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Photo printers

Capturing the brightness, clarity and colour range that the eye can see is impossible for a printer. The colour from our printers comes from combining different inks, the standard printer inks are cyan, magenta, yellow and black (CMYK). Black is referred to by the letter K, for key, so as not to confuse it with B for blue which is ued in RGB, the screen colour model. CMYK can combine to create the most colours using the least number of inks. All four used at once make black.

The range of colour that can be printed by CMYK is limited as the inks become darker when combined with each other, photo printers generally use six cartridges instead of four to help in overcoming this problem and so increase the colour range that can be printed. This means the results of photo printing will be better then with a standard inkjet printer. The two extra ink cartridges colours are light cyan and light magenta, the yellow ink is already about as light as it can be and so making an alternative is not worthwhile. Some printers, including some Epson photo printers have extra cartridges available to provide more printing finesse such as grey, matt black, gloss black, red ink, blue ink as well as gloss cartridges to add a shiny finish to the printed photograph.

The extra cartridges needed for photo printers mean that printing costs can be higher than with standard four colour inkjets, also printing times are usually slower compared with standard printers and for printing just text, the results may not be as good as normal printers but printing your photos in this way saves time and money that would otherwise be spent getting your photographs developed. Many of the new generation of photo printers are small and connect directly to the digital camera without the need for a computer which adds to their convenience. Have a look at Personal Computer World printer reviewed to read reviews of some popular models.

There are. of course, a wide range of photo printers available with all the major brands each producing a range which vary from the cheap end of the printer market through to the top end. Initial budget may play a large part in deciding which printer you buy but well worth checking is if the ink cartridges are cheap for the printer compared to other models.