SteelOrchid Photography

Tag: printer

  • HP rules OK!

    Hewlett Packard were top of my customer services list last week. My B9180 printer sprang a nasty surprise when it spat out a couple of its tiny pizza wheels a few weeks ago. That didn’t stop it making prints, but we decided to contact HP before the warranty runs out in August. A quick phone call to the call centre somewhere in the Asian continent brought forth the question…”can you fax your receipt?”…yes we did that…they called back a day or two later with the question “do you have a digital camera”…..which we thought was a bit odd. The reply being in the affirmative, we were asked to photograph the damage and email the pictures. That duly done, another phone call told us to expect a new printer being delivered within a few days. (more…)

  • Fine Art Printing

    Fine Art photographic printing took a major leap forward in the last few years with the introduction of high quality pigment ink printing. We upgraded to the HPB9180 printer last year and, hey, is it brilliant?! Low metamerism, low bronzing on gloss/lustre papers and bright saturated colour on matte and textured fine art papers make this a very desirable piece of kit. After several months of making prints with this beast, I have come up with a series of papers that work well with it. There’s a growing list of icc profiles available at HP here and it’s a simple process to load them – just follow the instructions in the HP Digital Imaging Monitor.

    All of the following papers produced very good results:

    HP Advanced Photo Paper Glossy
    As you would expect with a paper made for HP pigment inks, this paper gives an excellent result with good detail, low metamerism and only a little gloss differential. It’s a good all round gloss paper and, at 250g/m² it’s a good weight and feels like a wet process photo. Be careful only to choose “advanced” papers from HP and not the more readily available “premium” papers, which are made for dye inks and do not produce as good a result. Unfortunately, in the UK, it’s quite difficult to obtain HP’s own paper in anything above A4 size.

    Epson Premium Semigloss Photo Paper
    This paper gives an excellent result with the HP inks. There is just a little gloss differential (which you can see if you tilt the print so that the light hits it at an angle). It’s best used with the icc profile downloadable from HP, who seem to have realised that people will make prints with other manufacturer’s papers and cater for it. Thanks HP!

    Epson Archival Matte
    A good everyday paper with a smooth white finish which takes the ink well. A minor crit is that the paper is rather thin and so the resulting print doesn’t feel too much like a high quality piece of art. It’s great for sending away to competitions though, where it’s light weight (192gm/sq m) is an advantage and it’s the cheapest of the bunch to buy too. (more…)