Guyserman Loc: Benton, AR

I'm not paying attention now because I don't print but if I should want to find it in the future it would be nice if it had 'Calibrate' and 'Printer' in the title.

chasgroh Loc: Buena Park, CA

You don't say what type monitor you have, but you probably need a new one that'll get 100% RGB at least; I use the i1 Display Pro for calibration. Then the printer; I'm into a Epson P800 and it's great and will print 24x16"...but the ink prices suck (there are ways around that, but purists will bridle). If you get your two big pieces of hardware up to speed, then you need to get your brain there, too. Haha...welcome to the black hole of printing. I'm into the fine art side of things, and am a bit OCD besides, so it's important to get it right. YMMV. Keep at it, it'll come...

cjc2 Loc: Hellertown PA

Epson inks for the Epson P800 are some of the best values for Epson ink available. I have been successfully using an Epson P800 for quite a long time and am pleased with both the prints and the ink costs. Making a high quality ink jet photo print requires good hardware and good ink an the P800 provides both. YMMV.

That said, may I suggest to the OP to check out the Red River Paper site which contains all the information one would need on creating a color-corrected workflow. I does sound daunting, but once mastered, is not that difficult. BEFORE you start making your own prints, you need to follow some of the advice listed here. I am a BIG fan of Red River Papers and use them almost exclusively. Best of luck.

hrblaine

[quote=will47] What product(s) would you suggest to calibrate my printer to what I see on my screen.

I've been taking pics for over 50 years, started digital maybe 5 years ago. I print with a Canon Pro-100 and I have never calibrated anything. Still, my prints look good to these old eyes and I get no complaints when I give prints away. My SO prints with some kind of Canon Pix, samo-samo, also no calibration but prints look good and faithful. Of course, I print on good stock, not typing paper. Harry

chasgroh Loc: Buena Park, CA

...hopefully I'll get used to the ink prices...Red River is da bomb! I'm using the "Paper Canvas" and just love it for my art stuff...

John Hicks Loc: Sible Hedinham North Essex England

I use an Epson photo printer 1500W for printing my pictures it cost just £500.00 when new and can print A4 and A3 photographs it also uses Epson Claria ink which cost £16.00 per cartridge and their are six cartridges in the printer so when changing all six cartridges it cost just £100.00.

It is an excellent printer and claria inks have a projected life of 300 years although obviously I will not be around to see that
I use high gloss photographic paper you can also print CD a on the printer although I never have

imagemeister Loc: mid east Florida

this will make the search engine "work"

JD750 Loc: SoCal

What is he supposed to do with that information?

I have an idea. When you decide to print you can post here with ‘Calibrate' and 'Printer' in the title.

amfoto1 Loc: San Jose, Calif. USA

I use a Datacolor Spyder to calibrate my monitor. X-Rite makes good ones too. This will go a long way toward setting up your monitor so that what you see is what you get. Once your monitor is calibrated, you'll be able to "soft proof" in your image editing software to have a pretty good idea what your print will look like. It's not perfect and never will be... a backlit monitor displays an image differently than it looks on paper (transmissive light versus reflective). A monitor can never render perfect black or pure white. But the calibration will get it in a range you can work with and after a little while you become accustomed to it and can predict what your prints will look like pretty accurately.

A basic monitor calibration device typically costs around $150. You don't need anything more expensive and complex than that, unless you need to calibrate other devices or want to make custom printer profiles to use fancy paper and 3rd party inks.

Keep in mind that a calibration device pays for itself in time, with savings of ink and paper you were wasting without it. It's possible to calibrate by eye and just tweak things until the prints are what you want. But that can take a lot of trial and error... and a lot of ink and paper that cost $$$. The closer you can get to "perfect" with the first print, the better.

Recommendations for a printer are another problem. I'm not familiar with the one you use. But they all "drink" ink!

An inkjet for photo printing needs to have at least six colors.... cyan, magenta, yellow, light (or "photo") cyan and light (or "photo") magenta and black. The Canon Pro-100 I use has eight colors... same as the above plus two grays for much better black and white printing. I also use an HP 9180 that uses a similar eight color array of inks. The Pro-100's ink cartridges are small and cost around $17 each (about $125 for a full set). The HP's ink tanks are much larger... about 4X or 5X the size, but also almost 3X the cost. The HP is a discontinued model and I'm having trouble finding inks for it now.

The Canon Pro-10 printer uses ten colors, but has recently been discontinued and replaced by the Pro-300, which uses ten colors: Black, matte black, gray, cyan, light cyan, magenta, light magenta, yellow, red and a clear coating called chroma optimizer that's used to make the sheen on prints more even across all the colors.

All these printers are 13" wide format, allowing up to 13x19" prints and smaller.

The Canon Pro-100 uses dye-based Claria inks, which I prefer on gloss and luster papers.

The Pro-300 uses pigment-based inks (as does my HP printer), which I prefer on matte "museum" quality papers. Prints that I sell are done on this printer and paper.

Pigment inks are supposedly longer lasting, rated for over 200 years (on archival paper). Dye inks in the past were pretty short lived, only about 25 years, but I've seen prints from older dye-based printers fade in two years or less if they were exposed to a lot of sunlight. With the newer dye-based ink from Canon, they claim a life span of more than 100 years.

200 years... 100 years. Hey, either way, I won't be around to see it! But I do see a difference in the way dye and pigment inks "work" on different types of papers, as mentioned above.

Epson is the other major maker of photo quality printers and offers some pretty similar to the above.

There are "mega tank" and "eco tank" printers... but none of them are photo quality. They typically only have four colors.

I don't know what's available in 8.5" printers, if you don't want or need the wider format. If at all possible, I'd recommend at least eight color, though... even in a smaller format. A six color Epson I used for many years wasn't up to making prints for the wall... only thumbnail catalogs (and various office documents). For the "serious" photo prints, I used the Canon and HP printers mentioned above... and before them some Epson 13" wide format with similar ink sets.