April 2010: Understanding Your Photo Printer

Years ago I wrote four articles related to the understanding of how to make the most of the paper you use in your printer, the tradeoffs of borderless and non-borderless printing, and some problems you might run into if you are new to photo printing... and possibly even if you are a seasoned professional.  Judging by the number of emails that I get each week related to these topics, I thought it important to go over these points again and point my readers to the in depth articles that discuss each of the topics.  To effectively use any photo printing software, you must understand the basics of how your printer handles paper and how to work within the limitations of the equipment.  As such, these topics are applicable to every photo printing application available since they all are bound by the limitations of your printer and its associated driver!  To make each subject clear, I'll pose questions as I normally receive them via email and I'll then offer solutions to each.

Printers have physical limitations that result in mandatory margins along the edge of the paper.  If you have 8.5 x 11 paper loaded in your printer, you might notice that you can't print anything larger than an 8.23 x 10.76 inch print.  The exact numbers aren't important: the question that often arises is "Why can't I print an 8.5 x 11 photo"?  The answer lies in the fact that your printer has physical limitations that make it impossible to print over the entire surface of the paper unless you print in borderless mode (see next topic).  If you haven't selected borderless printing in your printer driver, no software will be able to print over the entire page: all software will be limited by the capabilities defined by your printer driver and if those limitations are 8.23 x 10.76, then that's the largest size you are going to get regardless of the printing software used.

Limitations such as the fact that the print head must be able to accelerate and decelerate near the edges of the paper, and the fact that the roller can only guide paper a certain distance from the top/bottom dictate the margins.  The smaller size is often referred to as the "printable area" of the page.  Here's my article that explains the process in detail.

 

To overcome the limitations of non-borderless printing as outlined in the section above, most printers now offer borderless printing.  Just check "borderless" in your printer driver and, as long as the paper type you have selected supports borderless printing, you're off and running.  Well, not quite!

Borderless printing comes with a new set of limitations.  In order to print edge to edge (and top to bottom) with no gaps or white slivers at the edges of the paper, most printer drivers expand the size of your prints when you print in borderless mode.  If you are using 8x10 paper and you are printing in borderless mode, your printer will actually expand that 8x10 to be larger so that parts of the print are actually printed beyond the edges of the paper!  For example, your printer may decide to expand your 8x10 to 8.2 x 10.2 so that about .1 inch of the print is actually printed off the edge of the paper (many printers actually have a sponge to soak up the excess ink that prints off the edge of the paper).  This is an "artificial" expansion because the user often cannot tell that it is happening: the printing software actually sends an 8x10 size but the driver then takes over and has a mind of its own, adding whatever amount of expansion it thinks it needs and therefore making the size bigger than 8x10.

If this artificial expansion is not done and you try to print exactly 8.0 x 10.0 inches on paper that measures 8.0 x 10.0 inches, inevitably you'll end up with a print where a tiny sliver is cropped off on one side and a white sliver appears unprinted on the opposing edge.  The reason is that the paper loading mechanisms in printers are not exact.  If the paper loads even a small fraction of an inch or a fraction of a millimeter too far to the left or right or if the paper isn't perfectly "square" or it doesn't load perfectly parallel to the guides, you'll notice immediately.  Any error at all will result in cropping on one edge and unprinted paper on the opposing edge.  The expansion (and printing beyond the edge of the paper) is a way to mitigate this problem.

Unfortunately, this artificial expansion always occurs no matter what size you are printing which causes a slightly different issue if you try to print multiple prints on a borderless page.  If you print two 5x7 prints on an 8x10 sheet of paper for example, the 5 inch side of the prints will be expanded to about 5.1 inches each so you'll end up with part of the left edge of one print being cropped off (it will print beyond the left edge of the paper) and part of the right edge of the right print on the page being cut off (it will print off the right edge of the paper).  Here's my article that explains the ins and outs of borderless printing in detail.

This is an age old problem that is a leftover from the Windows 95 era that still exists in even the latest printer drivers and operating systems.  When printing large prints, particularly on wide format printers, your system has to be able to handle huge amounts of data.  A modest poster size print can be well into the gigabytes as far as the amount of data being sent to the driver.  Your computer, operating system, Windows print spooler, and printer driver all have to be able to handle the amount of data being sent to the driver.  Professional high quality photo printing applications like Qimage typically send much more data to your printer than a typical "dumb printing" app like a photo editor.  Fortunately Qimage is designed to handle unlimited amounts of data without overwhelming the driver because it sends data in smaller chunks rather than just dumping an oversized image all at once.  Still, your system must be set up properly or it may be overwhelmed by the data processing required for large prints.  There are quite a few techniques and tips to be aware of when it comes to printing large prints including Windows printer spool format, network printing tips, and more.  This article on wide format printing and this one on print troubleshooting both serve as a repository of tips that can help you if you run into printing problems when printing large prints.