perfectly flat, perfectly lit, perfectly white 'light box' that can come in any shape. Just thinking inside and outside the box. Not sure what type of print quality could be obtained on transparent film.
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For "normal" viewers and "normal" viewing distances (ie, other than nose-in-print photographers) a large monitor image would probably be indistinguishable from a print of the same size.
I have a 58" Samsung playing a "best of" slide show in one room of my house. It generates more oohs and ahhs from visitors than any of the 60" prints in the other rooms. The images please me, too. And that might be the most severe test of all.
Screen-filling 16X9 images look great, verticals not so much. The biggest disadvantage I see is the problem with verticals. Even on a 58" 2K monitor, they pretty much suck.
I need two monitors. One for each aspect. 8)
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An inkjet printer has a max resolution of 2880 dots per inch. The resilution of the digital file needed is then 730 pixels per inch.
How to relateren this with displays? Is the dots per inch the measure or the pixels per inch?
TL;DR - compare PPI.
Epson Large Format printers have a max output resolution of 2880x1440dpi, but some consumer models can do 5760. In either case, max input resolution is 720ppi. Digital displays are ppi, so it's the second figure that we need to compare (the inkjet uses multiple dots to achieve each pixel). A 65" TV, for example, is 56.7" wide. To achieve 720ppi, it would need a resolution horizontally of 40,824 pixels. In a 16:9 arrangement, it would need 22,964 pixels vertically, for an effective MP of about 937.5MP.
Of course, to get 720ppi input for a printer to make a 56.7" wide print would also require such an enormous input MP. However, the printer can quite easily produce such a large print from 360ppi input, which would need 234.4MP which is a bit more realistic with stitching, for example. You can even go to 180ppi and still get great results that still stand up to close inspection (much closer than either the print or TV should really be viewed) and you'd only need 58.6MP.
So that sounds like the display is much better, right? You only need 8ish MP to do it on the TV at 4k. The difference is that the printer still has that 2880x1440dpi for putting dots of ink on the page. Until you use a loupe, it appears to be solid colour and coverage over the print whereas the TV has a definite grid pattern (albeit at a point where you really shouldn't be that close to view it).
In short, they're very different, but you can get excellent results in very large prints and have them in multiple locations for a fraction of the cost of having multiple 4k displays and you can choose a variety of substrates, frames (or not), etc. In our office, we have some huge prints done on fabric - just like you'd print directly onto a t-shirt, but 2.5m high and 2m wide on a frame. They look amazing and the impact is far more than the images from projectors on the wall. You can have any orientation or dimensions you want with a print without "wasting" pixels, too - you're not confined to 16:9.