IT-Enquirer conducted an interview with David Spencer from the SpencerLab Digital colour Laboratory in New York, a technical research expert when it comes to printing, colour engines and all things related to photo printing. We asked some obvious questions and got some not so obvious answers.

Our focus was on the big three (Canon, Epson, and HP) as they reflect the largest part of the market. Our first question was whether there’s any real difference between the print quality of these three vendors.

“ According to our tests, differences in realism, richness, sharpness, smoothness, and graininess vary more by model within each vendor’s consumer photo printer product line than by vendor. The latest top-of-the-line models that we have tested from Canon, Epson, and Hewlett-Packard—when used with their corresponding (OEM) recommended inks and best media—all produce print quality that appears to be fully competitive with conventional silver halide prints that consumers might obtain from their local retailer or on line,” David Spencer said.

SpencerLab also found that mixing the inks and papers with those of other vendors is risky in that they are designed to be optimal as a system and should be judged together within each vendor’s product offering. Using the vendor’s inks with the vendor’s paper therefore seems to be the best way to go.

Still, some people will replace the vendor’s inks with inks that cost less or have a quality and longevity that they claim to be better than that of the vendor itself. Lysonic inks comes to my mind, although not mentioned by Spencer. Refills are a market in their own right, but what’s the trade-in?

Spencer: “Since printer OEM vendors invest significant R&D to increase the quality of their inks, it is possible that a third party could; however, new inks are usually introduced with new printers and perhaps new media and even new print heads, so just changing the ink may not be enough. And we all know that “better” has a lot of meanings. OEM printer vendors worry about many, many aspects of print quality—richness, bleeding, water fastness, light fastness, abrasion resistance, etc..—how will “better” be measured? “Better” is a very complex tradeoff, and OEMs spend considerable effort just in understanding how much of which characteristics are important to consumers, professionals, and other user constituencies.”

Spencer said: “Longevity has become a popular print quality metric, but this was perhaps initially promoted to offset the decreased colour gamut typically available in pigment-based inks. As improvements in gamut of such pigment-based inks are brought to market, dye-based inks with improved media are chasing the longevity usually associated with pigments.” That way we are now at around the 100 years life time for an average Epson or HP print.

SpencerLab found that the top-of-the-line models of the current generation of photo printers pretty much meet consumer expectations. “Each generation of printers continues to improve on its predecessors—in inks, in media, in print heads, in colour tables, etc.  Other factors, such as ease-of-use, are becoming more visible.  Perhaps one of the biggest reasons for consumer dissatisfaction now is the use of the wrong ink or media—or the wrong settings between the camera and the printer (and especially the computer and printer driver, if they are in the flow),” said Spencer.

So far, David Spencer hadn’t talked about the issue that seems to be the most important if you have to believe some vendors’ marketing campaigns: resolution. His analysis was surprising: “Many consumer silver halide prints are made with digital processing, even with conventional film input. Resolutions may be only near 300 dpi. However, each picture element can contain full colour (this is also true for photo printers that use thermal dye sublimation technology).”

However, inkjet printers create dots.

David Spencer: “Inkjet dots are of much more limited colour; typically just the single colour of the ink. Therefore, emulating a picture element requires many multiple dots, each quite a bit smaller (higher resolution) than the picture element. The challenge is to make the dots small enough so that they are not seen as graininess—especially in the light pastels where the number of dots must be more limited.”

According to Spencer, this is also the reason that additional inks, such as light magenta/cyan or grays are desirable: “Much of the issue here is dot size, not dot placement (addressability)—both part of “resolution”. Printing at a higher resolution setting may not increase sharpness, especially if the printer incorporates advanced technologies such as variable dot size and additional inks.”