oh, how I wish I had a printer

[egypturnash]

Um, this is one of those longish, probably tedious entries. You don't have to read this. You're probably wasting your time if you do. It's just me sleepily venting. There's no payoff at the end except for a little thought on how much the mind's at the mercy of the body.

I need to print some stuff. At a decent size. In color. For this Saturday.

I went to Kinko's with a few zip discs in hand, each one with the same stuff at different resolutions - 150dpi, 300, and 600. They're all sized to fit within an 11x17 page with at least a half-inch margin; this pretty much means that the shorter axis is 10" across. I'd done this after asking the folks behind the counter about sizes and pricing this past Saturday morning. $.89-$1.50 depending on the paper you use, I was told. Doesn't sound too bad. I'd picked thirteen of my recent pieces and rendered them out as TIFFs. (Actually, a few more, and done a little winnowing.)

Turns out the guy had neglected to mention the setup fees. $5 for the first three files, $1.50 per file afterwards. About $45 total for thirteen images on the cheap paper.

What a pleasant surprise!

It was suggested I use the self-serve machines instead. The folks there assured me that it'd work out less per image than the setup fees for the price-per-minute.

Every time I go to Kinko's, the payment scheme is more byzantine. Right now it's almost sensible - you put money on a smart card and it works for both the copiers and the self-serve computers. And they assured me that yes, you can actually turn the leftover back into cash nowadays. So I put $20 on one.

I was told "go use the machines on the right". Okay. Twenty cents a minute, and... no Photoshop. No Photoshop? What? ooookay... no Photoshop on this one, or this one, either. No Photoshop. Okay. Log out. Huh, their little quick-start booklet thing suggests that what you really want to do is bring in a PDF and print it...

Off to home. Where I realize that the few tools I have to generate a PDF are not going to cut it - printing to PDF from Photoshop generates a scarily tiny file, using a images-to-PDF tool hidden in the OS wants to arrange them prettily for me, and it loses the color correction information, to boot.

Then I realize, wait, the guy at the output counter said forty cents a minute, and they have a machine with a scanner, that has to have Photoshop, right? Maybe that's the $.40/min one? Back to Kinko's to check on this.

It does.

It won't read my Zip discs. It won't read my Zip discs. Fucking Windows shitbox won't read my fucking Zip discs! Which I'm damn sure are MS-DOS formatted - they were MSDOS out of the box, I never reformatted them, they have the too-short all-caps disc names to prove it.

Back home, cursing and grumbling and vowing not to pay the couple of bucks of machine time I've now wasted, to burn a CD instead, hoping this'll be read. I haven't eaten yet. This is making me cranky. I fix some food while doing this and call dragongrrl_laca, who is coordinating the visual art for the show, to talk about how I'll get my art to her for hanging. Assuming I get it output. I discover the show's Saturday, not Friday as my brain was insisting it was; we decide I'll just show up a little early and hang it myself. Okay, this is good, it gives me a little more time to get it printed - but I hope it'll work this time! She also suggests a photo shop if Kinko's fails, which I hadn't thought of - what with the spread of digital cameras, everyone's pretty much able to print from digital files nowadays.

Much less tense due to now being fed, I go back to Kinko's with a fresh-burnt CD. To discover that their machine has color management turned off. I don't know where to go to find the color profile controls for the display, but at least I can turn it on in Photoshop and hope.

I load the first of my images, select the proper printer, and tell it to print.

At which I discover the crucial flaw in this plan of saving money by running the job yourself: even on the shitty paper they load the self-serve color printer with, it's $2.50 or so per page for 11x17 color. Plus the time it's spending to wake the printer up and grind a 300dpi 10x12 (or so) image to it.

This is going to cost more than having them do it would, even if I got glossy paper or something. I've already blown four bucks or so of machine time.

Aaaabort the print job. Log out. Hit up cashier and ask to cash out my card. I ended up waiting a bit and going through two people and a brief summation of all this before I'm getting my whole twenty bucks back from the manager.

Time and hassle was spent, but no actual money.

Tomorrow I'm going to check photo print places before going to work. There's one that's a half block closer than Kinko's. I've been wanting to see my stuff on paper for a while now, and this is a good reason, and if I'm going to print it out for people to look at it'd be nice to have some amount of detail and size instead of 8.5x11, right? Hopefully I can do it for something in my tiny budget.

I wish I was on good terms with someone at Disney TV; I know they have a nice large color printer, and using it for your own stuff is one of the unofficial perks of working there.

