How to Do Everything With Your Scanner- P19 pot

Printer Capability Unless you’re content to view images on screen, you’re pretty much dependent on your printer to do your carefully scanned and edited image final justice.. This book as

lots of image data CD-R and CD-RW drives have recently come down in price considerably (The latter allows you to rewrite a disk you’ve previously recorded on.) As with hard drives and high-capacity disk drives, a CD-R drive can be either internal or external The external models are easier to install, but aren’t otherwise significantly less expensive As of the writing of this book, you can find many excellent CD-R drives for less than $400

FIGURE 4-6 A Zip drive stores 100 to 250 megabytes on a disk.

FIGURE 4-7 A Jaz drive adds 1 or 2 gigabytes of storage space to your PC.

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Where to Shop for Additional Storage Devices

Once you decide you do need to add some more storage space to your PC before scanning and image-editing full swing, it’s a straightforward task The Microsoft Network shopping site offers you excellent resources for comparing features and prices of all types of external drives The site, located at www.eshop.msn.com, shown in Figure 4-8, allows you to specify search criteria as to the type of peripheral you want (for example,

a new CD-R drive), as well as your price range You can even do a detailed comparison

of the features of the models you decide you like best, based on your initial search

FIGURE 4-8 Comparison-shop for storage devices on the MSN website.

Printer Capability

Unless you’re content to view images on screen, you’re pretty much dependent on your printer to do your carefully scanned and edited image final justice

This book assumes you’re currently using—or are going to be purchasing—an inkjet printer, rather than a laser printer for your color photos The reason for this is

that color laser printers are expensive In fact, too expensive to be serious contenders for the home-based user More importantly, you can get a result that is, for all practical purposes, just as good as a color laser printer using an inkjet printer

CMYK vs Photo-Quality Printers

That being said, there are two varieties of inkjet printers—standard and photo-quality

Either of them is a solid investment, but the photo-quality printer is designed specifically

to produce great color photographs On the other hand, a standard inkjet printer (also called a CMYK printer) might be quite adequate if you scan a lot of black-and-white images or text since you don’t need the capacity to reproduce a wide range of colors

How the CMYK Printer Works The standard type inkjet printer uses two cartridges The

first one contains only black ink, and the second contains three colors of ink: cyan, yellow, and magenta Hence the moniker CMYK printers; the K stands for black since the letter B could be mistakenly assumed to refer to blue These four colors can be combined to produce nearly every color imaginable, as explained in Chapter 2

There are also “three-color” printers on the market that don’t contain black ink Instead, they produce black by combining the other colors.

The result is inferior, and most users don’t feel that the cost savings are worth skimping on the black ink.

The Photo-Quality Printer Photo-quality printers are specially designed to give you great results when printing color photos This printer uses six different colors of ink,

as opposed to the four colors used in standard CMYK printers Why are more ink colors better? Because it means you can reproduce the colors of an image more accurately when you’re scanning at lower resolutions

The major downside to a photo-quality printer is—you guessed it—price They’re generally 30 to 40 percent more expensive than their CMYK counterparts Additionally, the replacement cartridges are about 30 percent more expensive

Shopping for a Printer

Shopping for a printer on line has the advantage of convenience, and being able to compare lots of prices and specifications with a click of your mouse A great place to start an online search is the ZDNet site at www.zdnet.com/products/ shown in Figure 4-9

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FIGURE 4-9 The ZDNet website is a great place to shop for a printer.

Looking for a bargain on a printer? Don’t forget to check the Overstock.com website, located at www.overstock.com, shown in Figure 4-10 This site capitalizes on the mistakes of other Internet-based businesses—close-outs, overstocks, and even bankruptcies You can get surprisingly up-to-date merchandise at a steal of a deal Shopping in an office-equipment store has some advantages, too The biggest one

is that you can test the output of the printer To make the most of this opportunity, go

to one of the larger office supply stores that are likely to have several printers on display Take a photograph with you that has lots of people in it Accurate skin tones are some of the hardest shades to replicate and the easiest to discern if they’re a little bit off You’ll notice a slightly greenish or yellow tinge on a face a lot faster than whether the t-shirt or lawn is off a shade or two