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Another less talked about aspect of printing is the depth or intensity of color saturation. Most high end professional printers will do a good job creating vivid prints, but some professional wide format printers are able to make colors that are more intense than others. Do your prints contain a full black? Although all printers print with black inks some print a deeper black adding to the look of a wider gamet. Are the reds a bright red rather than muddy rust color? Red is one of the harder colors to get fully saturated being a composite of magenta and yellow inks. The same is true to a lesser extent of green and blue tones. Some printers print with the three basic colors and others use black to deepen colors. Stan's Canon 9100 printer utilizes 12 colors of pigment inks which gives it a saturation and depth not always found in other printers.

                                      

A short discussion of ink types is necessary here regarding what makes a superb print, although a fuller discussion will be found in Prints That Last. It has been well known that printing with pigment inks generally produces prints with a longer display life than those made with dye based inks. However ink technology has come a long way in the last few years so that the gap has narrowed and now pigment prints from high end wide format printers are almost as vibrant as dye based prints. When Stan acquired his Canon 9100 last year it was after seeing a printer demo where the color vividness blew him away. It was as good as anything he had gotten previously with the Colorspan dye ink based printer which he regarded as a superb printer. For him this was critical as the quality and appearance of a print is tied very directly to the vibrancy and gamut width represented in a print. Now color vibrancy could be had coupled with better display life.

Another aspect that is critical for producing a superb print is sharpness? What produces sharpness anyhow? There is no getting around the fact that image sharpness depends first and foremost upon the file size of the image. The larger the image the greater is the potential for sharpness and clarity. The real point at which one controls how sharp an image will be is at the beginning of the process when the image is being captured either in a digital camera or in the slide or print scanner. Camera's are limited in the maximum size of image depending upon their capability. An 12 megapixel camera will capture a much larger image than a 8 megapixel camera and therefore produce an image that has much higher sharpness and clarity. A flat bed scanner can scan at even higher resolutions and make bigger file sizes with more resolution than a camera image.

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