I got an HP 4500 inkjet two or three years ago and it hasn’t broken since then, so that’s a kind of progress compared to my experience with quite a few other manufacturers. Knock on wood, etc. I would like to have a super arty printer but I couldn’t afford either the money or the hassle if it malfunctioned, which seems almost certain given contemporary QA (non-)practices.
About 14 years ago I totally geeked out on photo printing after getting one of the 1st good consumer SLR digicams (Oly 2500L). I was hand loading archival inks for my Epson 750 photo printer and buying exotic papers. After I while I realized getting Fuji machine prints from Costco was so much more cost effective. I recently had a bunch of terrific looking 16 x20 prints made for framing around the house, cost $7 each. Maybe not good enough to sell for big bucks, I don’t know, but they look great to me, and I spent half of high school in the darkroom. I certainly have paid far more for C-prints from large format negs that looked worse.
I have a low end HP color laser (2410?) for the kids to print homework and such on. Its a little cranky with it’s connectivity but at least it doesn’t blow a fortune on cleaning it’s jets every time it’s used.
I for one welcome the new glass-screwing future. I mean, if it tickles you to write or bump something on it in the coming year, it sounds fun. I’m just going to try to look at proofs on a 10bit monitor instead of paper, if that would work. [Ponders getting some 50mm Zeiss glass and a ring light screwed on a Galaxy Tab 3, then a more earnest PnS.]
insert ObThe_sRGB_Conspiracy_Bankrolled_My_Golden_Hour_Arborist
insert ObWhat_5yo_Kid_Shoots_In_Black_and_White Nope
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[quote=“redesigned, post:11, topic:71014, full:true”]
i can still remember the sound of dot matrix and daisey wheel printers![/quote]
I still keep one of these around for printing ditto masters.
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We have to keep using these for printing air waybills… No way to make two copies on the layered carbonless copy forms in other than mechanical-impact way.
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Could we have that off the shelf and cheap, please? And with ability to print various, even custom-made/self-mixed, inks?
I’d have quite some uses for that. Including but not limited to high-fps thermal imaging sensor arrays (print conductive and insulating materials for the wire matrix, soluble stuff for support for the sensor elements, vanadium pentoxide sol-gel precursor for the elements themselves… and fuck you ITAR!)…
Those old uncoated lenses turn out to be a lot of the vaunted ‘film look’ that’s allegedly hard to recapture on modern video. Though I think a big part of that might just be that in the modern context, their low contrast inadvertantly compensates for the reduced dynamic range.
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Seems to me that Epson might have a handle on nozzle clogging issues. I’ve had an XP 800 for several years and don’t recall ever having to run a head cleaning. And that’s with only printing once every couple months.
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Yes, it is the same, as we were discussing how print heads clog when the printer is not used often. I was responding to the following message:
You need to learn how to follow comment threads.
Anecdotally that’s history. I heard an interview with a director who loved film whose DP set up a side by side blind viewing, and they were indistinguishable.
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Yeah, I think it might be film that’s giving that look instead of the sensor…
It is the technology that will not die.
It’s the whole chain, not just any one thing.
Oh, I dunno. Light travels through the lens and hits the light recording medium. If I take a lens on a Nikon film camera and move it to a DSLR, the only thing changing is the medium and film is the only one that’s going to give the look of film. I’m not advocating one is better than the other, I’m saying they’re still going to look different and that it’s not the chain, just the medium.
With apologies to Marshall McLuhan, the chain is the medium. There is no one single film look, and no one single thing that makes it. The “film look” depends on what era, what film, etc. you are trying to evoke. And those are based on the whole chain, from the film format, stock and lighting choices, the lensing, the frame rate, the mechanics and artifacts of the camera, the development of the negs, the color grading and optical printing, and the projection or telecine process.
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What where indistinguishable?
I think I might agree, I believe that once you have enough resolution and dynamic range, the “film look” becomes a form of deliberate distortion (kind of like how vinyl is ‘warmer’)
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Sorry, film and digital were indistinguishable. I remember now, it was Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan, I think interviewed by Elvis Mitchell. They were discussing the incredible look of the show.
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