At least I was wise enough to have food in me before going in for the third time; this enabled me to be politely world-weary and annoyed during the 'gimme my twenty bucks back' phase, instead of being starving stressy might-scream-at-any-minute annoyed. More and more I realize how much the brain is affected by the body. Ground into loops of depression by hormone flux, on the edge and ready for fight-or-flight due to hunger, whatever. Presumably there may be moments where the brain is really really happy due to something the body's doing, but I haven't experienced that yet...

Comments

[tugrik.livejournal.com]

Point me at some files and I can do you some great prints -- but at 8.5x11. I can even color profile them for you. I do have 13x19 capability on an older printer but it'll take some fussing to get it to behave again. I need to profile the darn thing anyways, and this is as good an excuse as any.

The only problem, of course, is how best to ship 11x17 prints? And how many total? And would you want them on matte, straightgloss, or textured-surface?

I've had a few friends color-challenge me before to see how well I can get their colors nailed right. So far I've done good. I use Photoshop CS and can take a number of different profiles if your files are set up right.

Let me know?

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Mmm, I just might take you up on that. Let me get some zips up; I'll p#mail you on Furry. Do you want anything for this besides "copies for myself"?

...and yah, shipping is a hassle. They might be best in a tube, shipping flat is a hassle. I think the Postal Orifice usually has tubes available.

After my first attempt at getting stuff printed out when I first started using AI, I make sure to work with color correction turned on - everything I do has color profiles embedded. And, as I found when Photoshop kept dropping the profile when going to Save for Web last week, it does make a difference.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Mmm, I just might take you up on that. Let me get some zips up; I'll p#mail you URLs on Furry. Do you want anything for this besides "copies for myself"?

...and yah, shipping is a hassle. They might be best in a tube, shipping flat is a hassle. I think the Postal Orifice usually has tubes available.

After my first attempt at getting stuff printed out when I first started using AI, I make sure to work with color correction turned on - everything I do has color profiles embedded. And, as I found when Photoshop kept dropping the profile when going to Save for Web last week, it does make a difference.

[tugrik.livejournal.com]

What I want in return is a critical eye and an honest assessment of how accurately the color was handled. I need the practice, you see. I'm somewhat serious about the print-side of the photography work I'm doing, and working with well-profiled digital art is a great opportunity to learn.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

<3

You don't need to print all the files I sent you out if you don't want to - just the ones that look like the most interesting challenges to match. The ones that look like fun.

[tugrik.livejournal.com]

Drop by online tonight if you get a chance? I have some color profile questions for you.

Get in touch with this fur...

[wolfwings.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, they won't be able to help in time for this Saturday's event, but they have a printer that could print this (http://www.livejournal.com/users/peganthyrus/269760.html) one you posted ages back at 2'x6'5" quite easilly, for example, for not much more than cost of paper and ink. The printer they have takes 2' wide rolls of whatever sort of paper, and automatically cuts the paper itself when told, so it can make entirely arbitrary sized prints, not lockstepped into the standard paper sizes. This seems perfect for your art.

Get in touch with trapa@firstlight.net (mailto:trapa@firstlight.net) to get more details and costs and what-not, he'll explain the costs of everything, and what else the printer handles, etc, etc.

[radd.livejournal.com]

I used to work at Kinko's, and I personally believe that at least part of this they do on purpose. Then the only people that will continue to work there are often those least suited to the job. They have a nasty tendancy to drive off any emnployees that actually know what they are doing. There are exceptions, of course, but in general this us often true.

When I worked there, they would claim to print all standard filetypes for free, but they neglect to tell their customers that only PDFs and Kinko's own proprietary format (wich is really only PDF format with a different 3 letter extension) are the only two graphical image types they consider 'standard'. There really is no reason for the extra charge, they just see it as an easy way to scam more money from their customers.

Only the more expensive computers have Photoshop, but the managers don't even actually tell this to the employees working there, so the person you spoke to probably had no idea. The only employees that do know are the employees that actually use Photoshop, wich is to say, almost none of them.

I'd reccomend any local printshop over Kinko's, you'll often get better service at a better price. Also, the equipment at Kinko's is showing it's age. I used to get prints done there, but now I have my own printer that prints at a much higher quality than Kinko's offers.

My Canon S820 only cost me around $150, at up to 2400 x 1200 dpi. It also has borderless printing, so all of my prints have a black border right to the edge of the paper, except those few prints that fill the whole page perfectly. Very nice. It's an inkjet printer, but I'd stack it against the laser printers they have at Kinko's any day of the week.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

I'd be pretty impressed with the scam if I hadn't had to try and deal with it when starting to become ravenous. Good thing I still have enough time to go to places that only have daylight hours; I bet a lot of Kinko's business is due to their being open all the time - I saw some people there who had the air of working on stuff due tomorrow - a guy helping his kid with a project, people trying to print essays, etc.

