FOR many people, printing photos at home is more easily said than done. There are store shelves full of specialized papers to choose from, ink cartridges to fiddle with and cryptic computer settings to decipher. Even then, the print may look more like a bad television image than the rich color photos promised by printer manufacturers.
"A lot of people get all the equipment and they think they've got the problem solved," said Michael D. Prestidge, the worldwide product marketing manager for digital and film imaging systems at Eastman Kodak.
"But," he added, holding up a print with blotches of white and irregular streaks of color, "they click Print and get this."
Every printer is different, Mr. Prestidge said, and many functions can be confusing or otherwise go wrong. But don't give up yet. Some broad guidelines and a bit of experimentation can enable even modest home inkjet printers to produce high-quality photos. Moreover, home printing allows you to customize your pictures at an affordable cost.
Manufacturers make most of their money on ink cartridges; the printers themselves can be relatively inexpensive. To test the compatibility of its inkjet papers, Kodak (which does not make inkjet printers) buys nearly every printer that comes on the market. Lately, Mr. Prestidge said, the company has found that good photos can be made by nearly any $100-to-$150 photo printer.
Most consumer inkjet photo printers use color inks made with dyes rather than pigments, and dye-based inks are generally better able to render subtle differences in color and tone than pigment-based ones are.
"If you factor in ink speed and picture quality, dyes offer the best solution for high-quality image applications," said Nils Miller, senior ink and media scientist at Hewlett-Packard. But dye inks, unlike those made with pigments, dissolve when wet.
Some people might be willing to trade slightly lower image quality for superior durability, but pigment printers designed for home use generally share one undesirable property: they cannot create true glossy photos. Pigments are fine solid particles, so pigment inks are not fully absorbed into the coating on photo inkjet paper. The result is a dull finish.
Deciding which kind of ink you prefer is easier than selecting paper. Photo paper is not merely heavier stock. Inkjet printers work by spraying precise droplets of ink, and the fine detail and distinct colors of the photo depend on the integrity of the droplets. But the droplets run together as they soak into the fibers of ordinary paper. Photo papers, on the other hand, have as many as nine coatings to keep ink from reaching the paper and to protect it after it dries.
The array of photo papers can be dizzying. Consumers' top choice, digital photography companies have found, is a paper with a glossy finish. Glossy paper is more easily marked by fingerprints, and glare can be a problem, but it displays photos in the sharpest detail and with the brightest colors.
Matte photo paper dulls colors and contrast, but it can be useful for printing scanned family photos that have been damaged by years of storage.
For general use, papers described as having a pearl, semigloss or soft gloss finish are best. Some of these surfaces, however, don't work well with pigment-based inks.
The most obvious difference between most manufacturers' cheapest photo papers and the top of the line, apart from price, is the weight of the stock. Some companies also claim that their more expensive papers have additional coatings. Kodak, for example, recently updated its Ultima paper with something called ColorLast, which it describes as a nanoparticulate technology.
Finally there is the question of brand. "Your best bet is using a paper recommended by the printer manufacturer," Keith Kratzberg, the director of photo imaging at Epson. "When a third-party paper manufacturer says, 'This works in every printer,' that is not a credible statement to me."
Not surprisingly, paper makers disagree.
Printer makers say that people sometimes go astray by failing to alter their printer settings when printing photos rather than documents. Most printers' default settings are appropriate for ordinary inkjet paper; with photo paper, those settings can result in a photo marred by streaky bands of color like the one shown by Mr. Prestidge of Kodak.
Some Hewlett-Packard models have an automatic scanning system that can detect what category of paper is loaded. But even those printers should be set manually to achieve accurate color.
Printing good photos also requires patience. At high-speed settings, printers spray ink too fast for the photo paper to absorb it. That turns dark areas into featureless blotches of ink that in reflected light may appear to be bronze-colored.
Printer manufacturers and Kodak supply software that adjusts settings for their brands of paper. For paper made by other companies, details of appropriate settings for various printers can be found online or in the instructions packaged with the paper.
Regardless of your paper choice, there is one other important setting. It is described differently by different printer makers, but the general suggestion is that what you are choosing is the overall quality level of the photo. In fact, what is being adjusted in most cases is the printer's speed.
The highest quality setting uses the most ink and takes the longest time. For enlargements of good photos, I found the wait worthwhile. But there is little or no benefit from using the highest quality setting for snapshot-size prints. At that size there is little discernable difference between the highest quality and lower-quality settings that are frequently - and confusingly - labeled Best.
On the question of which brands of printers and paper are compatible, everybody is partly wrong. The two consumer pigment-ink printers I tried sometimes lost detail in dark areas when used with some third-party papers. But they sometimes had the same problem with papers offered by their own manufacturers.
The three printers that used dye-based inks varied in their forgiveness toward papers made by others. The Epson Stylus Photo 820 and the Hewlett-Packard Photosmart 7960 produced very good prints with other brands of paper (including Canon's), provided that the other maker's least expensive kind was not used.
Prints made on Kodak and Fuji paper using the exceptionally fast Canon i860 look very good initially. But reflective light sometimes exposes ridges on the surface where light and dark areas within a photo meet, a sign that the paper failed to fully absorb the ink. By contrast, prints made with Canon's own paper look consistently smooth.
Finally, the top-of-the-line papers from all makers generally rendered subtle color and tonal differences better than discount papers did. They all seemed to have a nicer feel. But those differences will appear only if the photos are of an equally high quality.
As Mr. Katzberg of Epson pointed out, "The first principle in all this is, garbage in, garbage out."
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company