Sidebar Title goes Here
Inkjet printers are cheap, often sold at or below cost. But the
consumables—the paper and the ink—are expensive, eas-
ily outpacing the cost of the hardware after a few hundred
prints. Unfortunately, this is one area where it doesn’t pay
to pinch pennies. Simply put, the consumables dictate the
quality of your inkjet output. Throwing money at consum-
ables doesn’t necessarily ensure great output, but scrimping
guarantees bad output.
Consider the following scenario:
- For purposes of illustration, my sample printer is an
Epson Stylus Photo 1280. It’s not a new printer (I’ve
had it for several years), but it works great, the software
mostly makes sense, it can print as many as 2880 dots per
inch, and it well represents a standard consumer printer. - The Stylus Photo 1280 requires two ink cartridges,
pictured below. The first cartridge holds black ink; the
second contains five colors: two shades of cyan, two
Quality Comes at a Price
shades of magenta, and yellow. (As the reasoning goes,
the lighter cyan and magenta better accommodate deep
blues, greens, and flesh tones.) Together, the cartridges
cost about $60.00 and last for 45 to 120 letter-sized prints,
depending on the quality setting you choose. The higher
the setting, the more ink the printer consumes. So the
ink alone costs 50¢ to $1.33 per page.- You can print to regular photocopier-grade paper. But
while such paper is inexpensive, it’s also porous, sopping
up ink like a paper towel. To avoid overinking, you have
to print at low resolutions, so the output tends to look
substandard—about as good as a color photo printed
in a newspaper. - To achieve true photo-quality prints that rival those from
a commercial photo lab, you need to use photo-grade
paper (or simply photo paper), which increases your costs
even further. For example, 20 sheets of the stuff in the
packet shown below costs $13.50, or about 67¢ per sheet.
430 Lesson 12: Print and Web Output