Photo printer glossary

By Staff writers, CNET Asia on 10 February 2005
Whether you're trying to comprehend your printer's manual or to use the right term to explain something, this glossary should help make sense of the jargon.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
6-colour system: For good-quality photos you'll want a 6-colour photo printer which adds light cyan and light magenta inks to the 4-colour system, giving better gradations and skin tones. Do note that modern inkjets typically use pigmented black inks and hence sometimes you'll find 5-colour or 7-colour units that add a photo black (dye-based) ink to the mix.
8-colour system: Various manufacturers have come out with their own 8-ink variants to produce even better quality prints. However, do note that at present none of these use the same colour inks. For instance, HP's Photosmart 7960 has been optimised for black-and-white prints -- which also subtly improve colour outputs -- with more shades of grEy inks, while Canon's i9950 is tweaked to emulate positive film with the inclusion of red and green inks.
All-In-One (AIO): See Multifunctions.
Borderless printing: Also described as border-free printing at times, the term is used to define photo outputs with no borders, resulting in edge-to-edge printing.
CMYK: An acronym that stands for cyan, magenta, yellow and black. Almost all colour printers use the four basic colours of ink to produce a colour image, mixing them to get different shades and colours. This is generally called a 4-colour system.
Colour management: A set of software designed to increase the accuracy and consistency of colour between a scanner, display and printer.
Cost per page: The price you pay to use and maintain your printer. Generally high-quality images require an inkjet to go through a lot of ink and often print best on special stock, so cartridge and paper cost will add up.
Direct connect printing: This system bypasses the PC and comes in the form of a camera-direct or card-direct method. With the former, photos can be outputted simply by connecting a compatible digital camera and printer via a dedicated cable. For card-direct printing, see Memory card slot.
Dithering: Also known as halftoning, this is a process of varying size and pattern of dots of different colour inks together to produce other colours. If the halftoning algorithms are good, gradations will be smooth and you won't see any visible dots. Better-quality photo printers generally produce little, if any, visible dither pattern in the light-coloured areas where they are most noticeable. See also Halftoning.
Dye-based inks: One of the two main types of inks used in inkjet printing, dyes bind to paper better than pigments and offer superior colour reproduction and glossiness, yet they suffer from low fade resistance to light and air (ozone). In addition, colours tend to bleed together when exposed to water.

Dye sublimation: Despite the name, dye-sublimation (dye-sub) units work through a process of thermal diffusion. When the solid dyes embedded in the film are passed through the heated printhead, the dyes vaporise and diffuse onto the paper before they return to solid form. In doing so, there are no dots to deal with and you'll sometimes hear dye-sub outputs as continuous-tone prints. Dye-sub printers are expensive and slow but produce outstanding results. As an upside, most dye-sub prints have a scratch-proof and water-proof surface protecting your photos.
Driver: Software that allows the peripheral to communicate with the PC. In effect, a print driver tells your operating system all it needs to know to operate your printer. This is a bigger issue than you might imagine. A few printers lack Mac support entirely, and a number of manufacturers take their time before offering drivers that are fully compatible with the latest version of Windows. This may shorten the useful life of your printer.
Gasfastness: Durability of the prints when exposed to damaging pollutants in the air such as ozone. There are currently no standardised test for gasfastness. To combat this problem, manufacturers have produced swellable paper media which improves over porous paper media substantially.

Halftoning: This process lies in the our eyes' inherent inability to distinguish spots that are closely spaced. To convert a continuous tone image to print -- whether it is one-colour printouts (greyscale) or multicoloured (4, 6 or 8 inks) -- various patterns of ink droplets are varied to produce more colours and scales. Read more in Dithering.
Inkjets: Inkjet printers function by spraying tiny dots of ink onto a page of paper. This process can produce black-and-white or colour images, and in some cases, photo-quality images. However, inkjets can have trouble with sharp lines so text can vary from adequate to good depending on how fast the printer runs. Dedicated photo inkjets, on the other hand, are great for photos but generally not good for text.
Interface: Almost all personal printers now come with a Universal Serial Bus (USB) port, which is much faster than the old-fashioned parallel port. For larger workgroups, you'll want a printer that hooks directly to the network via Ethernet port.
Lightfastness: Durability of a print when exposed to light. When an ink is lightfast, it has strong light-fade resistance.

Media type: The material that is printed upon, such as paper, glossy paper or transparency film.
Memory card slot: This is based on a similar concept as direct connect printing. Here, you need to insert only the memory card from the digital camera into a slot on the printer for direct digital image output, sans PC.
Multifunctions: Addressing the needs of most small and home offices are these multifunction printers. Also known popularly as All-In-Ones (AIOs), these machines fulfill the basic tasks of printing, scanning and copying. To add further value, about half of these kit-out devices offer faxing capabilities as well.
Page per minute: Abbreviated as ppm. This specification is always exaggerated. Laser printers generally print text pages only slightly slower than the manufacturers' claims. But the claims for inkjets are typically done at low-quality settings while using very simple text pages -- in other words, a speed you'll never see in real life. Reality check: Printing a single A4-sized colour photo on an inkjet may take anywhere from 2 to 30 minutes.
Picoliter: Miniscule unit of liquid measurement with regard to inkjet inks. These days, some inkjets come with ink droplet volumes as small as 2 picoliters.
Pigmented inks: In general pigmented inks offer better fade resistance than dye-based inks. However, there are also drawbacks. For starters, dyes bind to paper better than pigments and offer superior colour reproduction and glossiness.

Print cartridge: There are two variants of print cartridges in the market today. They can be referred to as separate ink and silicon technology and integrated cartridge technology. For the former, only ink exists in the containers. In the latter, the device integrates the printhead, ink cartridge and ink delivery system.
Printhead: The important, usually movable, part of a printer. This contains the printing elements directly responsible for applying ink to a medium. As a general rule of thumb, a printhead with more nozzles will have a larger print swath (coverage), resulting in faster outputs.
Print quality: Generally, the lower the quality, the faster the print speed and less ink used. The higher the quality, the slower the print speed and better print results.
Resolution: Usually measured in dots per inch or dpi. This indicates how many individual dots a printer can create on a page per square inch of area. Dpi is typically listed as horizontal resolution by vertical resolution; the higher the dpi, the better the resolution.

Topics: printer, terms, ink, inkjet, all-in-one, photo, multifunction, colour, laser, glossary

Related Articles

Comments (1)

Post your own comment

You must read and type the 6 chars within 0..9 and A..F

You must read and type the 6 chars within 0..9 & A..F

Submit

Enter your personal information to the left, or sign in with your Facebook account by clicking the button below.

Connect

The Explain Series

Must read