The Digital Revolution is at hand. Why is it that my printer hasn’t been told yet?

I have a Hewlett-Packard C4280 that is the bane of my existence. It’s fairly new, and doesn’t seem to be “failing” in any way (other than that it won’t print, but couldn’t that be user error?), so what gives?

What I’m printing is a Word document comprised of several pictures. None of these pictures have been resized. So, the bork comes in when the printer’s feeble memory has conked out because of these pictures I’m sending it. Not my day.

As often happens when I’m tired and frustrated, I turn to Google, and give a go at finding a better way to do something. As it turns out, someone has a few pointers for me. I’ve consolidated them here:

  1. Maximize Image Quality.
  2. Prepare Your Printer.
  3. Pick the right Paper and Ink.

So, Image quality. Bigger is better. However, if I send several megabytes to my printer, it will croak and die. Commonly, my wife and I try to put up lots of smaller pictures of our boys, and larger pictures for milestones. So, 5×7 prints are usually perfect. Here’s what I found:

  • 2 megapixels: Appropriate for an attractive wallet- (2 1/2 x 3 1/2-inch) or album-sized (4 x 6-inch or 5 x 7-inch) print.
  • 3 megapixels: Minimum resolution required for projects like creating calendars and greeting cards or printing an 8 x 10-inch photo suitable for framing.

That makes it all gravy. This pretty much covers everything I need, and tells me that my 4-megapixel Nikon has plenty of go-juice for my family pictures.

Now, how do I handle things from my printer’s end?

Well, along the same lines as image quality, we want the print quality to be set fairly high. So, on printers, this is our DPI (dots per inch). For you Windows nuts, this will be somewhere in the “Printing Preferences”. Us Linux geeks probably already know where it is. (CUPS, right?)

So, now that the DPI is set to roughly about 1200, my prints should look nice. I am using a glossy finish medium stock for the prints.

This is all great for the printer end, but what about resizing my images to make sure that everything prints smoothly?

To this effect, I have pulled out the GIMP and gone to town.

For the first Image, I open it up, and click Image -> Scale Image.

The GIMP Scale Image Dialog Box

I change the first pulldown from pixels to inches, so I can get a better estimate of my picture.

After this, I matched the DPI resolution on my printer to what I set for the DPI resolution on the GIMP, and voila: I have a ready-made picture, with a correct size. And, my printer didn’t bork!

Needless to say, after all this work, it’s time to go print out a few more pictures.

Thanks!

/cs