Printer quality

Televisions/monitors are improving on a daily basis in terms of HDR/4K/whatnot...why are we not seeing a comparable improvement in printers?

Physics mostly.

There is only so much you can do with physical materials to reproduce an image, and printer development kind of ran into a lot of the practical limits awhile back. We can get the droplets of ink to go smaller than what we currently have them in modern printers, but then the accuracy of where they actually end up and what shape they are takes a complete nosedive. To practically improve in pinter resolution above and beyond what we currently have then we need far more strict quality controls with regards to paper specifications.

Plus the alignment procedures required for that manner of accuracy would greatly slow printing down.


What we have seen with regards to improvements in printers in the last while has been the overall speed and colour quality. Large format printers already have insanely high resolutions, so there is limited market pressure to develop consumer products that do better. What customers want are prints that come out faster, are dry and ready sooner, and which not only display more vibrant and accurate colours but also last longer than they did before.

Building a printer with more resolution for the sake of more resolution with tech as it currently is would be going counter to what the vast majority of consumers actually want for practical use.

Sure, I would love a printer at home that could accurately encode an 18mpix image onto something smaller than a stamp so that I would need optics to view it clearly, but I would much prefer to have one of 'reasonable' resolution that could have a finished 8x10 in my hand in less than 5 seconds after I hit print. One of those I would enjoy and geek out over, the other my friends/family/clients would find far more interesting.

Perhaps it's time to get away from the ink drops on paper concept, which has peaked out...
maybe to some sort of an electronic pixel deposit onto an an electronic substrate. My mind tends to wander.

Some akin to using a monitor as a display medium hanging in your LR.

Pixels vs Dots is a very complex subject for resolution and detail reproduction, and cannot be directly compared, but most mid to high end printers already far exceed the general resolution of 4 and 8K displays. Displays, being transmissive rather reflective, do have an advantage in colour reproduction, and processing for screen vs for printing is a rather different task in and of itself because of that, but you will be hard pressed to improve on physical image quality without sacrificing speed and running/consumable cost rates.

If you thought inkjet technology was expensive to buy and run, wait till you see the cost of thin-film display production.

Printers are inherently limited by the fact that they only produce things on reflective paper. Entirely different animal if you want TRANSMISSIVE ...dyes vs. pigment issue, so that backlighting the 'transparency' expands the dynamic range of the viewed image.

Digital projection is really a sorry state, can't even achieve the resolution of the Canon 20D yet! Even viewing on monitors is not even up to the standard of the 20D!

So while the typical digital photographer rants about DR, and swoons over 25Mpixel images (and now 50Mpixel), they have no idea what majesty comes with a projected slide from 135, and cannot even imagine the impact of a 645 or 6x6 slide projected. In this regard, photography has slipped back to the 'Dark Ages'

All I want is to totally duplicate what I would see on my monitor were it hanging in my living room,
regardless of the lighting scenario.

Maybe buy a display, raspberry Pi, and a motion sensor of some kind if a monitor is your preferred display medium?

chauncey wrote in post #18103753
All I want is to totally duplicate what I would see on my monitor were it hanging in my living room,
regardless of the lighting scenario.

Heh! I've had prints hanging on my walls that I've been quite happy with, but there have been occasions when I've had a computer hooked up to my 52-inch widescreen TV and I've done a slideshow for visitors/friends, and the response has been "Wow!", so...

chauncey wrote in post #18103538
Some akin to using a monitor as a display medium hanging in your LR.

Why "akin" to this? Just do it.

Of course, if you want to give Grandma a print to put on her wall, it will start to get expensive.

I don't think that resolution is the issue with printers, particularly at normal reproduction sizes. It's more a matter, as others have said, of the characteristics of a backlit display versus those of a sheet of paper.

chauncey wrote in post #18103753
All I want is to totally duplicate what I would see on my monitor were it hanging in my living room,
regardless of the lighting scenario.

Do you have the proper lighting on your prints. Makes all the difference in the world.

Personally I think a print hanging on the wall properly mounted and framed with the right lighting beats any images I see on a display. The displayed images lack texture, lack depth...they are just bright and bold and after a while look all the same. I like the ability to choose the paper medium I want for a given print to match the mood of the print. Many of my images are printed in B&W on a matte or textured paper to give them mood and character...which is lacking on a monitor.

Does that"wow"factor outweigh their reaction to your prints?

chauncey wrote in post #18104439
Does that"wow"factor outweigh their reaction to your prints?

Well, my prints have been framed and hanging on walls, and when people have walked around, checking them out, sure, they are happy! 'Course it's also nice to get a positive response with Internet "sharing", whether here, or on FaceBook, or people checking out my PBase gallery...and, like I said, it's nice when someone is settled down in the living room and you can treat them to some visual "pleasure"!

But I admit that there have been times when people have suggested that I put photos into a gallery, and then I have to stop and consider a whole upgrade of the printing process!

tonylong wrote in post #18103919
Heh! I've had prints hanging on my walls that I've been quite happy with, but there have been occasions when I've had a computer hooked up to my 52-inch widescreen TV and I've done a slideshow for visitors/friends, and the response has been "Wow!", so...

Kinda reminds me of the difference between seeing a really large print vs. a medium format transparency projected onto a big screen...more apparent DR