Archive for the 'Printers' category

2009 starts with some new equipment in Roumazeilles.net home:

• An HP LaserJet 1005. The lowest B&W laser I could find at HP (I am faithful to this brand even if the last LaserJet 1022 failed suddenly far before the end of its normal useful life). It’s a Windows-based printer used on the local network, but it seems that printing over the LAN is nearly instantaneous. Magic!
• An Epson Stylus Photo R1900. Replacing an eon-old Stylus Photo 750, it should bring color photo printing in A3+. It’s amazingly silent.

This is easy to reduce a color photo to a B&W image (any photo software or any B&W photocopier can do it). But the reverse operation seems difficult at best, impossible in most cases. However, a team of French scientists from the French INRIA (Guillaume Charpiat, Matthias Hofmann et Bernhard Schölkopf) presented recently an algorithm that succeeds to rebuild the color information from a B&W photo. And with some success.

On the image on the left, Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa has been converted to black and white (A), using color data and textures from a similar image (B), the algorithm built a color image again (C) not too far from the original (D).

Analyzing this work, I’d say that part of the differences between the result (C) and the original (D) come from the quality of the conversion to Black & White which led to an image quite hard (a bit more contrast than needed).

Impressive result on photos, you can expect to see it applied to moving images (and movies).

Source: Futura-Science.

What I do (or should be doing, since -like everybody else- I can’t stick to my good resolutions) in order to obtain beautifully detailled photographs. It’s even more important if you want to make them ready for printing in large size (on your brand new A3 inkjet printer or poster-size at a print shop).

A quality lens

The first advice I should give it to choose a high-end lens. Even if the trans-standard zoom lens of the kit for most digital SLR cameras provide very good results in an exceptionnally compact form factor, that we all love to use. But these are also the result of so many compromises where image quality cannot be always the only factor.

Professionnal zoom lenses (the most expensive) are often capable of really impressive achievements, but prime lenses (with a fixed focal lenght) can reach quality levels that no zoom lens can reach. Some say that this is their unique (and only) selling point: Quality.

Thus, in the Minolta-Sony lens catalog, I rushed onto the white tele-lenses from the APO G pro family that, even today, produce exceptionnally good images (for a price no less astonishing if you don’t purchase them second-hand). But each serious camera/lens manufacturer has a few very nice lenses in its catalog.

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I do not often present character fonts, but this one is definitely nicer than usual with its elegant 3D effect of folded white paper.

Source: DaniellaSpinat.com.

This was a little event a few days ago: Adobe launched its first beta version of the online PhotoShop under the name of Photoshop Express. As it was easy to predict, it’s not as simple as marketing would like you to believe and you cannot replace one by the other as most of the reviews hereafter will show you:

• Les Numériques (en français): would better use Picasa to share the images prepared with Photoshop Express, and would want to see Raw files management, curves and histograms, and masks.
• Ars Technica (in English): it is rahter a cross between iPhoto and Adobe Bridge, but they love the basic features and (including color correction).
• Baekdal.com (in English) : disappointed; This is not an image editor, by far – just a fun way to apply a few corrections/effects. Woudl rather recommend Splashup, he feels is superior.
• Photojojo (in English): This is certainly not Photoshop but it does very well what it offers (basic image edition/correction).
• LifeHacker: Not the Full PS Package, but Good Web-Based Editing
• Pixinfo.com (in Hungarian): Honest! I didn’t understand what they think about it…

To notice: Photoshop Express is free, limited to 2GB of online storage (easy to reach) and in English only for now.

Sometimes, the economy is not faring well, sometime it’s too good. In both cases, it may lead to astonishing bills. I found some cases, I really loved.

The biggest single US dollar bill

This is not even really a bill since it’s more a tool to manage gold exchanges in an economy that was based on gold: a gold certificate. It was never circulated in the public since 1034, and is only visible in museums.

Source: PurpleSlinky.com.

The weird Zimbabwe bills

In a country where the economy totally collapsed, the Zimbabwe dollar has no value left: Inflation reached several tens of thousands of percents (much more than what hit the German economy of the 30’s), crushing the mere value of any bill in just days.

As a matter of fact, this 10 million dollar bill does not allow you to pay anything (valued a few euros a few months ago, it’s really worthless now).

A guide published by Canon to help you better manage colour with photo cameras and photo printers from this brand.

Canon color management guide (2MB PDF file)

Specially for graphics designers, for those who cannot stop seeing the word in Pantone colors, W2 Products designed coffee mugs branded by Pantone.

Out of stock already.

Would you know what colour cerulean is? Or peach? Or spruce? Or watermelon? Or plum? Or rust?

The HP online color thesaurus is a great way to identify these and to get the precise formal definition of such colours. You type in a name, and it will give you the color, similar ones and anonyms.

