Lily Pang Art

Lily Pang Art and Design, Gardening, Painting

Monday, March 15, 2010

My New Printer Epson T40W and Owl Cherry Blossom Flower Tree Abstract Landscape Print

I got a new printer over the weekend. It is an Epson T40W printer. My old printer gives me a lot of problem lately. You need to print a half page image before the colors are getting right. It  makes me wast a lot of time and papers. I thought I might just change it.

I am very happy with the new printer. It is with the range of printers from Epson with pigment ink. It is superb when printing on matte or semi-glossy papers. The colors are fantastic. The best thing is that it uses pigment ink thus all my glass pendant images are safe when they are attached to the glass tiles, i.e. the image will not smudge.

The printer doesn't vibrate very hard as comparing to the other printers that I have used from Epson. This is good because I put the printer on my desk and it would make you feel very unconformable if it vibrates too much. 

It can be used wirelessly, meaning that you can print image without linking a cord from my laptop to the printer. But it needs some effort to set it up. I am still working on this. It would be good that I don't have to plug the cord every-time I try to print.

The image shown on my laptop screen is the Owl Green Print. I was working on a layout for a print.

My experience of selecting a printer is summarized as the follows.

For an artist, the quality of image is the most important factor when selecting a printer. The quality depends on the types of image you have. If you print mostly large photos, you need to look at those dye based ink printers with many ink cartridges. If you print small photos or art work, you can select other type of printer. 

The another features affecting the quality of image are "Max Print Resolution" and  "Min Ink Droplet Size". I found that "Max Print Resolution" is almost the same for all the printers, but Min Ink Droplet Size varies from printer to printer. The T40W is 2pl. The number is the smaller the better. I tried something of 4pl printer. The image is obviously coarse. You cannot tell much difference if the image is printed on big size papers. But when it is printed on small one such as the size of a glass tile, when I put it under the glass tile, I feel a bit dizzy when I look at it.

If you are not printing super large size image, I believe that most of the printers can meet your requirement. But do select the  Min Ink Droplet Size with at least 3 or smaller if you need to print small image that can fit into a glass tile.