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warcats-cat · 1 month

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Please please tell me about printers, I would like to know <b>everything</b>

You asked for it /lh

Ok so some clarification: I spent three years at Staples working with a Xerox C70 color laser printer, so that's where my "expertise" lies.

FIRST OFF - DO NOT EVER GET YOUR PHOTOS PRINTED AT A STAPLES/OFFICE MAX/FEDEX/UPS/ANY OTHER OFFICE STORE!!!!!

All office stores (that I have been to) use laser printers. Laser printers are high capacity (meaning they can print loads of stuff before the toner needs to be changed), and use toner, which is a powder version of the ink that is electrically fixed and baked onto the paper. (Forgive the oversimplification) This means that the color will not soak into the paper/past the coating if there is one. So, if you want a glossy photo printed, you will literally be baking the color over top of the gloss, and the color will not be glossy. It will be ugly. I've made like at least 300 family photos and other shit on a laser printer. Don't do it.

Sometimes you can play with the printer settings (the Xerox C70 has pretty in-depth settings because obv it's for office printing) and you can set the color load to be "glossy" but that really just means a thicker layer of toner. It's a little shinier but not glossy.

Also, laser printers just can't get that tight, crisp color quality that an inkjet can. So many people came in wanting to make their Christmas cards with these ultra high quality photos and wanted them cheap and same-day, and then would complain that they were "fuzzy". Personally, I always thought they looked fine, but white suburban mom Karens complained all the damn time about the "fuzziness" of their fancy professional photos. Inkjet can get the crisp, sharp lines that you see in digital photos and art, whereas the toner, being powder based, just can't quite get it.

ALSO also! The colors on your computer screen will always be a little brighter and nicer than what comes out of the printer! That is because your computer is back lit, it's shining light at your eyes. Paper cannot do that, so sometimes the colors look a little "dark" or "muddy". Personally, I've seen this with really light lavender, beige, and cyan the worst. Combine this with the more limited scope of color mixing with a laser printer, and sometimes you get weird ass colors coming out. If you have a specific idea for your colors, inkjet is the better bet.

Tldr: get your photos printed at Walgreens or Walmart, or send them somewhere that specializes in photo printing.

There are two main categories of printers, Laser and Inkjet. You have an inkjet if you have a printer in your home.

Inkjet printers have the liquid ink in the cartridge, that's why you have to wait a little bit before it dries, especially for specialty papers or really old printers. The liquid ink can soak into the paper/through the coating, so that's where you get the nice glossy photo prints. ((You can also buy sheets of primed canvas for inkjet printers, which is super cool and I definitely have a bunch of it for some of my favorite digital artworks from friends)).

Ink can come in two types - dye based and pigment based. You have dye based ink if you have a printer at home. Pigment based inkjet is for like,,, the top of the top art printing. It's expensive as hell, but it doesn't fade from light exposure, like dye ink can. (Don't worry, the things you print at home are not likely to fade very much, unless you have them in direct light and never turn the lights off. I have seen photos fade because of light exposure, but that's because Staples never turns any of the lights off for whatever reason, and we had printed pictures using the poster printer to get the nice gloss without realizing.) Pigment based is also apparently a powder, but I'll be honest I don't know how it's fixed to the paper. I assume heat as well. (I've never gotten to work with a pigment printer, I only know about them because I was looking for good printers to print art and found out about them, then I saw the price tag and was like lolol)

When buying specialty paper to print on (like photo paper or canvas), you need to check the label!!!! There are papers designed for laser printers that can withstand the heat and accept the toner, and there are papers designed for inkjet that can hold the liquid ink as it soaks through. The coating on an inkjet safe paper is not as heat resistant as ones made for laser. If you put it in the laser printer, the coating will melt, and you will ruin the internal machinery. I have seen it happen. Don't do it.

Speaking of specialty paper! Have you ever heard of pearlized paper??? It's my favorite paper!!! It's sparkly!!!! 😍

Pearlized paper is typically for laser printing; I've tried to print on it with an inkjet but it came out looking really weird. It's shimmery without having chunky glitter on top that will fall off and go everywhere. Go to your local Staples and ask if they have pearlized paper, just to look at. Pictures can't do it justice. (My business cards for my fairies are printed on soft pearl, which is ivory colored, because I printed and made them myself so I got to do what I wanted /lh) We mainly used it for weddings and stuff, but I recommended for all kinds of stuff because I thought it was so cool.

Other papers: the two main types of paper you will work with at home are regular paper and cardstock. Cardstock just means thick. Both can come in tons of cool colors and textures (linen texture is my personal favorite, you usually buy it as 'resume' or 'business' paper.) you know how thick a piece of paper is by its "weight" which is measured in pounds. I don't know why it's measured in pounds, it just is.

If you want a nice quality paper to print on that's still flexible and foldable, you want to look for something that's 24-30lbs. Typical cheap copier paper is 20lbs, and a lot of the time you can see through it, i.e. if you print something double sided you'll be able to see a little of the text on the back showing through. I have found that 24lbs is thin enough to be more affordable (per ream), but thick enough to not have the bleed through. We had a 32lb paper that was thick nice thickness and super smooth, and we called it "ultra premium". It was nice, but I wouldn't print like flyers and stuff on it. I did a lot of booklets with that one.

If you're gonna get a cardstock, get something 60~lbs and up. 65lb is a really good thickness if you're printing coloring pages because it soaks up the marker ink and holds it nicely. Use 100lb if you're making a coloring *book* that's going to be double sided.

Cardstock cannot be machine folded without a really heavy duty machine, and it's very annoying because those machines are usually at the high-volume production centers and not in-house, so customers complain that they have to wait for their booklets. >.>

When working with business cards, post cards, and the like, you will hear about "bleed area" or "print to bleed". That just means whether or not the ink can go all the way to the very edge of whatever is being printed. When you design a business card or other card to be printed, you will typically have a bleed area, where you want the background to go a little farther than the actual size of the card to allow for cutting, but you want to keep any important text or photos to a certain area so it doesn't accidentally get cut off. The bleed area is not a negotiation. If you don't have space for the bleed, something will get cut off.

At Staples, our business cards were 2x3.5 inches, but the designs had to be about 2.25x3.75 to allow for bleed. The number of times I had to go in and manually fix some idiot's card because they didn't understand what a bleed was is absolutely absurd.

You can get full page size (8.5x11) printed to bleed, for things like flyers with special borders and letter heads, but those also require specialized printers that are at the production facility. The number of people who outright refused to understand this was also absurd. If you have a printer at home, there is a 99.99% chance it is not able to print to bleed for a full 8.5x11, and that's why you still have a white edge if you try to print something that is supposed to have color all the way to the edge of the paper.

My final bit of advice before I end my rant: when you're financially independent and able to/want to buy your own printer, if you plan on making your own art prints to sell, do NOT get an HP printer. HP is fine for general use, it prints well and it's pretty ink-efficient, but it's just not got the super fine quality. Brother and Canon are the two brands I personally recommend for art and photography; they're more expensive but they have a really nice quality of printing. I had to do a lot of training for HP printers and computers, and it's a lot of big words that mean very little in the grand scheme of things.

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