Today is Blog Action Day: The day that bloggers chose to try and help save the planet from the impact of Human activity. For my own part, I decided to collect a few ideas to save energy in your computer usage:

• Upgrade your gear
• Dim your screen
• Consolidate and virtualize computers
• Turn off peripherals
• Kill unnecessary processes
• Get a smart power switch
• Enable energy saver settings
• Unplug energy vampires
• Spin down your hard drive
• Shut down the computer

Another trick: Power saving remote computing.

12 monochrome laser printers compared by Tom’s Hardware. These are not the printers that grab all media attention, but a mere B&W laser printer can reduce significantly your printing budget and they come at really low prices.

It is already an old tradition of this site that we keep repeating that color laser printers, without being able to do full photo-quality printing, progressed to the point where they are priced reasonably (often less than $300 and with a price-per-page that is strictly out of range for inkjet printers).

Beyond the comparisons already shown, here is a major update offered by Tom’s Hardware for 12 color laser printers:

• Dell 3110cn
• Dell 5110cn
• HP Color LaserJet 2600n
• HP Color LaserJet 2840 All-In-One
• Konica Minolta MagiColor 2550
• Konica Minolta MagiColor 5440DL
• OKI C3200n
• OKI C7350n
• Lexmark C534n
• Lexmark C762n
• Samsung CLP-600N
• Samsung CLX-3160FN All-In-One

BibliOdyssey is a web site about art in antique prints. You love books, you love quality books, you must stay tuned to BibliOdyssey.

Today, I just want to point to one single impressive post there: Drawing on the Renaissance.

Canada’s National Archive experts are worried that we don’t have enough knowledge about how inkjet prints age. They fear that most of them will die early because the dried ink is much more exposed to external stresses than the pigments of traditional photo paper.

So, they turn to Henry Wilhelm of Wilhelm Research to get some additonal information.

Source: New York Times.

In the spotlight: Sony Alpha 900 Canon EOS 5D Mk II Nikon D700 FX Download Nero for free

Do you happen to know that 5% of all male population is actually affected by some form of color-blindness (females are much less prone to it). It means that plenty of activities that tend to rely on color identification by the user is significantly flawed for about 2-3% of the user population. This can become a real issue for companies willing to support equal employment opportunities for all.

In software, if this was not reason enough to think seriously about it, we should also think about the impact of printing onto black & white printers (they are color-blind too and this affect 100% of B&W printer users). Most of the problems could be alleviated by following some simple rules that should be part of any software requirements.

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Choosing a photographic inkjet printer able to produce high-end A3+ printsis not an easy task even though the list of candidates is much more limited than for A4+ sizes. Nevertheless, as prices are steep, it’s worth avoiding errors. This makes the comparison done by our firends at photo-i the more interesting.

They oppose three impressive printing machines:

• Epson Stylus Photo R2400
• HP Photosmart pro B9180
• Canon Pixma pro 9500

I will not hide the conclusion, the HP B 9180 runs ahead for its excellent price, its auto-calibration, its ability to keep heads unclogged by auto-cleaning every 6 hours, its Ethernet connectivity (on top of the USB) and its photo quality very similar to the others (the differences really became small at this level).

Link: Comparison of 3 A+ pigment inkjet printers.

I previously wrote about the various techniques used for inkjet printing, but a good reader (thanks Daniel!) made me notice that there is a technique less common than the usual dye-based or pigment inks. I admit easily that I did not know it before. But it is a slightly older technique that was used by Epson for desktop printers and that includes both a solvant and a heat-sensitive dye.

To use it, you absolutely need a paper whose special surface has been prepared taking that ink into account and making the surface relatively sensitive itself to heat (polyester cover) in order to open to heat (creating micropore allowing the ink to enter the paper, then closing behind it) or a very hard surface (metal or ceramics, for example, where the ink will be cooked on the surface). This is specifically the technology used in giclées (printing solutions using a surface that looks a lot like a painter canvas: sublimed ink on a canvas heavily coated with polyester).

Rather uncommon today on the desktop (both at home and in the office), this technique must be rather difficult to handle photo-quality colors (the importance of good ICC profiles cannot be stressed too much), forces to adapt to prepared papers (special surfaces like cotton are not usable) and must have a rather good shelf life (the ink is preserved at the bottom of the closed micropores).

Sources:

• Dye Sublimation information.
• Info sur la sublimation de colorant (giclée)

Complementary information about the possible use of such an ink on an Epson R800/R1800: These inks are supposed to be used with printers that never were designed for them (far from it!), UltraChrome ink Epson printers (R800/R1800). There, it smells really funny; The more because these good printers normally use a rather complex combination of inks including a varnish or “gloss optimizer” transparent ink used to manage correctly the bronzing effect so common on pigment inks. I would stay far from this odd combination (I would be afraid to damage my printer…)