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| 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. |
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nehmah
30/11/2007 02:01 PM
What is meant by "A4"?
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