PRINT AT HOME
Hello readers, thank you for the overwhelming response to the first edition of Printing and Beyond published last month. Thank you for the emails appreciating this initiative taken by your magazine. This clearly reflects your interest in printing photographs. At our end, we will try and make it more informative. Please keep writing to us and letting us know about various aspects of Print that you would want us to write about. And in case you have a printer at home, do share with us about what you print and if you have created any creative projects either for yourself, others in the family or friends or for kids at home, please do share.
Over the last few years, home printing has really caught on. From a technological point of view, there are several ways to print a photograph. However, for our discussion, we will stick to a A4 size inkjet colour printer (with or without a scanner and copier), using four inks – cyan, magenta, yellow and black, which produces good quality photo prints, ideal for documents too – typical home requirement. Dedicated inkjet photo printers, for home application and entry-level studio use, typically have 2 additional inks – light cyan and light magenta which helps deliver a bigger colour gamut. The additional light-coloured inks help print smoother gradients and improved skin tones.
The market for home printing is growing by leaps and bounds and this is further being pushed by work from home (WFH) culture. An inkjet printer is used by almost every member of the family, more often by children for their school and college projects. Some of the popular inkjet printer brands in India are, in no particular order, Epson, Canon and HP.
In a conversation with Siva Kumar K, Senior General Manager – IJP, Epson India, this is what he has to say; “Demand for printing at home remains extremely robust. As many companies continue to partially or fully work-from-home, the need for printing at home remains high. Productivity and efficiency cannot be compromised. At the same time kids continue to need printers for school notes, projects and homework. Economical and eco-friendly ink tank printers continue gaining popularity among home consumers over the traditionally inconvenient and expensive cartridge based printers. Printing of office documents, kid’s projects, tickets, scanning documents and even photos to customise their home workspaces are most popular. Some amateur and enthusiast photographers are also buying Epson Eco Tank Photo Printers to print their photographs at home.”