Today I used the fancy-pants photo paper I bought a couple of weeks ago to print out a few more photos. Rather than printing them full-sized I printed a couple of pages with two-to-a-page as they are destined for a nice scrap book which Justine has offered to make for me; it’ll be in a pleather-covered scrapbook.

One thing that is still difficult to get working exactly as one would like is to do with colour spaces and profiles and so I wasted a sheet (not exactly what one wants when it’s two bucks a sheet) by choosing the wrong colour space.

It’s a lot easier with printers and printing though, since each printer has a “profile” which you can tell programs like Photoshop to use when printing. On low-end machines like our printer you get relatively faithful colours but they’re not perfect and there’s a lot of gradation between colours. Still, it’s a lot better than having to deal with inconsistencies between web browsers, monitors and other things.

Or maybe not, since I don’t print photos for a living.

Over the weekend, Justine and I made our way to OfficeWorks to buy some more colour ink for the printer we bought. I haven’t made a significant amount of colour prints but the colour seems to have been used quite quickly — maybe I’m using more than I expected.

I decided a few months back that I wanted to print some of my photos a little larger and get it done at a decent photo lab, but the costs are quite expensive and then to get it framed it can be pretty costly. So, in the interim I decided to just buy some good photo paper and make a few prints myself.

Since we have an Epson printer, this time around I chose to buy Epson paper; I bought the most expensive (and thus high quality, right?) paper that OfficeWorks has: Epson Ultra Glossy. I bought 15 A4 sheets — it’s really strange, they only paper on offer was 6×4 paper, A4 or A3, no 5×7, 8×10, 8×12 or regular photo sizes. So, if I want 8×12 prints I have to trim A4 sheets; seems kind of a waste.

A recent shot was decided as the test subject, since I liked the colours and sharpness of it. The red colours in the shot I chose are quite difficult to reproduce, and looks very different depending on the colour space and monitor settings. To my surprise, the shot looks really good, though I’ve been leaving it under a clean sheet of paper since yesterday as the recommendations state.

It doesn’t quite look like “real” photo paper but it still looks damned good. Upon close inspection I noticed a speck of dust that I tried to flick with my fingernail — bad move, there are now small scratches on the shot. Mental note: don’t do that again.

At over $2 a sheet (not including the massive amounts of ink used) it’s not cheap and easy to ruin but the output is pretty good. Now if only I could find a cheap framing place that does a good job. There are places around that sell mat boards, frames and glass so you can do-it-all-yourself but I don’t know how easy it is.

On Saturday, I finally caved in and agreed that Justine really needs a printer this year for school. I have had no need for a printer for around the last six years and things in the world of printers have changed quite a bit.

We ended up at OfficeWorks in the torrential rain (so that was going to be our last stop) in front of a small wall of printers. We ended up getting an Epson Stylus C67, mostly because it was under a hundred bucks (excluding paper, USB cable, and all the other crap you need) and has four separate print cartridges (CMYK) which may or may not end up being a good thing. Probably good.

I also bought a 50 pack of Canon glossy photo paper to play with, since the printer has 70,653,324dpi resolution or something. The printer supposedly prints at a not-particularly-speedy 17 pages per minute but print out a 6×4 photo with a lot of strong colours, and you’ll be waiting over 5 minutes. Nice one!

Speaking of the photos, the colour reproduction is alright, as is the sharpness. However, the “depth” of the colour reproduction is not there. Imagine looking at a CRT then looking at a washed out LCD… that’s the feeling I get.

For the price though, I’m not complaining, as Justine got a printer for school and we both got an average photo printer.