I did notice a sharp distinction in the employees: the folks who're just cashier had weird thick Armenian accents (Glendale's full of Armenians), while the ones behind the counter spoke English. They claimed their printer was actually pretty new and fast, but this may have been lies.

I'm going to see what's open on my way out of the house today...

*googles that printer* Ooooh. $150 for that? That's damn nice. Especially since you can actually replace the ink carts singularly. And, holy cow, there's an 11x17 version that's supposedly available for as low as $200... technology's come down. (Of course, neither is made any more. Maybe I'll ogle their current printers today and see if they still have individual ink tanks and speed and stuff.)

Geeze. $300 for a largeish-size borderless printer (i9100)... I gotta buy some print gear next time I have discretionary income.

[esche.livejournal.com]

I'd have to recommend a local printshop, also. Or AlphaGraphics, which, while it's still a chain, is at least somewhat more customer-mindful than most of the Kinko's I've been to, and better equipped, too.

I had some prints made at Kinko's, and their shitty printer... yes, the 'good' shitty printer behind the counter, totally devoured and disregarded some of the subtler shades, rendering them all as horrible flat oversaturated green. So uh... yeah. Local print shop. Definitely.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Yeah. It's just finding 'em.

I have a feeling that Kinko's officially denies the existance of color management... the one machine with PS had it turned off, and didn't have any gamma correction for the monitor set up at all. I suspect a lot of it is just not using the thing at all correctly...

[neillparatzo.livejournal.com]

they have the too-short all-caps disc names to prove it

Wawawawawait, Macs don't support VFAT?

I thought everything supported VFAT.

Newer Macs do...

[wolfwings.livejournal.com]

...but if the ZIP discs had been around for quite a while, older Mac's that might have originally 'named' the discs might not have supported VFat.

Though does VFat's filename-length-extension trick even work for volume labels? I thought you were still stuck with 8.3 for the volume label component.

Re: Newer Macs do...

[neillparatzo.livejournal.com]

I know the volume labels are virtualized, since if you look at a VFAT volume under DOS 6 or earlier, you get something nonsensical like "AT" for the volume label. There might be other restrictions on them, though.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

What's VFAT?

The actual filenames on the discs are fine, but there's some restriction on the names allowed for the disc. "Peggy Stuff To Print" wasn't allowed. *shrug*

[neillparatzo.livejournal.com]

VFAT is a trick introduced in Windows 95 that lets you encode long filenames in a DOS filesystem that would ordinarily only accept uppercase 8.3 names.

[nefermoon.livejournal.com]

When I have to make a PDF from Photoshop, I save my file as an EPS and run it through distiller. Then the file size can be as big as a mountain.

There are a lot of places online that will print files at pretty decent prices, and can usually get the prints to you very quickly. Doesn't help you this time, but if you want I can get you a list of online print services. :)

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Mmm. I might have to remember that for the future. My reaction to all things Acrobat is mostly confined to "aww, no, this is such a pain to read from the web browser." I'd hope it'd keep the color profile information that way...

I've thought in the past of finding somewhere online to print my stuff more easily, even to take care of the issues of people ordering and paying for it. That'd require splitting the profits, of course, but it'd also mean much less hassle for me. Pointers to places you've been happy with would be quite appreciated!

[nefermoon.livejournal.com]

The only issue I have with making PDFs of Photoshop EPS files is that they can look a bit chunky, and some printers won't really know how to handle it.

You could also save your file as a TIF, plant it in a layout program (Quark/InDesign), and write your PDF from there. Not sure what the color profiles will do, but in theory that should work. I guess testing is the only way to know for sure.

I've had the most experience online with Cafepress, and depending on the product, I've had varying results. I ordered a poster that should arrive soon, and I can tell you how that turned out (and show you the file so you can see what type I was printing). The nice thing about them is the on-demand printing, and profit sharing is a small price to pay, I feel, for letting them handle all costs and labor.

Other than Cafepress, I have seen business cards printed from www.psprint.com, and they were very nice 4-color, 2-sided (one side glossy). It's not on-demand, but they do relatively low order numbers (250 minimum as opposed to 1000 or so on). They also do posters, cards, etc. I have only seen a business card myself, but my senior Graphic Design instructor used them religiously. I believe they also provide proofs.

[eselgeist.livejournal.com]

good luck at the show! meet and greet and kiss the babies ^_^

[holohedron.livejournal.com]

They weren't anything I'd frame, but I made my last flyers on a home HP printer, using card stock and a $45 cutting board. They came out a lot better than my test run at the copy place.

And the "self service" at Kinkos is a crock. I was charged $15 for a 50c printing job... I needed their computer to do it, and it wasn't responding to my initial efforts. They did refund me, but only after I brought in my then-boss to complain at them. :/