Posted on 01 February 2007 by Keith
Late in Tuesday’s class we talked about inkjet papers, finishes and sizes. There are a lot of commercial papers you can buy in places like CompUSA, Best Buy, etc. – Kodak, HP, Epson all make papers specifically for their printers. It’s safe to assume if the make of your printer matches the make of the paper … you’re *probably* going to get a decent print. There are other companies that specialize in higher quality papers that deliver excellent general performance across printer brands and also high quality papers. Ilford and Moab are two you might see in retail channels. Red River Paper in TX is one of my favorites as they have a HUGE variety of paper surfaces and sizes.
If you’re thinking of doing your own printing, get samplers, test those on your printer and see which produce the results your after.
There are many more companies than listed here, but this is a starter list to get you going.
URLs :
Moab Paper Company (http://www.moabpaper.com)
Red River Paper (http://www.redriverpaper.com)
Ilford Paper (http://www.ilford.com)
Posted on 01 February 2007 by Keith
Tuesday in class we went over a lot of things at a breakneck speed. In particular, we talked about all the cool online services to make cool things like t-shirts, cards, stamps, canvas prints, panoramas, to name a few. We wanted to put some more details around them so you can get cracking on making cool things of your great digital photos.
Caps, t-shirts, cards, mugs, calendars and other great gifts
Zazzle.com has some of the nicest quality cards and stamps with the fastest turnaround ( 1 day + shipping time ) of any vendor who sells into the one-off specialty market. They have a very nice website and have a lot of products. Close second in speed, but first in customer services is cafepress.com. You can’t go wrong with either of these two.
Books
It seemed like there was a bit of excitement around this as a real possibility. Lulu.com is 100% DIY and geared toward the self-publisher, so expect to have the finished product ready before you send it to them. Mypublisher.com, though, is by far one of the more mature companies in this realm for the consumer, photo market. They have a nice tool to help you layout, upload and pay. Pricing can be very good and they run 50% off promotions from time to time. They also sell the monstrous, 12×16 ( 12×32 fully open ) books! Blurb.com is relatively new, but they have a really nice book making software, though they currently ( and disappointingly ), only sell 8×10″ books.
Stationary and other paper products
Vistaprints.com sells everything stationary under the sun, from letterhead, envelopes to a variety of cards. WARNING : once you buy from them you’ll receive special deals and promotions to get you to make more stuff! Mpix.com is now also making cards and paper products on a variety of paper types, so they will soon be a viable alternative.
Photographic Prints
While there are a number of online photo printing sites, these stand out in terms of popularity, price, quality and service.
