iPhoto - how to get good quality prints at home?

[sigamy]

I'm trying to get quality 4x6 photo prints on my home printer from iPhoto.

We have ordered prints thru the Kodak service and they come out perfect--no complaints at all. Printing at home is a challenge though. I have an Epson Stylus Photo 785EPX photo printer. I had to play with the settings under WinXP with my Kodak software in order to get good prints. Now I'm trying to do this with iPhoto.

At 2880dpi the prints are pretty good, but still no where near what I get from the Kodak service. Is this just a function of my low-end printer?

I've tried all the differnet paper settings, dpi settings, etc.

My setup is Olympus C-3000 (3.3mp cam), iPhoto 2, iMac G4 1ghz, Panther, Epson 785EPX, Kodak Premium paper and Epson ink.

I'm not yet worried about borderless, etc. I'm just printing 4x6 photos on 8.5x11 paper. The colors, details, etc are just not good--it doesn't really look like a photo.

So, any tips on how to improve the quality? Or do I need to step up to a better printer? And if so, any recommendations?

TIA,
Brian

 

[Horrortaxi]

I'm not familiar with your particular printer, but in general getting good photo prints takes a combination of decent camera and good printer. You need to take a good picture to begin with (garbage in-garbage out) on a camera that gives enough information for a good print to be possible. You can do photoshop voodoo to help it along but you won't have a good print if the printer won't print well.

There are print settings though--if you are printing in draft mode even the best printer will make your stuff look bad.

I use a Canon i850 and I love it. I've been using Epson 4x6 glossy paper and it gives good results. I generally just print pictures the way they come out of the camera and they end up looking like traditional film prints. My wife does all the Photoshop stuff and hers come out looking beyond perfect.

If I can further pimp my printer a little--a good feature on it is that every color has it's own cartridge. You can run out of yellow and replace it for $14 instead of replacing yellow-cyan-majenta for $30 when you had plenty of cyan and majenta left.