Raw & Post Processing, Printing > Printing: Printers, Papers and Inks

Low Volume Printing - what's an amateur to do?

(1/1)

Craig Arnold:
I have purchased Michael's excellent tutorial, but it's all rather  complicated.

I own an Epson R800, which has served moderately well, but I've never really been happy with the prints since I moved to Mac. I used to (against expectations) get better prints with my Windows machine. The inks are very expensive, the paper is prone to jamming, all-in-all it's a mess. If I don't print for a month I pretty much have to start all over again and get the calibration right, etc, etc. Life is too short.

So for most prints I used to use a local photo shop that had a nice RIP setup and a big Epson printer; they were great, but although their pricing was typical of London print shops it is still fairly steep. £10-£15 for an A4, and up to £30 for A3. But they went bust. And the only other nearby shop is rubbish, they have a wide-format Epson too, but their prints are horrible.

My volumes are really too low to invest in a big printer for home use, typically 5-10 A4 prints a month and perhaps 1-2 A3, very occasionally bigger. Spending big bucks on a home printer makes no sense at the volumes I do.

So I thought I'd try online printing, and to my great joy I find that the Kodak Gallery online service is giving me some stunning results. All of Europe seems to be serviced out of a lab in Amsterdam. You upload a JPG file and they print and turn around in 3-4 days. The prices are fantastic - only £1.20 for an A4 and £7 for an A3, which is 10% and 20% of high-street inkjet print prices and actually no more expensive (probably less) than the materials cost for the mid-level printers like the R2400, HP8150, etc.

The colour results are a lot more hit-and-miss than the BW though (which have been uniformly excellent). There are no ICC profiles for download so soft-proofing is out, and I have not really been able to find out much about their printers. They say it's silver-halide printing to photo paper, so I think it's a Lightjet style printer that they are using. Does anyone know more about the print technology that Kodak is using in their online labs? This is the only info they make available:

http://www.kodakgallery.co.uk/HelpAboutPri...;localeid=en_GB

At the moment I can afford to produce small prints to proof and adjust in a hit-and-miss fashion because they are so cheap, and I expect I'll just get a feel for what kind of histogram works. But if anyone could give some advice which will make the process shorter I'd be much obliged.

I use a Canon 5D, Zeiss Ikon with Coolscan for BW film, and Lightroom.  I was thinking that one possible problem might be that the colour space I'm seeing in Lightroom exceeds what gets output to the final JPG.

Geoff Wittig:
Try looking for local camera clubs or enthusiast groups; they may be able to put you in touch with a hobbyist with something like an Epson 7800/7880 to make the occasional large print. I do this for folks I know through my day job who want a big print.

astagg:
Hi,

If you send me an email at photo (at) andrewstagg.com - I may be able to help.

Best
Andrew Stagg

Navigation

[0] Message Index