A question for someone who.........

[Jen~Ealogy]

understands printers please!

This is difficult to put into words for someone who knows very little about them...so please bear with me.

I have an Epson Stylus DX 4000. Which has served me well and for the most part prints very good pictures depending on the quality of the original image (I refer here to older family pictures 80 yrs old plus).

However, I have other older pictures which my computer is showing me should come out equally as good......but unfortunately don't! i.e, when they are printed off, they are very substandard.

My brother suggested I might like (at his expense I might add), to get a printer with a higher resolution, say 5670 or even a 9600 (I think its that:o)

I have looked into my present manual to see what dpi my present printer is scanning at and its telling me the effective pixels are 5,100 x 14,040 at 600 dpi. Scanning resolution is 600dpi (main scan) 1200dpi with Micro Step (sub scan)........whatever that means?

How will I know if I will get a better picture from what appears to be the higher speck printer?

Can someone please explain exactly what these numbers mean in relation to the quality of their performance? And will it be worth getting a printer which will help enhance those pictures printing out at the poorer quality?

I hope this explanation will suffice.

[Grimsqueaker]

Jen,

If the image is already low quality (as hinted by your post), then a higher quality printer is unlikely to make any difference, especially as you have mentioned that other pictures print OK

[Jen~Ealogy]

Do you really think so Tim, I thought it may have more to do with the quality of the original image and/or what quality of aparatus it was initially taken with?.......

Sorry Tim, I appear to have said more or less what you have....think it's past my bedtime!

What I mean Tim, is that those prints that are coming out at a lower quality when printed off, look equally as good as the better ones on my comp. screen!
Which makes me feel there is more to be had from them!

[James]

Does it not depend on the resolution of your monitor? which might be higher than your printer?

[Grimsqueaker]

monitor resolutions are generally 72 to 120dpi, so anything scanned at a higher resolution than that will always look good...

But if you have a photograph scanned at 600dpi, using a 2400dpi printer will not improve the quality of the image.

[Jen~Ealogy]

If you mean what the image is looking like on screen James then I would say yes, so I tend not to scan anything higher than 800dpi, because I know my printer refuses to handle it.
This is why, I feel that a printer which maybe copes with a higher resolution may produce a better print out!

Am I on the right track or way off beam in your opinion James?

[James]

I would think that some of the older prints would not have the same quality, ie the graininess of the picture, it a long while ago, but the rating of the film depended on how fine the grains in the picture were and how much you could enlarge it, I regularly now days have pictures on the screen which are larger than 8" x 10" whereas before I doubt if you would have enlarged it greater than postcard size.

Are you finding that the pictures are very grainy?

[Jen~Ealogy]

Not particularly James, I think I only have a couple that are grainy.