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I am amazed by a product that started shipping last Fall that I had never seen before. I had heard about it, but I hear about far more products than I can write about, and I receive more products for testing than I even have time to test. If enough people had exposure to this product, I think it could change the face of photography. I'm talking about an Olympus digital photo printer that is so good, its prints rival 35 millimeter prints, and they're much better than photos from instant cameras.
I've had some doubts in my mind in recent months about how much of a threat digital photography is to traditional silver-based technology. The main problem is getting prints of digital images. I don't like ink-jet printers all that much because of all the maintenance. Plus it's relatively expensive and slow to print color photos on an ink-jet, and unless you buy very special and costly paper, the images just don't look right.
Another problem is that digital cameras have been rather expensive, especially for fancy ones with resolutions higher than 640 by 480. That resolution just doesn't do photographs any justice, especially if digital images are being compared to traditional film. However, once you get up into the 1024 by 768 region, and are making photo-album size prints, the images start to look incredibly sharp. I'd say that 1024 by 768 and up is more than adequate for 99.9 percent of the pictures people take. From close-ups to family portraits to outdoor vacation scenery, it's fine. Professional photographers, of course, need more.
OLYMPUS P-300 PERSONAL PHOTO PRINTER
Olympus has solved both of my problems, one with printing and the other with taking digital pictures. The Olympus P-300 Personal Photo Printex is a 300 dpi, photo-quality dye-sublimation printer. Dye-sublimation produces continuous color tones, so the P-300's output is equivalent to a 2400 dpi inkjet printer. It prints images on 4-inch by 5.5-inch glossy sheets at 1.5 minutes per page in true 24-bit color with 16.7 million colors. Photos can come from scanners, digital cameras, the Internet, wherever-as long as they're digital.
Not only do I feel that the P-300's glossy prints rival 35 millimeter prints, but the printer, in combination with Olympus...