Tuesday, Sep 06, 2005 at 07:52
Now
Rock,
If your images are coming out dotty on A4 paper from a 3.1 megapixel camera, you are doing something wrong in the transfer, save or print facet of the process. It's not the camera. If you don't get to the bottom of this you'll be no better off with a 10 megapixel camera.
Please note that A3 is twice the size of A4, not the other way around.
From my 2 meg camera I print A4. My wife, from her 3.2 meg camera prints A3. The photos are not dotty. At least not till you get up close with a magnifying glass. And we don't care about the critisism of picky little people who get around our images with a magnifying glass, do we?
The ideal file size for printing A4 comes from a 4 meg camera and will print at 300 dpi at A4 size. With my 2 meg camera I'm printing A4 at 150 dpi and it's fine.
There are a number of
places in the process chain where you could be going wrong: take careful note.
1) Set your camera to its largest file size. There will be both file size and compression options. So choose largest file size and no compression.
2) How do you download the photos to the computer? If you plug the camera into the computer you can't go wrong. If you use a card reader as I do, copy and paste, do not save as. This is about saving the file with all of its origional data with no compression.
3) If you need to move the file around the computer, copy and paste, don't save as.
4) If you need to edit the file, that is, fix the colour or whatever, print from your edited version without saving the changes.
5) Never save changes to your origional file. Always work on a copy. Save the changes to your copy if you wish, to send it over the e-mail, put it on your desktop or whatever, but always keep the original without saving changes.
The reason: a JPEG file or .jpg is a compressed file. When you click save or save as, you compress the file, reducing file size and quality, more every time you save.
Now, that's taken care of the file size part.
6) When you come to print, go to File>Print>Properties. Select the right paper. If you have a choice of several photo papers be sure to select the right one. Each of those choices has it's own printer profile and in order to get good colour you must select the right printer profile.
7) Select the highest quality printing. Your printer might print 600 x 300 dpi (dots per inch) or 300 x 300 dpi. This a measure of the fineness of the job your printer does. It is different to the dpi of your file which is actually pixels per inch. If you are printing A4 from a 2 meg camera the dpi from you file will be 150 dpi but the printer dpi will still be 600 x 300 or 300 x 300 as the case may be for your printer.
So
Rock, there are seven things you need to get right and your prints will be fine. If they don't come right you may need to look into the printer. I think we should go halves in that thousand bucks you're going to save.
Note: We have two printers.
1) Canon i6100. This is an A3 plus size. We bought it for quality arty photographic prints. We always use the best ink and paper. Cost about $700 bucks.
2) Epson Stylus C45. This is an A4 size. Used for run of the mill stuff including A4 photos. I refill the ink cartriges with cheep ink from Go-Ferrit and use the cheapest photo paper. I bought a heap off Ebay for 60c a sheet.
We paid $69 for this printer at the post ofice early this year. They now have them for $59. The printing quality is fine. Can't go wrong.
Regards,
Laurie.
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