Saturday, 19 March 2011

HP Virtual Focus Group - Week 3 - Photos

Ok so we are now into week 3 of the virtual focus group. I am completely up and running and now Wireless (through a wireless dongle!!) which is very exciting!  This week it’s all about the photos. Now as most of you know I’m a big fan of the photos and spend a lot of money on getting copies printed off. I currently have a whole memory card of full of pics waiting to be printed so this was quite a good challenge for me. Both printers have the awesome capacity of being scanners as well as printers so I’ve been getting to grips with that this week.

Another thing that both printers have is the ability to print straight from the camera memory card or from a USB. Again super easy on both and not much to choose between them.  The Kodak wins slightly on this as my memory card wouldn’t fit into the HP so it’s much easier personally to print photos directly onto the Kodak.  The next biggest test then is in the quality of the print and the colours that they produce. Each comes with their own specific paper and these are ones that I printed off and then scanned in:


What do you think? I prefer the one on the left which is from the Kodak print because the colours are much brighter and it keeps the focus of the picture much more than the HP does. Another thing that I didn’t like about printing pictures on the HP was that you could see the lines of printing and that didn’t happen on the Kodak. I printed at least 15 off on each to compare the quality.

Ok so with that done the lovely Thom from HP, who is our printing guru, suggested that we do the ‘water test’. It involves using the photos from above and submerging them in water to see what effect it has on the durability of the paper and the quality of the print:


Immediately the colour started to slide off the HP paper and when I took them out and rubbed the corner of the picture, this is what happened:


Again the colour slid straight off the HP paper but the Kodak held its own.  As a final test I turned them upside down and lent then on the towel to mop up the excess water. When I put them back they looked like this:


For this task I have to say that the Kodak definitely came out on top. I would've expected them to perform about the same with this so I'm really surprised that the HP paper did so poorly. I'm wondering if the fact that the Kodak  prints had a while longer to dry had anything to do with it???

 If you have any questions about the tasks or the printers then please feel free to ask!

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