Small Prints

A month or so ago I bought a small printer normally thought of as for the TikTok generation. The Canon Selphie (CP-1500) has a correspondingly obnoxious name.

A Small Printer

The very small cadre of followers may know that I like to take my photographs out into the real world on occasion. I have a darkroom where I make black and white prints from my film negatives. I get some of my digital images made into film negatives and then print them in my darkroom as well.

Morse Brothers StudiosDoug Morse

It is however relatively affordable and uses dye sublimation technology to make small color prints (100mm x 148mm) which is 3.9 x 5.8 inches almost 4x6 inches.

I am determined to use this printer as if it can produce seriously nice prints. I think it does. There is a trend in photography to go for heavily saturated photos. I am pretty sure some inkjet printers can produce more saturated images but generally I think this is overdone. As my previous post pointed out the range of color (gamut) of this printer is very close to inkjet printing.

Here are a couple of examples. The middle one is an inkjet print. The top is a CP-1500 print with brightness adjusted to match. The photo below exaggerates the lack of saturation compared to the inkjet print but it is not as saturated. The bottom print I boosted the saturation and it exceeded the saturation of the inkjet version.

There is the usual problem I encounter with matching the screen to print but the first results are decently close and at $0.33 a print it isn’t prohibitively expensive to run a few prints to dial in exactly what you want. (At least compared to my darkroom prints where I can blow through ten sheets of paper to get to a good print.)

I am assembling an album of my favorite images using these small prints.

Small Print Album Project

I have always loved printing my photographs. It is an oft-repeated truth that holding a photograph is special in a way that a screen cannot compete with.

Morse Brothers StudiosDoug Morse

I recently bought some small mattes for framing. You can get them in batches online. They don’t quite fit as they are meant for true 4x6 prints. It is also true that my camera has a 4:3 aspect ratio and the paper is 3:2 so unless I crop the print it is not a perfect fit. What I do is carefully trim the prints, then glue them to the backing card and then glue the matte window on top. Here are a couple of examples.

These mattes are made to fit a standard 5x7 frame so you can get a cheap framed print. I also intend to get four-by-six mattes that fit eight-by-ten frames to give more isolation of the image. Again these will fit standard frames so another cheap framing option.

Below are some cheap Walmart 5x7 frames. With the mattes they make a nice display for the wall or desk. The cost is between $1.50 and $3.50 each. The prints are about $0.33 each so for less than $5.00 you are good to go.