Professional Photo Printers

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When it comes to printing photos, we have come to expect a certain level of quality from our printers. But now the technology has ripened enough that almost all modern printers give photo realistic printouts. Usually ink jet printers are associated with photo printing, but even laser printers are able to give very good quality or photo realistic print outs. But since ink jet printers are better at printing photos than laser printers, I will be talking about professional photo printers that are ink jets. There really isn’t one characteristic that determines a professional photo printer in comparison to a regular one since it can be a combination of qualities. But these qualities are often related to handling photos, photo sizes, options for photo printing and how fast it can print photos rather than the sheer quality of the printouts.

When printing companies give you their line of ink jet printers, you can bet that the quality will be largely similar from the lowest end to the most expensive one. That is because a line of printer is just based off the same base model and print engine (in which the print head is a big part of), and is usually just the lowest end model, the bare bones of the line. You can bet that the quality and print speed of a $50, $100, and $150 option from the same line would be the same when it comes to hardware. It is usually just in the firmware that they cripple the speed or features of a lower end printer. But you can bet that the quality would be largely the same.

What you must do in choosing the printer best suited for your needs is the combination of features which relates to photo handling. Printers with many options as to the size of the media supported or have built in simple image editing and print preview within the printer is probably the one you want. It would be great if the printer has some basic contrast, color, and cropping capabilities too. Printers are rated on how fast they print in plain black text and in full page color. That is why you often see two ppm (pages per minute) values on the label or brochure. The full page color speed would be slower, so when choosing a printer choose the one with more ppm value, unless you do not need to print in bulk all the time. The best professional photo printers should be able to stand on their own, meaning they should not rely on a host PC to function at all and should be network connectible for this to happen. With this printer you should also be able to quickly email your scanned photos or upload them to FaceBook via widgets and simply print photos with a variety of options.

Lexmark offers very good all-in-one ink jet printers which are already by definition, professional photo printers capable of great picture quality, connectivity, support, and widget printing all from a beautiful touch screen display. HP is also coming in close second with a touch capable printer just as feature packed. Since you can be sure that newer printers have good quality and features, all you need to consider now is the cost of printing, so it doesn’t matter if the printer is more expensive, but as long as the printing cost is smaller compared to a cheaper printer, then you could still save in the long run.